Weekly Release, January 28, 2009

"Paid" is awesome feature, thank you.

BUG: When you 'Print Summary' on your event page, it shows all your paid attendees as UNpaid. ;)

Thanks

Thanks for fixing the links

I have a member that asked:
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I haven't been getting emails with updated message board topics. I poked around and found that my email to receive notices was unchecked, so I checked it.

I still haven't been getting the emails, so I looked again today, and it was unchecked again today!

Lisa, do you happen to know what's going on?

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Does that have something to do with the upgrades?

LisaBE, everyone --

The message board email issue was a bug on our end which should be completely resolved later in the day today. It was a pretty ugly bug -- if you're interested, Andrea explains it much better than I can on this thread here.

Once again, our apologies!

Hi everyone,

The team at HQ is busy at work on some exciting *new* features for you. Until those things are ready for prime time, we've been working hard on making some feature enhancements and fixing bugs.

Launching on Wednesday, January 28 is the following:

Feature enhancements:
...snip...
* If you schedule a paid Meetup event (regardless of how you're accepting payment), you can now manually mark people as paid and keep track of your members' payments status on your Meetup group. (Amazon Payments will get added automatically, PayPal and cash/check you'll need to do manually). Your members will not see each other's payment status.
...snip...

Thanks,
Maya

Thank you for all the improvements.

I don't accept online payments and don't plan to. So this should be 'known' to be 'unset' when rendering a page. Is there a way to not display "Unpaid Mark paid" for members who have RSVPed, if I am not collecting payments? I am finding that I am getting distracted by these links when I am looking at the attendee/RSVP list.

Thanks in advance.
Steffen

It is great that meetup is adding so many new features, but I wish they conformed to accessibility standards.

A logo sounds like a great idea, but a blind person (or text-only browser or mobile device) cannot "read" it.

Could you please fix the customization interface to allow you to do the following to a banner:
* Add any combination of (background image or color) and (logo or text).
* Use no background (so entire page background shows through and the repeating image is seemless).
* Include a "alternate text" field for logos.

This would allow an organizer to:
* Change the banner background color/image while still using the same logo (some organizers might just have fancy text saved as a logo).
* Disable the banner background color/image completely so the page background shows thorugh beneath our group text or logo and the look is seamless.
* Include "alt text" with our logos for accessibility standards.
* Use a background image in conjunction with the default group text if we prefer not to save the text as a logo, which is simpler and also conforms to accessibility standards and also helps with search engine rankings.

Text should never be represented on a website as an image, or at the very least alt text should be available.

alt text in a logo will not satisfy the want/need to use a proper HTML header with text which increases ranking in search-engine results for searches on a phrase that matches your group title.

Using a text header, which conforms to accessibility standards:
(It would be nice if we could disable the background to the banner area entirely, so the page background just shows through seamlessly. Also, we should be able to use a background image in this area if we want, instead of a background color. Though I would envision that not getting much use except on groups that don't have entire page backgrounds.)




Using a graphical logo, which is not readable text and does not have alt text, and therefore is not accessible to those with vision impairments (who use screen readers) or using other web devices (such as mobile devices, text-based browsers, etc.):
(First, any logo should have an avaiable field for "alt text". Also, we should be able to use (or not use) a background color or image even with a logo, because smart designers would save just the text as the logo, so we can reuse the same logo even if we change the page or banner background.)




It is clear that the 2nd option looks nicer (and could look best if page background showed through) -- but it is not accessible!

Furthermore, simple image editors like Microsoft "Paint" do not allow you to use a repeating image as a background. It is quite a chore to crop a section of a repeating background image, then create a blank header image of the right size and paste the cropped background multiple times and align it each time so it doesn't look like a messy paste job.