What's New on Vox
If we’ve seemed a bit quiet lately, it’s because we’ve been hard at work on some major improvements and changes to Vox. It doesn’t matter what we think though unless you’re also happy with the enhancements, which is why we want to get your feedback on all the changes outlined below. Some of the changes are currently viewable by everyone, while we decided to give a few of the more dramatic changes some time in beta while we get your comments and work out all the kinks.
First, the changes that are live for everyone today:
Find & Invite
Your Friends
There’s a chance that some of your friends are already on
Vox and you don’t even know it.
Now you can find your friends already on Vox by searching with your web-based email or uploading a contact file. After you’ve added your friends who are already on Vox, you’ll also have the option to invite your other contacts to join. You can access the new features on the “Invite a Friend” page or directly from the beta dashboard on the “Find Your Friends” module.
We’re still working on making it easy for you to find all of your contacts from other social networks (like Facebook or Twitter) who are already on Vox. You can help expedite this process by adding all of your other accounts on the Contact Information page under “Your Accounts Elsewhere.” We’ll let you know as soon as you can search those accounts for your friends.
Rotate Your Pictures
Several of you have been asking for the ability to rotate
your photos, and we’re excited to finally give you the option.
Photos don’t always upload in the direction you want so we’ve made it easy to rotate any photo after you upload it to Vox. Just click on “Rotate Left” or “Rotate Right” in the “Options” drop-down.
Embed Vox Assets
Anywhere
See
something you love on Vox that you want to post
elsewhere? Now all you have to do is click on the “Embed” link on the
right.
When you click that link, the embed code will appear. Then just copy
the code to insert it into another web page. Easy! You can also use
this to post your own content from Vox on another webpage, blog or
profile.
New Features to Try
Out
We’ve added some new features for you to try out, but only
if you’re brave enough to click on the “Go for it!” button at the top of the page. (Don’t worry.
If at any time you decide you want to revert to the old style, you can just
click “Switch me back, please.”) We’re so excited about these changes, we
wanted everyone to be able to try them out, so even if you’ve already opted in as a beta tester, you will still have to click the “Go for it!” button.
New Navigation &
Explore Areas
We’ve spent months designing a navigation that is clear and simple. We know it’s not perfect yet, but with your feedback and more testing, we hope to introduce the final navigation in the next couple of weeks.
One change we’re incredibly excited about is that now, when
you click “Explore Vox,” you will see links to some new explore areas centered around different subjects. For
starters we’ve added Culture, Entertainment, Life, Music and Technology, and you
can also drill down into sub-categories, including Fashion, Food
& Drink and more. (We'll be expanding these in the future.)
Each page features a feed of the latest posts added to Vox that fall
into that specific category. So, if you
want to see all the latest posts that are related to Music, just click on the
Music link.
These new explore sections also feature a spotlight area where a Vox Editor will feature different content and blogs. Do you write a lot about fashion or technology? This is a great way to have your blog featured in a prominent way, attracting more visitors and perhaps some new friends and neighbors! In the coming weeks, we’ll let you know how to nominate great content from you and your fellow Voxers.
We’ve worked incredibly hard to make these areas as relevant as possible, and we hope you’ll be inspired to click around and discover new posts and neighbors who share your passions.
Re-Designed Homepage
We’ve redesigned the logged-in homepage to bring you the stuff you want to read, all in one place.
At the top of your screen you’ll find a new area that features new information from your neighborhood. Click through the links to browse posts, comments, media and updates. Below that you’ll find editorial sections highlighting some of the great posts on Vox. The Question of the Day is now in the right-hand column above the “Recently favorited” module.
We hope that the new homepage will allow you to not only get a quick glance of what your neighbors are up to, but will also help you discover new people and content.
Improved Performance
Our engineers have been working tirelessly on all of these
changes, but somehow they’ve also managed to find time to make some awesome
performance enhancements which will improve page loading times and your overall
experience on Vox.
We Want Your
Feedback!
After you’ve had a chance to play around with the new
features, we’d love you to Take
Our Survey and let us know what you think.
If you’ve clicked on the “Go for it!” button, you’ll see the link to the
survey just below it. We also encourage you to submit overall thoughts and
suggestions on our feedback
page. You can always check out our known issues list as well to get
a sense of the items we’re aware of and working to fix.
It’s really important to us that we find out what you think about these changes. If you love it, hate it, or have ideas for other things we should add, we want to know. So please don’t be shy! Share your feedback and help improve Vox.
Comments
One comment about the new navigation top bar, it doesn't match the selected Vox Theme. I guess it only comes in light pastel blue currently?
I'll keep poking around to try out the new features.
Also, PantsParty's new "my favorites" widget KICKS ASS!!
Other than that minor annoyance (since I usually get to organize via the address bar anyway), stuff is looking good. Well played. :)
i like being able to rotate the pictures if they upload goofy, but i'd also like to be able to change the order of how they appear in my photos list (the way my friends view them)
also, i uploaded three songs today, one automatically put the album cover on the sound icon, the other two (from the same album) did not and is just that lovley pink speaker icon.
easier navigation is a great thing to look forward too! thanks much.
I would marry you if you were a single entity and not a collective of random developers, designers, and part of a corporation, etc, and the marriage laws didn't forbid the marital joining of a human with a digital network.
I LOVE YOU. ;____; You make me cry with joy over the greatness that is you.
1. An enhanced import from LJ (including tags, security options, etc.)
2. A better crosspost (including tags, security options etc.)
3. Something similar to lj-cut
4. Multiple icons
There are many more. I've summed them up in a post in my blog (in Russian, but can be translated on demand). I realize you do gather feedbacks from your users, but here you have it from a specific group of new and potential users.
In the meanwhile I've been doing some scripting work (with GreaseMonkey), adding threaded comments, vox-cut and <vox user> support (but all of this is just a temp solution, I hope).
I do miss the drop-down menus when you hover on sections of the site, though - they made getting to pages like Design and Organize so much quicker & easier.
I agree with the people who miss seeing recent comments on the home page, too - they were useful 'cos you could see if you'd been replied to without having to go to the post itself.
:)
1. The (sponsored) Vox Hunt is at the top of the page "above the fold" as they say in the biz, but QotD is relegated to a position requiring scrolling.
2. I may have been the only one, but I liked seeing things my neighbors had favorited, groups they had joined, etc. I thought it needed some fine tuning, but at its root, there was a good idea. It seems to be gone now, though. Did y'all decide it wasn't a good idea after all?
3. There's no longer a link from the home page to the "reader" version of the posts page (i.e. clicking "more posts" goes to the "explore" version). I'm a big fan of the reader, and one-click access would be nice.
(does anyone know if that little Vox Recommends thingy beside posts is new? o.O the thing that finds other stuff on vox tagged similarly to what you're viewing? - cos, yeah, I don't like that so much.)
1. open commenting! why can't my readers leave comments if they don't have an account with us? Vox is great and all, but you can't force them to join if they don't want, now d'you?
2. customizable design. not only the banner pic but the background too! i have these cool vector pics i've created and as a designer I am I want to pimp it nicely!
I'm still checking out the rest but so far so good....I think. (although the new upper thingy...will it be colorable like before?)
On the good side - I seem to be getting a little bit of a spike in traffic - certainly not like the porno sites - but I'll take it!
Goody^-^
I hope Vox also implements some type of hover sub-menus -- if not drop-down menus as in the previous Navigation Bar, then in the form of horizontal menus that dynamically change depending on the category/link the mouse hovers over.
Since this seems to be a major topic of discussion, an option to turn off Snap Shots across the entire Vox website would probably be much appreciated by many. While it is definitely nice to be able to activate/deactivate Snap Shots for our own blog, readers/visitors of our blog may not be so appreciative or like-minded. Would it be possible to implement two options: Snap Shots on/off for our own blog, and Snap Shots on/off for other's blogs?
I hope links to Library Assets (posts, photos, videos, audio, books, links, collections) are returned to the sub-navigation for blog pages. Not everyone activates all the necessary sidebar modules, so currently the only way to access theses pages is by typing the URL in the address bar or by clicking on the asset links on a person's profile page (with the exception of the missing "Collections" link).
All in all, I really like where everything is heading. Great job!
Please reconsider this. Or give us an option so we can opt out.
I also wanted to say Thank You for all the work you're putting into Vox and I do love Vox.
Petite remarque : il manque toujours l'option que j'attends avec impatience, celle de pouvoir chercher un blog en tapant un mot clef mais qui ne concerne QUE le titre ou sous titre du blog. Exemple, si je cherche un blog sur les hamburgers, je tape le mot et il me trouve des blogs du genre " mon blog sur les hamburgers". Car actuellement quand on tape un mot clef, il nous sort trop de résultats. Non ?
Sinon j'adore l'aperçu des sites qu'on a mis en lien !
not at all thrilled with the new look of the menu bar on top of our vox layouts now. especially as a lot of us spent so much time/energy creating banners to the FIRST design, only having to redesign to match the one before this new one... now, having wasted time on all the banners we worked hard at designing.
plus, some of the banners you offer do not look so good with the new design.
i, too, preferred the existing homepage.
one request... when will we have the freedom to control font colour for our personalized layout design? will that be something possible to do for the future?
thank you.
I like the new features but I like the old ones more. For some reason with the new version, the strip below our banners where it says Home, Profile, Neighbors, Posts, Photos, More disappears. I do, however, like the improved page loading times. The Homepage looks more organized, but I had to scroll down in order to find the QotD.
I would like to see an option to be able to use different fonts besides the default one when composing a blog in the future.
A thing we really need is a "Sent" folder, so I can see what messages I have sent to other Voxers and also a place where I can view all the comments I've made to posts, assets, etc. I want to view all the comments I've made, please!! <3
Good job, guys! :D
Thanks for the great work!
Outside of the improved loading time, I don't see any improvement to my Vox page. The bar with "Create" and "You" (You?) is amazingly shallow. No drop-down menus? It feels like you loaded a shotgun with the different options and just splattered it at the page.
I know you work really hard, Vox team, but I don't get this one.
1) The way it's done, using tags and keywords etc. to find similar content, is not infallible. We have no control over what content is promoted on our own journals, and even using tags and keywords, it's possible that something we don't condone or want to be associated with would be shown, and I don't like that.
2) I know Vox is a community, and it's awesome as such, but I just simply don't like the fact that other members' content is being promoted on individual user's pages. Other members that the user very possibly doesn't know. I can't think of any journal/blog community that promotes another member's specific content on a user's page. I don't see the appeal in having people I don't know or have nothing to do with splashed all over MY page. We already have the awesome Explore and [TIG] to find new content.
Hope that makes sense. They're just my own thoughts on the feature. :)
my only concern is that the recommendation goes to a spam blog or a blog that i don't like....
v
I would *hope* that being non-public would prevent someone's content from being shown AS a recommendation, but that's another good point: no control over whose site your content appears on.
Btw...kick me where it matters if you don't like this, seeing as you have spent so much time on it, but...
Would it be possible to allow for a custom navigation bar? I'm thinking, allowing for open HTML on the navigation bar so one could change it's appearance?
Obviously one would prefer to keep things standard tho, so everyone can get around easily so I'll understand if it's not such a good idea ;oP
I was surprised that an email arrived suddenly.
I did not know that there was such an activity!
Update of the blog is me who do not readily advance, but feels like reaction seeming to be continued when there is it.
Wish you all HAPPY XMAS & NEW YEAR 2008
I'd like to chime in about the "Vox recommends" module.
I am unhappy with it for similar reasons as mentioned by Ciana above: I have no control over what gets displayed on my own blog, recommendations are no real recommendations (i.e. not reviewed by a human), but pulled by similarity of tags assigned, and traffic could be driven away from my blog.
The module also shows off posts of spammer and scraper blogs on Vox (yes, they do exist here!), and I don't think Vox seriously recommends such posts or blogs? I noticed it on two of my posts already.
In addition to that, people could mistake these recommendations as made by me, plus these links could drive traffic away from my own blog. I am sure that any traffic that stays on Vox makes Vox happy, but I'd actually like to keep my readers on my own blog first.
@vu, Ciana, et al: somehow, I missed "Vox Recommends", but I, too, am concerned about its potential to attract spam. Already I find it annoying that new music artists simply add me to their Neighborhood-- one sent me a post of theirs-- three times!
I'll also openly admit I use Adblock. I really don't want ads I didn't ask for-- I plan to purchase some MOO goods soon; their blog and general cross-campaign was excellent. But I don't really want random ads I'm not interested in. Please, Team VOX and 6A, carefully consider some more new and awesome partnerships!
on behalf of emily sears once more, as well as some others-- the new default of Comments to "no one" is very, very annoying, and some of my good Neighbors have unintentionally disabled comments because it was the default. C'mon, this can't be a bug...
@marmelade: I agree. While I would love more friends and family to come join the fun-- if they don't want to, why should they be prohibited from replying? While I don't want to encourage something that could be another spam leak, I would like to see options for user-screened anonymous posting. Not everyone uses OpenID, either.
@Dmitry Rubinstein: Finally, someone who's speaking in behalf of LJ users! Thank you!
I am sure that SUP's acquisition of LiveJournal is privately a sore spot for a number of 6A Staff, since there are still some LJ users that are bitter about changes 6A brought and can't stop whining about it, but...
seriously, I have to agree, some imports of some LJ features would be very, very nice. Good on you, sir, for working on a <vox-cut> feature... I would quite happily support that, as I tend to be long-winded in my posts.
Some thoughts on your ideas, sir:
1. An enhanced import from LJ (including tags, security options, etc.)
2. A better crosspost (including tags, security options etc.)
While I think the new Embed feature might be able to address this, I can't imagine that's as convenient as the existing crosspost feature and so yes, yes I would like to support such an idea. Tags and security options would be nice if they could remain consistent, especially as you can't cross-post if you set security options on a VOX post.
I also support this as I want the "On Vox:" preface to all my LJ crossposts from VOX to go away. No use pouring salt into a wound; those that care to notice can look for a "crossposted from www.vox.com" line right in the post, which would be nice if a potential <vox-cut> was cross-compatible with <lj-cut>.
3. Something similar to lj-cut
See above.
4. Multiple icons
Yes-- it would be nice to change the blog photo (icon) on-the-fly.
I'll send you a private message. Apologies to others if this comment was too long.
Im new here but really like what I see,This site has it all and im glad to be a part of it.
Coyote Lee aka SmokeyC4
I can't seem to find the option to rotate images.
Seems like that would be an easy thing to fix.
Sorry for shouting, but they're mostly how I use VOX.
And VOX it is. If I'd wanted to be on LJ, I'd have been on it. I like VOX for its differences.
Comments open by default. Editing of comments, even if it's just within a few minutes' window.
Happy New Year.
h47
Thats great work I love the new features but please please please can you either enable direct support for something like statscounter (JS) or Google analytics (JS) or enable us to embed the JS or even provide a simple interface for us to put our account numbers in (the basic code is the same for everybody) and you can embed the code if you're worried about security..Or even better just build us a simple stats system so that we can see how many visitors we get and what people like (only a small percentage will bother making comments)...
Pretty please.... with sugar on top?
Steve
Im new here but really like what I see,This site has it all and im glad to be a part of it. have it on my VOX, it works well. You just have to put their code on the widgets place on your sidebar. SiteMeter has instructions on how to install on VOX in their help page too if you need, look for it.
I don't know.... have I overlooked a useful stats workaround?
and what about a possibility to leave "groups"?
we can create or choose Groups, but we can't leave them!!!
I've previously left groups using this method, which to my knowledge has always been available for Vox Groups.
thank you very much!
it's been a while since I explored things on Vox, being not much involved inhere now as I used to be before.
My blog is getting quite some traffic, but I know I am losing a lot of comments and interesting discussions, because people are annoyed having to create an ID here just to leave a comment (some told me they feel they're being tricked into signing up because of the way the commenting process is set up). It feels so futile to invest time in good posts when hardly anyone of my readers (who are not and will never be on Vox) comments.
free commenting PLEASE!
we need more freedom to our readers, so they can comment us without needing to join vox. should they still be forced so?
I'm missing lots of comments due to that. PLEASE CHANGE THE FEATURE
I've begged so many times... nothing happens,.
It feels like I'm speaking to myself in Vox.
=(
I have put a poll on commenting on my blog, because I want to know what my readers think. Surprisingly (NOT), the majority would love to be able to comment without becoming a Vox member. (The poll is still open, btw. ...)
1. Threaded comments
2. <vox-cut>
3. <lj user=...> as well as <vox user=...>
4. Crosspost to LJ with tags, security options and support for crosspost of edits to existing posts
5. A couple of less important tidbits, such as posting of images from forki.com as well as a "current music" line automatically provided by last.fm
If you are interested, I will provide you with the links to posts that explain where to get this stuff and how to use it.
Russian Women,Russian Girls
Day Trader