New User Profiles

Hoc Poeng on Friday, May 27, 2011 11:20PM

It’s been a long time coming but we finally got around to updating our Profile System. You’ll find it much more useful as well as easier to use. We’ve added a lot of new features that should really enhance your experience on our network. Most importantly, we’ve increased and simplified user privacy the details of which we’ll get into below. Here’s some of the new features:

Increased user privacy - Before anyone, even guest users, could see someone’s basic profile. Now you have to be friends with that user. In general, privacy is determined by friendship. If you’re friends with someone, they have access to your profile - simple as that.

User searching - is limited to just friends. You can no longer search the entire database of users. This is part of the increased focus on user privacy.

Walls - Every user gets their own private wall where they can talk to their friends and update their status. Only friends can see and write on each other’s walls.

Activity Stream - The activity stream layout has been cleaned up and at the same time keeps track of more things. It also includes EXP activities like winning a pin. You could see your all your friend’s combined stream now.

Mentions - is a special kind of item in your activity stream which shows when you’re mentioned in a blog post across our network.

PM System - has been greatly simplified and cleaned up. Before anyone can PM anyone, now only friends can PM each other. The level 2 requirement to send PM has been removed. Due to large amounts of spam, you can no longer PM site admins. The email notice you get when someone PM’s you now includes a short preview of the message.

Quick Compose - Just about every comment box contains a link to PM the comment author. Now those links open up a special compose PM box that allows you to send a message without leaving the page you were on.

Quick Friends - Same as above, just with friending.

Photo uploads - now features batch uploading and a cleaner interface. You can upload 20 photos at a time.

Advance Pin Details - Your profile now shows the latest pins that you’ve won. Clicking on a pin reveals more info + a larger image.

Bookmarks - You can bookmark blog posts now. Below every blog post, just before the comments, you can find a bookmark button. Clicking on it will save the bookmark to your profile area so that you can find important blog posts easily.

Deactive Accounts - If you so desire, you can deactive your account. Doing this will prevent others from seeing your profile and friending you. Deactivated accounts cannot interact (comment, enter contests, earn EXP) with our sites unless they’ve been re-activated.

Easier Registration - Lots of streamlining should make registration even easier and quicker.

Simplified User Settings - We removed a lot of profile setting options for the sake of convenience.

Easy Conversations - This is a really cool new feature that I’ll get into more detail later because it’s deserving of its own post. The gist of it is that you can write to your friends’ wall via our blog comment system simply by typing “@username” in the beginning of your comment making for easy tracking of conversations among friends.

There’s a bunch of small improvements that would be too much to recap here with a couple major features to be added later. For the interim, our new profile system is considered to be beta. You may find some bugs or issues while using it. Please report them via our Support System. Also use our Support System to ask questions if you have any.

If you’re new to Ningin which is part of the Mixr Network of site, your Ningin account will work across all the sites in our network. All your activity across our network will be consolidated into one activity stream. You have one wall, one private message account to check, one friends list, and I think you get the picture now.

At the time of this writing, not all the profile links across the network have been changed to the new one. We’ll be getting to them all in a few days.

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