The Last Login functionality is great, but only available to admins.

I tried linking directly to the .cfm page and found that this can only be run by admins.

How could I easily make this available to the class, in general. I think that it would spur much interest.

thanks,

Jim Reynolds, South High 1968

James, with respect, I disagree that the last login should be made available to classmates. We have some classmates who have not logged on since they joined the site nine years ago. I think they might be embarrassed if this info was available to other classmates. I'm not sure what purpose the last login functions serves, other than to let the administrator know who the regulars are.

The other thing about our site is that all the pages are open for public viewing except individual Classmate Profile pages. It's quite possible there are many classmates who check the Latest News and other pages without logging in.

Scott,

Once I brought up the possibility, many seemed quite interested. Initial poll was 80% strong approval of the idea.

We get 20-50 people on the site daily, with a high of 72. So there is a lot of interest in who is visiting. It’s my job to keep them coming back with new and interesting information and functionality.

We have possibly 20-30 who have old logins, perhaps going back to April or May when we were just starting out. I’ve already explained to the class that we inserted these people so that we could capture their other information - phone, physical addresses, etc, after interviewing them by phone. Being a 1968 class, many in the class are not internet savvy, even through iPhones. We all know that and there is no shame associated with that. Some of these non-loginers actually attended our recent 50th reunion. We had 200 attend, including 10 teachers and guests.

So there is no lack of interest and I think that we have dealt with the potential embarrassment factor. Of course, how could somebody be embarrassed if they never logged in to see what was going on? We could limit to the last day, week, month. No problem.

My only real concern was that possibly Class Creator was protecting the server load by disallowing non-admins from hitting the database through the .cfm page.

What would it take to make the functionality more broadly available? Or is it possible?

Our site is fairly open, as well. We have hundreds of pages of photos and other information available.

As for the reason for making Last Logins available? You answered your own question. “.. other than to let the administrator know who the regulars are.” I contend that the REGULARS would like to know who the regulars are! They seem to agree.

Jim Reynolds

James, we agree to disagree on this one. I see it as a privacy issue. If CC admin allows classmates to see the last login, I surely hope they give administrators the option of activating or not activating this function. Looking forward to additional inputs from others.

Of course, I've thought of the privacy issue as well.

Note that we usually show who is currently logged on to the site in the right hand column. Is this no more or less of a privacy concern than knowing about last logins?

I have not had one person complain about the visibility of current logins.

I would like the CC people to make the LL functionality available to normal users if the admin of the site thinks it would stoke interest in the website. We are just one more internet portal trying to grab the fleeting attention of a fickle audience. We could use all the help we can get.

I would be happy to make my website the pilot for this project. I was a software engineer for 25 years and this is normally how we would roll out new functionality: pilot projects.

What we have (school websites) that other websites don't have is a built-in user base that has a long history and strong, yet brittle, ties to one another. Anything we can do to reinforce that "family" connection gives us an advantage in the fight for eyeballs and attention. Knowing who is really out there could compel a person to keep coming back. That is what my users have told me.

Now you know why people keep coming back to our site.

Jim

By the way, I realize that there are things that can, and cannot, be done within the framework of the CC system.

If my request is not possible, please tell me so now and we'll stop yammering about it.

I have no interest in carrying on a conversation about desired functionality that is not possible within the current framework.

I do much appreciate Scott's comments, though disagree with his views. He evidently has a different user base than mine.

thanks,

Jim Reynolds
South High Bakersfield 1968

Could be an option to allow classmates to view - don't hold your breath though

If you are willing to put a little bit of work, once a week (or daily?) it's easy to replace.

You can use Firefox to take a screen shot and then update the image.

OR you can view source and copy the html used to create that list. Now paste that in your own page.

Here's a sample showing just me, but the whole list is exactly the same. Start with table and end at /table

<table class="tablesorter" id="table1"> <thead> <tr> <th>Name</th> <th>Last Login</th> <th>Email</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Vermeulen, Jack </td> <td nowrap="nowrap">2018-11-17 11:48 AM</td> <td><a href="class_profile.cfm?member_id=2514412#private_message" target="email2514412">EMAIL</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table>

I can see how you are dumping information into a formatted table. Where is the database call to get the raw information? Did I miss it?

Nothing missed

You have to manually copy and paste that into a page. That's what I meant by updating it weekly or daily or?

Not too tedious. Just view source, then copy and paste the section using Source Mode in the editor.

Here's a link to test page with just that entry. Listing the whole class looks better, but I did not want to expose classmates

Have you put this on your site? Are your users appreciative?

Thanks

Jim

Not on our site. Just did that for an example of how you could do it.

Our site is not too active. Mostly at reunion time is there any activity. That's mainly why we picked CC - much easier to organize reunions.

And I just like to mess around

Bothell -- I lived in Tacoma for 20 years. Spent a lot of time commuting up to Redmond on the 405. If you are the class of 1961 then that means your users are most likely not too techy, yes? Really very few tech types in my 1968 class. I was a career changer in 1985 to computer science. So I am the oddball in this class.

This may be a problem when I want to hand off the site to somebody else, eventually. Who do you turn to?

I ran a donate page to keep the site running for awhile after the 50th reunion. Got $1,250 within a couple days so we are in business for the next ten years. Must be a timing deal. The class will be 79 years old in ten years.

Yes - Most not too techy. Their idea of tech is having an iPhone I would be an oddball no matter what though

That's a long drive from Tacoma. My brother did that for decades in reverse from Bothell. At least from your direction traffic is a bit better. It is horrible now.

I accidentally took a CS (math) course in 1963 at UW on the IBM 7090 - class book was the IBM assembler manual. Talk about not having a clue how to teach programming. Assembler as a first language is a shocker. OTOH served me well since everything after that was easy.

I've had a lot of fun making stuff for our site and others. Home page has some of the scripts I've made. Never had time for that before.

Should make a master page listing all the scripts created for CC sites. FYI, you can host pages on CC and have your very own style. Here's an example for the Video/MP3 player.

Domain is good till 2025. Not too concerned about long term. In 10 years the age will be 85. They do read emails though and that saves a LOT of work & money for reunions.

The original purpose of our site was to make paying for the reunion easier to do and to track. Just that part alone was worth the price. Then it turned into more of a communication hub. Then it turned into a repository of hundreds of photos.

The most successful parts have been the announcements and broad emails. If I don't put out new announcements on a regular basis they lose interest. I've done dozens and dozens of announcements. The notes need to be witty and interesting or that backfires, too. Blast emails can be easily overused, as well.

How in the world would you communicate with a couple hundred people without a website? Seems impossible now. So many people showed up for our reunion events that we ended up with a $2K surplus. Good way to start the next one -- 52nd, to celebrate our 70th birthdays?

We had a professional photog at the 50th and she took over a thousand photos. Will need to get those up there in a coherent manner. People can now access them through her website, but they are not "identified".

James your site is not secured as I was looking at a lot of individuals locations.

On your home page I would move the Birthdays list up so classmates can see it when the open the home page.

Just a question why do you show a list of who has used their I-Pad etc. to log on to the site?

I like the mix of open and restricted pages. I follow the same concept. If it was just me, there would be a few more open. One argument is that keeping most stuff restricted makes people join. I like the mix of keeping some open.

The analytics is interesting to me. Not sure general members care. It's not really about the members visiting, but the WORLD that visits a site. There's another section that tracks the operating system used and what part of the world. And also what pages are visited. Restricted pages would only be for registered classmates.

I would love to have a graph, perhaps on a separate page, that would show details of how frequently a classmate logs in, not necessarily a day by day, but at least a graph that at a glance would show peaks and valleys how much each user was active over the years.

The last login is helpful, but the member who hasn't logged in since 2010 and suddenly shows up, tells me very little. (It would also be nice to have a notification when a user who hasn't logged on in years suddenly resurfaces.)

I lean toward not to showing specifics to classmates, but it would be nice to have some sort of notification that might show Active/Inactive or an yellow dot if they haven't been on in 6 months, an orange dot if it's been over a year, and a red dot if it's been over a year and a half. We have a lot of folks wishing people Happy Birthday, when the recipient hasn't been on the site for several years, but they have no way of knowing. If they could see someone has not been active in the past year, or particularly several years they might make he effort to actually reach out and telephone them. As it is now, we just assume that they will read it.

I'm one of the sites that Jack helped program. He added a Quote of the Day They Said So and a Word of the Day Merriam Webster at the top of our home page, that way visitors see something new every day without any further action on my part. Helps keep it fresh, I feel. Also, there is an interesting page we call Brain Fodder that one of our other Admins suggested. I didn't find the originating page, but it seems to link to TheFreeDictionary.

Again, a Big Thanks to Jack!

Talking about updating Jack's script once a week, I'm just wondering could this be automated? Possibly a routine that lives on our home computer, downloads the data to our own spreadsheet periodically, and then uploads the results, if desired, to a custom page on our website? Just thinking out loud.

While I'm on a roll, and I probably should make this it's own page, It would be extremely helpful to be able to see Messages to the Class and Page Update Notices tied in to the most recent logins. [Statistics - List Users and Last Login Dates] That would permit us to see the activity in response to each Message or Page Update and additionally, who has and hasn't seen the update because it was posted after they last logged on. We don't get Time Sensitive messages very often, but they do happen, but being able to see if a Message to the Class was effective would be quite helpful.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

We looked at this internally and we've determined that it is not a function we intend to pursue at this time.

Scott Mastenbrook wrote:

THANK YOU

Scott Mastenbrook wrote:

Thanks Scott, I'm in agreement, it's not a function we'd like to pursue at any time... Our website is multi- class,ranges from 1958 to 1990. We like Statistics the way it is now. Thanks CC.

Wishing Brad, Scott, Jessica, Kyle and all Class Creator staff and all the admins, a happy, relaxing, and fun Thanksgiving!
Thelma

Thank you and I hope have a wonderful Thanksgiving as well!

Thanks for the responses.

I didn’t think that there would be any changes in the last login policy.

If I think that it is interesting enough I’ll just do a batch job on a weekly basis. Would not take more than a couple minutes.

We’ve had over 17,000 visits from who-knows-who since starting in March this year. Is that pretty typical?

Now that the 50th reunion activity has settled down we’ll get 5-40 logins a day. If there is a new survey, new announcement, or new photos we’ll get on the upper side of that. I suppose it goes to sub-5 in the long run. If I don’t say anything witty for a few days it definitely inclines towards zero.

I just embedded an Elf video so that should be interesting to see the response. It’s pretty funny. You guys can’t see it, though.

Christmas Elf video got about 120 responses over a four day period.

Not bad.

Told everyone that if that respond in the comment box at the end of the new year’s announcement they can also see what everybody else said. This will be an ongoing feature.

I decided to include a weekly static page for “Who’s Been Online”. I dump the result, with slight editing, for 24 hours, last week, and last 30 days. No email data is included. People seem to like this. Let’s us know, on a macro basis, if we are gaining or losing steam. It just takes a few minutes to pull this together and I reuse the page. No one has complained about privacy issues.

I also gave detailed instructions on how to unsubcribe from email. This caused an exodus of one person, probably the one who was complaining about it.

I agree with the open/closed website concept. As long as I don’t expose private info, I’m ok with it.

We’ve had almost 20,000 visitors to the site since March, 2018. I don’t know how many of those are bots. Can anybody tell me about that? Are these actually real people checking out the Home Page and whatnot?

Google Analytics is probably the best way to dig into the details of how your site is being accessed and used. But you can take a (very) rough guess at where your home page hits came from by comparing the number of logins from the Statistics page with the increase in home page hits count.

Or.. you can see where all your home page hits are coming from by including a hit map like the one on our home page {LINK}. I use both Analytics and the map, and it looks like many of my home page hits end up as a secondary result from a Google search hit on a lot of my humor and 'entertainment' page names - such as "50's Cars".

Thanks, I’ll check this out.