Sorry you had to feel the pain of rejection. Unfortunately, you will not be able to “re-ask” Henry to be your friend. (We chose to implement this measure to keep “friend spam” down.)
Henry will be able to ask you to be his friend, and while you may want to reject him out of spite, I recommend accepting if you want your Banktastic friendship to ever develop into a meaningful relationship.
Probably isn’t the right thread for this, but I’ll make some recommendations. I’d like to see conferences we’ll all be at next as part of the profile.
The blog is rockin, but I almost looked right past it in the beginning. Possibly a sidebar box for “On the banktastic blog now…” or increase the font size in the footer would be a suggestion.
On the profile pages, the ability to add more than one website (maybe you can already do this) – but often our blogs are different from our companies, and many of us are using services like linkedin, twitter, etc.
Also, in the bar beside search saying “7 people have joined banktastic today” – link that up with the folks. And when an invite gets accepted, have that automatically add the person as a friend to the inviter (maybe it does that already too).
All in all, I love it. It is my new social media crush for the week. I have a feeling it’ll grow into a long term relationship with babies and such.
I can tell you right now if you want to add more than one website you can hack it right now but just putting in a comma between each website. See my profile for example.
@Trey: Thanks for the great suggestions. We definitely appreciate you diving into this community.
In regard to the invites, right now when an invite is accepted, the invitee is given a choice as to whether or not to accept the inviter as a friend. So if you’ve invited someone, and they have signed up, they should see your smiling face on their homepage asking for a friendship.
(We considering automatically creating the friendship, but we didn’t want to force friendships on anyone.)
@Tony: When the idea came across for this community we thought and discussed at length about if we should gear it to just banks or credit unions?
In short, we don’t discriminate. We want to improve the entire industry.
For a lengthier reply, we are lucky enough to have clients in both the credit union and bank space and what we found is that banks and credit unions have MANY of the same issues and have the same processes/technologies/people to fix or handle these problems. We didn’t want to limit ourselves and I feel both have good, positive insight that could help the other.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Side point: Banktastic just had a better ring to it than CU-tastic :)
When looking at it, it looks like cut-astic to me (a community of knife experts?). Maybe after we establish this community we’ll move on to cutlery. :)
So I wanted to let you guys, our founding members, reply in regards to a feature we are in the process of implementing. We are going to allow someone to recommend a question to you based off of your expertise or if they just know you they can send a request for you to answer it. Is this something you look you could use? Is there a way we can could make that feature even better?
The only real problem that I have is that you can see and read the information of the discussions and such with out being logged into the system. For example if I get an email a response and a link. The only reason that I mention that is that I may want to post or talk about issues with fellow it bankers, but I sure don’t want the world to know some of the technology or issues that discussing.
I agree with Josh, I think this has great potential but I still have reservations about what I would feel comfortable putting out here. Secondly maybe a preview button for posts/responses for those of us with spelling/html challenges. I noticed the “edit for 15 minutes”. How does that work (besides the obvious)? Does it work like a preview where I have 15 minutes to change it before anyone sees it? Or can everyone see it as soon as I hit send?
Patrick – The “edit for 15 minutes” feature is set up to preserve the conversation. We allow 15 minutes for editing immediately after posting so that you can proofread or reword any portion of your response. After the 15 minutes has passed and conversation has begun, we decided that we wanted to keep the original post the way it was so that the flow of conversation remains consistent and nobody runs the risk of getting confused.
At some point we would like to add a “preview” feature for both posts & comments, but it’s not yet in the pipeline.
@Patrick & Josh – Thanks for your replies and your honesty. Your comments make the system better!
I completely understand where you guys are coming from. In the beginning when we started chalk talking the beginnings of this service we wanted to create something that changed the banking industry as we all know it today. So to do that, we had a couple of mantras we try and stick with throughout this building process:
1) ‘The Collective’ is key – Create a place for a diverse group of people, from a variety of backgrounds, to come together, and give them the tools to express their knowledge/opinions/ideas. And by doing that the true unbiased answers of the wisdom of the crowds will be apparent.
2) Openness is king – To ensure the betterment of the industry as a whole, sharing and openness is pivotal to enable everyone (both registered and non-registered) to view, learn, and share.
So, in our humble opinion, the decision to not go ‘closed’ was a necessity to fit that vision. We could very easily close the system to the ‘public’ but how is that helpful to the industry? Even those that don’t want to register? The banking industry has built up these walls of fear and we’re trying to find a way to break them down. Besides, there are numerous sites out there that require registration to view its content and frankly, I think that stinks. It’s not conducive for creating new ideas and innovative thought.
But also note, I do agree with you that user privacy is indeed important and we have both privacy mechanisms in place today on the users of the system and allow the users to say as much or as little as they feel comfortable about themselves in their profiles.
Lastly, we have been batting around the concept of ‘groups’ and how to make that work, is that something you’d be interested in, possibly even as a premium service?
Also, in addition to a question showing who it was posted by and when (on the main thread view), I think it should also list who posted the last answer and when. That would help me determine what has had the most recent activity and which threads I should be following.
I think there should be a messaging function built-into this site, similar to the wya forums have private messages. For example, if I wanted to send a quick message to someone who is using Banktastic, you give me a link on their profile that says, “Send a message to this person” and off I go.
Mike – I think that you’re giving some great feedback for us here. I really like the idea of messaging another Banktastic user. I know it’s not exactly the same thing, but during a recent meeting of the Banktastics, I threw out the idea of possibly having a chat feature on Banktastic. I think I like your idea of messaging better. I’d like to see some way that all members of the Banktastic community can interact with one another without having to just rely on comments…or even outsource our communication to Twitter. :)
I think a chat might be too much. That would require people to all visit the chat area at the same time to get anything done. If whoever you wanted to talk to wasn’t in the chat, you’d be stuck waiting until they came in. With a messaging feature, it sits in their private message inbox (much like an email) until they log in to Banktastic and send a reply. Receiving a private message could also trigger the system into shooting an email to the recipient letting them know that they need to log in and respond to their message.
Maybe the Twitter component could be added as an additional field in the profile? There could even be several new fields. One for a website, one for a blog and one for Twitter. If a user didn’t fill in the field, it wouldn’t display on their public profile. The field would only show up to be filled in when the user was trying to edit their profile, thus keeping the clutter down.
@Mike T. – We just pushed some changes one of which adds the time and date of the last answer to the questions list and also adds the number of answers for quick reference. (The same is true in the articles section.)
We’ve also got plans to add the “person who last answered” details in the future.
Roz G.
That I was rejected as a friend to Henry (as a JOKE, I might add) and now I can’t RE-ask him! Am I rejected forever?
Mark M.
Roz,
Sorry you had to feel the pain of rejection. Unfortunately, you will not be able to “re-ask” Henry to be your friend. (We chose to implement this measure to keep “friend spam” down.)
Henry will be able to ask you to be his friend, and while you may want to reject him out of spite, I recommend accepting if you want your Banktastic friendship to ever develop into a meaningful relationship.
Thanks for your patience…
Jeffry P.
Link to this page
Trey R.
Probably isn’t the right thread for this, but I’ll make some recommendations. I’d like to see conferences we’ll all be at next as part of the profile.
The blog is rockin, but I almost looked right past it in the beginning. Possibly a sidebar box for “On the banktastic blog now…” or increase the font size in the footer would be a suggestion.
On the profile pages, the ability to add more than one website (maybe you can already do this) – but often our blogs are different from our companies, and many of us are using services like linkedin, twitter, etc.
Also, in the bar beside search saying “7 people have joined banktastic today” – link that up with the folks. And when an invite gets accepted, have that automatically add the person as a friend to the inviter (maybe it does that already too).
All in all, I love it. It is my new social media crush for the week. I have a feeling it’ll grow into a long term relationship with babies and such.
Brad G.
@Trey – Great recommendations! Keep’em coming!
I can tell you right now if you want to add more than one website you can hack it right now but just putting in a comma between each website. See my profile for example.
Mark M.
@Trey: Thanks for the great suggestions. We definitely appreciate you diving into this community.
In regard to the invites, right now when an invite is accepted, the invitee is given a choice as to whether or not to accept the inviter as a friend. So if you’ve invited someone, and they have signed up, they should see your smiling face on their homepage asking for a friendship.
(We considering automatically creating the friendship, but we didn’t want to force friendships on anyone.)
Hope that sheds some light on that process!
Mark M.
Clarification on the multiple url hack. You need to separate the urls with a comma AND a space:
http://www.banktastic.com, http://www.thegarlandgroup.net
Tony M.
What about making the name “Creditunionriffic”?
Or, CUriffic? Maybe CUawesome?
Just a thought. ;)
Brad G.
@Tony: When the idea came across for this community we thought and discussed at length about if we should gear it to just banks or credit unions?
In short, we don’t discriminate. We want to improve the entire industry.
For a lengthier reply, we are lucky enough to have clients in both the credit union and bank space and what we found is that banks and credit unions have MANY of the same issues and have the same processes/technologies/people to fix or handle these problems. We didn’t want to limit ourselves and I feel both have good, positive insight that could help the other.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Side point: Banktastic just had a better ring to it than CU-tastic :)
Tony M.
Brad, we also have clients that are banks as well as credit unions. Thank God they all have a sense of humor (I think they have to to work with us).
I have this site bookmarked, but I renamed my bookmark CUtastic – and there is nothing that you can do about that ;)
Mwahaha (that is supposed to be an evil laugh)
Brad G.
@Tony – Genius.
When looking at it, it looks like cut-astic to me (a community of knife experts?). Maybe after we establish this community we’ll move on to cutlery. :)
Tony M.
LOL, see when I say it out loud it sounds like Cute-Tastic – I feel so adorable.
Brad G.
So I wanted to let you guys, our founding members, reply in regards to a feature we are in the process of implementing. We are going to allow someone to recommend a question to you based off of your expertise or if they just know you they can send a request for you to answer it. Is this something you look you could use? Is there a way we can could make that feature even better?
Josh C.
The only real problem that I have is that you can see and read the information of the discussions and such with out being logged into the system. For example if I get an email a response and a link. The only reason that I mention that is that I may want to post or talk about issues with fellow it bankers, but I sure don’t want the world to know some of the technology or issues that discussing.
Patrick H.
I agree with Josh, I think this has great potential but I still have reservations about what I would feel comfortable putting out here. Secondly maybe a preview button for posts/responses for those of us with spelling/html challenges. I noticed the “edit for 15 minutes”. How does that work (besides the obvious)? Does it work like a preview where I have 15 minutes to change it before anyone sees it? Or can everyone see it as soon as I hit send?
Lisa R.
Patrick – The “edit for 15 minutes” feature is set up to preserve the conversation. We allow 15 minutes for editing immediately after posting so that you can proofread or reword any portion of your response. After the 15 minutes has passed and conversation has begun, we decided that we wanted to keep the original post the way it was so that the flow of conversation remains consistent and nobody runs the risk of getting confused.
At some point we would like to add a “preview” feature for both posts & comments, but it’s not yet in the pipeline.
Brad G.
@Patrick & Josh – Thanks for your replies and your honesty. Your comments make the system better!
I completely understand where you guys are coming from. In the beginning when we started chalk talking the beginnings of this service we wanted to create something that changed the banking industry as we all know it today. So to do that, we had a couple of mantras we try and stick with throughout this building process:
1) ‘The Collective’ is key – Create a place for a diverse group of people, from a variety of backgrounds, to come together, and give them the tools to express their knowledge/opinions/ideas. And by doing that the true unbiased answers of the wisdom of the crowds will be apparent.
2) Openness is king – To ensure the betterment of the industry as a whole, sharing and openness is pivotal to enable everyone (both registered and non-registered) to view, learn, and share.
So, in our humble opinion, the decision to not go ‘closed’ was a necessity to fit that vision. We could very easily close the system to the ‘public’ but how is that helpful to the industry? Even those that don’t want to register? The banking industry has built up these walls of fear and we’re trying to find a way to break them down. Besides, there are numerous sites out there that require registration to view its content and frankly, I think that stinks. It’s not conducive for creating new ideas and innovative thought.
But also note, I do agree with you that user privacy is indeed important and we have both privacy mechanisms in place today on the users of the system and allow the users to say as much or as little as they feel comfortable about themselves in their profiles.
Lastly, we have been batting around the concept of ‘groups’ and how to make that work, is that something you’d be interested in, possibly even as a premium service?
Thanks again gentlemen for your input.
Mike T.
I am annoyed that it says “You” on my questions and responses. I would prefer that it had my name. ;)
Mike T.
Also, in addition to a question showing who it was posted by and when (on the main thread view), I think it should also list who posted the last answer and when. That would help me determine what has had the most recent activity and which threads I should be following.
Mike T.
I think there should be a messaging function built-into this site, similar to the wya forums have private messages. For example, if I wanted to send a quick message to someone who is using Banktastic, you give me a link on their profile that says, “Send a message to this person” and off I go.
Lisa R.
Mike – I think that you’re giving some great feedback for us here. I really like the idea of messaging another Banktastic user. I know it’s not exactly the same thing, but during a recent meeting of the Banktastics, I threw out the idea of possibly having a chat feature on Banktastic. I think I like your idea of messaging better. I’d like to see some way that all members of the Banktastic community can interact with one another without having to just rely on comments…or even outsource our communication to Twitter. :)
Mike T.
I think a chat might be too much. That would require people to all visit the chat area at the same time to get anything done. If whoever you wanted to talk to wasn’t in the chat, you’d be stuck waiting until they came in. With a messaging feature, it sits in their private message inbox (much like an email) until they log in to Banktastic and send a reply. Receiving a private message could also trigger the system into shooting an email to the recipient letting them know that they need to log in and respond to their message.
Maybe the Twitter component could be added as an additional field in the profile? There could even be several new fields. One for a website, one for a blog and one for Twitter. If a user didn’t fill in the field, it wouldn’t display on their public profile. The field would only show up to be filled in when the user was trying to edit their profile, thus keeping the clutter down.
Brad G.
This see if this works! PLEASE! :)
Mark M.
@Mike T. – We just pushed some changes one of which adds the time and date of the last answer to the questions list and also adds the number of answers for quick reference. (The same is true in the articles section.)
We’ve also got plans to add the “person who last answered” details in the future.
Thanks for the suggestions and keep them coming!