RealTown Development

<p>We have just enabled feeds for RealTown Groups. Subscribing to a feed will allow you to stay updated on new group posts without cluttering your email inbox. The group feeds come in two flavors: RSS and Atom.</p> <p>If you are not familiar with feeds or want to learn a little bit more, check out <a href="http://www.realtown.com/hector/blog/technology/rss-guide">Hector's Guide to RSS</a> (yes, it's a shameless plug for my own blog!)</p> <p>Each public group now has its own feed. You can find the link to the feed underneath the discussion list for the group.</p> <p>Currently, private groups do not have group feeds.</p> <p>There is also a master feed for RealTown Groups that is a collection of all of the latest posts across all public groups. You can find that feed under the list of groups when viewing All Groups.</p> <p>For an added bonus, you can add any of these feeds to your &quot;My RealTown&quot; page by clicking &quot;Add Feed&quot; and entering the feed's URL. It's just another great way to stay up to date with one of RealTown's fastest-growing applications.</p>

<p>We have just enabled a new feature in RealTown Groups that allows Group Organizers to &quot;sticky&quot; a discussion. Sticky discussions will always appear at the top of the discussion lists for that group and are a great for announcements and &quot;must-read&quot; discussions.</p> <p>Sticky discussions will have a light orange background and a special icon next to the title when viewing the discussion list. This will help them stand out against normal discussions.</p> <p>If you are a Group Organizer and want to &quot;sticky&quot; an existing discussion, click the &quot;edit&quot; button for the first post. You will see an option at the bottom to select &quot;sticky&quot; as the type. Click &quot;Submit&quot; and you're all done!</p>

<p>The &quot;Ask the Experts&quot; application in RealTown has been updated. If you have any questions for RealTown's Real Estate Experts, feel free to submit it <a href="http://www.realtown.com/experts">here</a>. We have a team of industry experts including Real Estate Lawyer John Reilly and RealTown CEO Saul Klein in the distribution. </p>

<p>Today we added the &quot;Daily Digest&quot; delivery mode to RealTown Group subscriptions. Each morning, at 2:00am PST, the posts from the previous day will be compiled into a single email and distributed to the digest group subscribers. Each group will have its own digest, so if you are subscribed to several groups you should receive one digest from each group each morning.</p> <p>We realize that very active groups may produce hundreds of messages per day, which could lead to an <i>extremely</i> large digest. To help prevent this, we are limiting the number of posts a digest may contain. By default, group digests may not have more than 15 posts each. We feel that this number is a good balance of usability and maintainability. However, a Group Organizer may override this limitation and increase it to 30 posts per digest for their group, which will affect all digest subscribers.</p> <p>Group subscribers with the &quot;individual&quot; delivery mode are not affected by this daily limitation and will continue to receive email notifications upon each new post.</p> <p>To update your subscriptions, visit the <a href="http://www.realtown.com/groups/subscription">My Subscriptions</a> page and then click the pencil icon for the subscription you want to modify. You can then choose which email address to send to and your preferred delivery method. The bravest of RealTowners may choose to subscribe to both delivery methods by selecting &quot;both&quot;.</p>

<p>RealTown is preparing to release a new &quot;Friends List&quot; feature over the next few weeks. The Friends List is going to be centered around Member Profiles with a backend Friend Manager in MyRealTown.</p> <p>Now would be a good time to fill out your profile, upload your favorite photo, and start making contacts with other RealTown members.</p>

<p>We have just added a new feature to RealTown Groups. Group Organizers can now promote any Group Member to Group Moderator status.</p> <p><b>What is a Group Moderator?</b></p> <p>Group Moderators are trusted members of the group that have been granted additional group privileges. These privileges include the ability edit and delete any post made to the group. Normally, group members may only edit/delete their own posts.</p> <p>Group Moderators, however, are <b>not </b>allowed to promote other group members. Nor are they allowed to modify or cancel the subscriptions of any other member.</p> <p><b>How do I promote [name] to Group Moderator?</b></p> <p>Only the Group Organizer (the person that created the group) can promote a Group Member to Group Moderator. If you are a Group Organizer, click to view all members of your group from the Manage Groups page. Under each Group Member's name there will be some additional buttons, including &quot;Promote to Group Moderator&quot;.</p> <p>If you wish to demote a Group Moderator back down to a regular Group Member (therefore removing their permission to edit/delete any post), you can do so from the same View Members page.</p> <p>If you have any suggestions for enhancing this feature or have any questions, please post below.</p>

<p>We have just enabled the &quot;Individual&quot; delivery mode of RealTown Group Subscriptions. If a post is submitted to a group that you are subscribed to, and your delivery mode is set to &quot;Individual&quot; or &quot;Both&quot;, then you will automatically receive an email of the post in your email inbox.</p> <p>The email will contain the submitted post in a fashion similar to the way it appears on the web, including &quot;Quote&quot; and &quot;Reply&quot; buttons. There is also a new button that says &quot;View on the Web&quot;, which takes you directly to the post's discussion page to view it in context.</p> <p>If you are familiar with the Individual Messages of RealTown Communities, please note that there is one major difference. Due to the unmoderated nature of RealTown Groups, you may <b>not</b> reply to the email message directly. If you do, your reply will be lost. </p> <p>In order to post a reply, you must come back to the web and visit the discussion page. We apologize if this is an inconvenience, but the decision to drop inbound email support was made to prevent spam, bounces, and auto-replies from polluting your groups.</p> <p>We also have plans to give you all a very robust &quot;Digest&quot; delivery method option. More on that later.</p>

<p><b>RealTown Group Invitations</b></p> <p>In order to help jumpstart group activity on RealTown, we have added a new button on member profiles that allows you to send an invite to join your groups. This feature works exceptionally well on all public and open-membership groups, allowing you to take action to increase group membership.</p> <p>Please note that if your group is set to &quot;invite-only&quot;, then the only way a member can join is to be sent an invitation.</p> <p>Additionally, if a group is set to &quot;private&quot;, then only the group organizer can send invites for the group.</p> <p><b>Invite Limitations</b></p> <p>We are currently only allowing one invite per group, regardless of who is sending it. In other words, if I invite John Doe to my group &quot;RealTown Development&quot;, then no one else can send him an invite to the same group. This should help prevent duplicate requests for the same action.</p> <p><b>Pending Invitations</b></p> <p>If you did not receive the email notification, or are unable to check your inbox, then you may visit your Group Invitations page at any time to manage your incoming requests. I have added a nifty counter next to the link so can easily see how many invitations you have.</p> <p>I am planning on implementing an expiration date for the invitations. We are thinking that a 2 weeks should be enough time to respond to the invite. If there is no response in 2 weeks, the invitation will disappear and you will need to re-invite the member (or let someone else do it).</p>