Hey all, @tina
I have some features I want to bring to your attention which could really help the platform become more customizable. I'm seriously considering Socibd again, sorry Social Buddy. To make a long story even longer, happy new year stability and goodbye corruption and other expensive money pits.
I originally wanted to post this as a status, but it wouldn't let me.
1. Language editor. Social Buddy needs a language editor so we can do things like change the way something looks on our sites. I have always not liked the way Music and or Sounds has been branded as tracks. It confuses people and makes them think the site's tracking their activities offline making it very difficult to explain the situation, because we can't change certain aspects of the site capabilities even in the English language.
2. Profile URL. We need the ability to just have a better profile URL. Something we can change if we want. Yoursite.com/myprofile makes this ideal. Currently settings doesn't have this ability, making it difficult to remain anonymous if you want your profile title to read Network creator, but your full name is seen somewhere you can't edit it out in the URL structure. It's made even worse if members emails or parts of it show up here. While I'm on the subject, content needs this also.
3. Change your subdomain.socibd.com if available. Domain mapping is difficult to set up and needs a better interface preferably within the admin panel to set up without needing an external help article to guide you through it.
4. Plans for people who are on disability. Lets face it, the competition is cheaper. I know that socibd is hosted somehow and some way using Linode. They charge too much for bandwidth and I've worked with them in the past on things. Believe it or not, Amazon AWS is a thousand percent cheaper. I'm not saying you have to move, but seriously Ning is cheaper but I found out they started doing weird stuff like going in and changing peoples network settings without permission. I have enough evidence against them to win a class action lawsuit, but enough about that. You don't want to hear it.
5. Network sub instance integration. Okay so if you're crazy enough to need multiple instances of things, and you need 3 music players right away, this might help you. Until social Buddy releases some kind of feature manager that can handle multiple instances of features themselves, the next best thing is an integration allowing you to export, import and manage portable content and profile data.
6. Archive functionality. Export your data, and import it later into Social buddy or another platform at a later date or keep it for personal use.
7. Simplify how site structure is set up. Currently the admin panel contains 9 separate tabs to manage settings, with more to follow suit I'm sure. This isn't practical if you're looking for a setting which has feature complexities which is found say globally, appears globally and may be found on the same page globally as the one you wish to edit, but you're stuck trying to figure out what area of that page to get to. For example, it would make sense to merge the tabs and pages and the layout editor into one module for easy admin editing if you wanted to control what content appeared on the home page.
8. Streamline features. Put the stream page into a widget and merge the landing page and home page into something where widgets control who can see them.
9. Self hosted. In today's open web, even grou.ps is open sourcing their platform for people who want to run their own server. You shouldn't need to provide platform support for people self hosting things, but you may find somewhere in the future of the product, a developer has taken their network to new heights because it's available to extend locally. You could partner with such a developer and offer features you maybe not have thought of before if they wanted to show you how it was built.
10. Content flagging or reporting. When members see a piece of content they don't think vibes with the site, they should be able to report it to the admin.
11. An in built search page. Instead of it being a link only signed in members can access, a form that people can type text into when submitted, should be able to accomplish the same idea the way normal search works.
12. Notifications system improvements. Currently we can't mark all notifications as read, especially if they're things we've already seen such as messages and friend requests. Speaking of which, make friend requests and messages show on their own page. Either group notifications into custom types, allowing admins to choose how they appear, or simply help us manage them better.
13. Simplify theme options. The interface for managing themes is far from pretty. We need something preferably Ajax based with bootstrap 4, css3 and css sprite images along with responsive design. The fewer files we need to load remotely, the better. As far as templates are concerned, make those apart of page builder. Only having access to part of the source code required for the network to be displayed, doesn't help a developer much at all accomplish that.
14. Add the ability for admins to choose what page is loaded when members complete sign up for the first time, or sign in to the network.
15. Make chat something global instead of friends only! Also add public room capabilities.
16. Remove the limit for adding modules on a page in layout editor.
17. Make all profile tabs visible by default, including the main site navigation tabs when viewing group, event, page, hashtag and member profiles apart from the site's main areas.
18. Add the ability to use tab containers for setting up space savers for widgets.
19. Make a scrollable navigation system, instead of something you have to click previous and next all the time for when viewing a portal or index page with lots of posts.
20. Expand subscription system to choose individual charge options for any piece of content, or a content feature.
21. Make it possible to open up a menu so instead of just being able to add a status, you can add any piece of content the member is allowed to from the global top member menu.
22. That's it. Were you expecting something else? Focus on this first, then we can talk about global platform changes. Such as informing members when the platform's undergoing maintenance.
I hope this helps. I was originally going to mention a few things, but as it's 2019, I started counting the years since 2000 for some reason and so the number of features isn't long, but they're what has come to mind for me.
If this could be worked on soon ish, I think we'd all benefit hugely from it! thanks for all that you do. I hope you are well.
Talk soon,
Elshara.