AML's New Online Community

Our Web Services team is extremely excited about recent enhancements to our Web presence. Here's a (somewhat lengthy, with apologies) snapshot of new things for you to see and do!

AML's NEW ONLINE COMMUNITY

After a number of months research into available software, we settled on a new discussion board software package to replace the FuseTalk package. The old software, in hindsight, wasn't up to our needs and wasn't as intuitive or easy to maintain as we thought it would be. We settled on a new package that's expanded our Community outside of discussion forums, and in October and November, we transitioned the bulk of some 70,000+ posts from the old system. (We're now close to 83,000 posts in 8,600 discussion threads.)

Some of the Community updates include:

• a redesigned, clean interface

• the ability for you to subscribe and respond via email to single discussions and entire sections of the forums. (Note that you can't respond via email to private messages at this time.)

• tags and tag clouds. Tags are simply words and phrases that allow you to categorize posts, downloads and photos. The more you tag, the easier it is for others to find information in the community. Tag clouds are clusters of tags that help find you find the content you're looking for.

• a community directory. In addition to the member directory on AML's main Web site, you can also search the community directory for information about participating members, and we've enabled forum participants to have photos with their posts so you can see who you're speaking with!

• discussion favorites -- you can now rate those posts you find most interesting.

• easier access to your favorite discussions. In addition to the option of marking a post as a favorite, you can also customize the discussions so that you only view the sections you frequent most often.

• a WYSIWYG editor. Instead of the text-based post editor, you can now use the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editor. (Note that our devoted Mac visitors will be able to use a Firefox browser to utilize the WYSIWYG editor until we find a fix for the Safari issue.)
  We're all very excited about the new online Community, but wait, there's more....
  

THE OFFICERS' SHAREHOUSE

Housed within the new online Community is a file-sharing area that's home to the new Officers' Sharehouse. The Sharehouse is where Editors, Webmasters and other volunteers can upload and share their graphics, photos and articles. Unlike personal files, the Sharehouse is meant to be a source of evergreen materials for our groups to use.

Because the Sharehouse is a part of the Community, you'll have the ability to rate uploaded content and comment on the uploads as well. We think this will be a great addition for our editors and Webmasters to provide our members with great content from all over the country!

Yes, we're excited about the Sharehouse, and yes, there's more....

THE 2% JOURNALS

(<sigh> Yes, that should probably be the "2 percent journals," but the menu option would've been much larger.)

We're collecting content from a number of sources into one location for your reading enjoyment. You'll find recent InterLoc articles, AML News notifications, and interesting articles and essays culled from our 134 Local Group newsletters.

In the future, we hope to bring you other types of content, and as with the Sharehouse, you'll be able to rate and comment on any of these content pieces.

Oh, you know we're excited about the Journals as well, but we have one last enhancement to the Web site that we know you'll find useful....

MY MENSA

Having trouble finding a specific area on one of our Web sites? Know where you want to go but hate the trip to get there? We have the answer for you -- it's "My Mensa," where we provide you with the ability to create your own, personalized page of links and information about Mensa.

You can add QuickLinks from the main Web site, available officer resources, games from our online Games Room (but not yet those from MensaForKids.org), and your favorite sections from the new Community! If you're on a page on our main site that you want to visit again, simply click Bookmark under the left menu. You can also add your own bookmarks and read content from InterLoc and AML News. And you can access all of these just by logging into the main Web site and personalizing your page!

In a nutshell, My Mensa is really your Mensa... our Web information the way you want it.

(With the advent of My Mensa, we no longer had a need for the "Click Here to Continue" page, so it's a thing of the past. ;)

That's it for now, but there's always more to come from your Web Services team.