9 posts tagged “system updates”
I just wanted to let everyone know about a few more updates we have made lately. Some of you have probably seen some of these things yourselves already.
First of all, we have now built our Member-Guest coupon program into the member area itself. This way you will be able to invite your friends for a free month on the system directly, without having to email us. You will see that when you click on the "Invite a Friend" button in the member area you will be able to input your friends' names and emails and they will be instantly mailed a link for a free month of Basic Membership. What is more, we will know that you recommended your friends and when they become an active paying member we will give you one free month for recommending your friends.
A few other small things we have done include adding a way for you to edit your Skype name in "my account" and additional statistics in your Progress Report. As usual, we hope you like these new features and make sure to "invite your friends"!
On a happy note, we have finally added a search field in The Linguist Library. It will search by content title and by keywords that are in the system. It is on the front page of the library and on the category pages as well. Let us know how you like it!
I realize my last post was on the same theme but I hope this is not going to become a habit! The login problems many of you experienced today were actually a different problem than the one that happened last week. Both problems are related to increased traffic to our site, however, and the need for us to better deal with this situation.
We have made adjustments to the site which should help in the short term. We are also planning to add an additional server at the end of next week which should help even more. I am very sorry for the inconvenience and I do appreciate your understanding.
Thank you to all of you who sent emails to let us know.
I just wanted to apologize to all of you who were unable to log in and were inconvenienced when our server went down yesterday morning. For some reason an error occurred in the database and the database shut down. We were able to repair the problem yesterday and everything is working fine now. Sorry for the disruption.
Many of you have been asking for us to add "next" and "previous" links to the bottom of our Discussions list so that you don't have to scroll all the way to the top of the page to see them. We're sorry it took so long to do this obvious thing but we have finally done it! Enjoy!
Just a quick post to let you know that we have now included all of our Linguist bloggers in the Member Blogging list on our home page including those of you in Japan who we were unable to add before. Again, if you don't see your posts in the list, make sure to send us your blog URL.
Here's a really neat addition to our Front Page. It's a list of all recent posts from The Linguist blogging community. You will find posts from Vox bloggers and non-Vox bloggers, from Linguist members and staff. If you don't see your posts in our list please let us know and we can make sure to add your blog feed into our aggregated list. We are currently having trouble adding some blogs from Japan but we hope to add these blogs soon. Let us know if you have a blog we don't know about so we can add it to our list!
In case some of you don't subscribe to the Linguist Digest newsletter I am reposting my article about recent system updates. This also gives you a chance to give us any feedback about these changes.
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Many of you will have noticed that you can now see the number of Discussion participants in the Discussion List without needing to open up the event form. You will see that events are now identified as Full if they already have 4 participants or you can see how many spaces are still available 1, 2, 3 or 4. As we have added more tutors and more discussion times, it has been more inconvenient to find out which events have spaces available. Now, it is that much easier to sign up for Discussions.
You will also notice that we have introduced big, blue buttons to identify the main action on most pages. This was done to help new members get started. At the same time, we have simplified the sign up process for 1 on 1 Conversations. This process was not as clear as it could be and we think it works much better now. In the past, some of you thought you could only have a 1 on1 with your assigned tutor so we have made it more clear that you can pick any tutor you want and select an available time from their schedule.
As you can see from our content list below, we have continued adding new content to the library. What we have also done is to rearrange the categories in the library so that we now have more categories with fewer items in each. This way, things should be easier to find and to search for. Still on the theme of content, we have also added additional items to the Sentence Pronunciation section. You can now select from 6 different content items when you are using the Sentence Pronunciation tools.
Finally, we have corrected the persistent problem with funny characters appearing in the content that you import into the system and in your writing submissions. Now when you import content from the web or submit writing for correction, any funny characters will be instantly replaced by characters our system recognizes. The strange characters are now a thing of the past!
We recently had a post on the forum about our server going down sometimes so I thought I would explain what is happening so that all of you understand.
