The Maintenance Log

Thanks to the entire GLRF community who have endured website outages and broken links in the GLRF Categories Videos.

First, a bot attack. On Wednesday, 03 August, we received an email from Mandrill, our email transactional provider, that our monthly allocation for sending emails thad almost been depleted. Since the GLRF Team was working on the Community Digest for 04 August, the notification was put aside. After the Outgames blog entry was finished at 1 am on Thursday, 04 August, we decided to have a look at our Mandrill account. All email allocations were gone and there were 254,000 emails in backlog. It turns out a bot was either used against the website or implanted, we'll still can't be sure. The bot was taking advantage of a vulnerability in an email form on the GLRF ecommerce platform. Needless to say, the Team was up all night, the issue resolved, and the 04 August digest went out without a glitch. Where was the bot source? China.

Next, on Sunday 07 August, the website kept displaying a server not available, 503 error. It seems that, and we're still not sure if the two are related, a follow on fix to plug the vulnerability, reactivated the bot. We had 273,000 visits to the ecommerce platform. Our server administrator said a "process" was consuming all of the server's RAM memory, and we have literally gigabytes. We disabled one application in All Oars, and not the ecommerce platform, and after that, the server resumed normal operation. Since then, we have reenabled the application and no problems have arisen. Bottom line: something hit the GLRF website and then just stopped and we are still clueless as to what or why.

Ongoing: on a daily basis, one or more hackers from Russia and who knows where else keeps trying to register on the GLRF website. Some succeed. We know the trademark signs and immediately delete the registrations. As this has been going on for more than a year, we continuously add more banned emails and ip addresses to our registration component. Sunday, 07 August, was a huge battle. There were 577 attempts to sign up, all from the banned ip addresses and email addresses. The seawall is in place and holding but the attacks are relentless.

Finally, on Thursday morning, 11 August, the GLRF Team was stunned to find that the GLRF Categories videos were no longer functional. It turns out that YouTube had deprecated the coding we were using and why they decided to suddenly turn off the switch at midnight 10 August, we will never know. Luckily, our web developer was able to fix the code by 09:00 so that the subscribers to the Community Digest would find useful pages when clicking on the videos. Some of our early digest clickers were faced with non-fucntional videos.

A further note about videos and what we think is homophobia: from time to time, a video that we add to the GLRF Categories videos suddenly is marked private. That means the account that originally uploaded the video has seen that GLRF has embedded the video and they mark it private to prevent GLRF members from seeing it. Is this homophobia? If it looks like homophobia, smells like homophobia, and acts like homophobia, it probably is. Our apologies to our members. Unfortunately, as much as we try to promote acceptance and inclusion, there are parts of the rowing community that remain ... homophobic.

GLRF Central has had some major distractions in the past 8 months. Staff has had to juggle family issues, an office move, and a number of administrative burdens. As a result, we're behind but slowly restoring order and catching up.

Thus the resumption of videos in this week's GLRF Community Digest, and the back log of image uploads from the 2015 fall regattas.

Unfortunately, because of the uproar, we don't have the usual staff to cover the Stonewall Regatta on Sunday, 05 June. If any GLRF members can spare a few moments to take some images of the Stonewall Regatta, we would be most appreciative. Although our upload process is not as easy as say a drag and drop, it isn't that challenging. We are happy to have multiple members upload their images, whatever your eye finds of interest.

Upload and don't worry about image titles or keywords. The GLRF staff can add those. Oh, and don't forget to select the number of images you plan to upload in the first section of the form. You can upload 18 images at one time.

Beyond images, we are also looking for a news story - a recap of the regatta. Winners, losers, Tweets from Trump, about Trump, last minute speeches from Bernie, or picketing from Republicans (who are also handing out their cell numbers on the DL). You can upload the story yourself to the GLRF Boston Bee, or send us the text and we can assist.

Thanks!

For those of you who tried to click on the links from the 27 August 2015 GLRF Community Digest, you were served nothing but error pages.

This issue caught us by surprise. We noticed one bad link in the digest but we didn't think to check the rest of the links in the digest until this morning when we discovered that all of the links were corrupted.

What happened? Last week, we switched the digest transmission from a task issued in php to a server-based cron. We know, that's total gibberish. In other words, we changed how the system that assembled the GRLF Community digest. It was supposed to be more automated and reliable. What was unanticipated was some lines of software code that generate the links in the digest. They obviously did not like the new automation system.

We're working on a fix and if we don't get a fix by this Thursday, 03 September, we will revert to the old fashioned system.

Think of it as switching between the old fashioned method of a wake up call being done by someone at the front desk and a new, reliable automated system.

Obviously the wake up calls went to the wrong persons/rooms.... so to speak.

Again, we apologize for the annoyance that some of you felt when you took the time to click on the links only to be met with errors. Thank you for your patience as we keep trying to improve the GLRF website features.

The GLRF Team.

Yet again, it was another software upgrade but this time from the wonderful owners of YouTube, Google!

Although Google said they had been warning everyone for months that the YouTube API Version 2 would be discontinued in May 2015, we were unaware and caught completely off guard. After a month of searching and working with a developer, we have been able to restore our GLRF Categories Videos.

As we began to slowly reintroduce the search criteria for worldwide rowing videos, it was stunning to see the GLRF website become populated with rowing videos from every corner of the world. This new YouTube API Version 3 is bringing in rowing videos for every aspect of the rowing community, providing something for all 9 demographic communities as well as 42 geographic communities of the federation.

As word gets out, the new normal in the rowing community will be gay and lesbian rowing. Suddenly everyone will be saying they have always been gay-friendly, act gay in public, or just whisper they are on the DL ... so they can join GLRF! [actually, anyone can join GLRF - we don't ask anyone's sexual orientation]

It shouldn't be a problem since there are so many of us in the rowing community already ... :)

The GLRF Team

We wanted to give you an update on the distribution problems that have plagued the Community Digest for the past two or three weeks.

We have identified the code that is causing the problem but we still don't know why we are having a problem. For the week of 25 June 2015, the Community Digest will be sent via our external email distribution system which may result in less than a stellar appearance of the header of the digest in your emails. We suggest you click on the link to see the "fabulous" version of the digest within the website itself. You can also find the link for the community digest by logging in to the GLRF website, and looking on the All Oars Activity column.

For the week of 02 July 2015, we will be running the distribution system internally and we hope to record some error log data to finally identify the cause of the distribution problems. After that, hopefully, we will have a solution in hand and with the 09 July 2015, be back to normal Community Digest distribution.

The current belief is that a software coding error occurred when our hosting service for us to upgrade our server control panel at the end of March, 2015.

Thanks for your patience as we struggle through these couple of weeks of less than stellar website performance.

The GLRF Team

GLRF members can enjoy the full selection of already assigned videos in the GLRF Categories but the addition of new videos will be suspended temporarily. The cause was a change in the YouTube software sorting system, which was upgraded from v2.0 to v3.0 on 05 May 2015.

We are working to restore the system as soon as possible but it may take a week or more.

Thanks for your understanding.

Some of you may notice some odd entries in the All Oars Network Activity column of the GLRF Central page and the All Oars Network Home page.

We're building an entirely new Regatta feature that we think will take the entire rowing community by surprise and delight. As we test items, you may see some updates that don't make any sense. Please be tolerant of these odd entries. We will attempt to delete the entries as often as we can. However, stopping the entries by disabling the the network activity feature would remove some useful entries that you do want to see.

Thanks for your patience. The project had a great start out of the gate and has settled at a really fast stroke rate. :)

For members visiting the GLRF website this week, there will be a surprise - the new GLRF Central section will go active. The new section introduces new versions of the Learn To Row, the Club Assist, and the Acceptance page (formerly the Facing Homophobia page).

In addition, we have merged the About GLRF page with our Information section

Please let us know if you encounter any issues or problems. Hopefully it will be seamless.

If you have bookmarked any pages in your browser, you may find yourself in the old section. We're doing that on purpose to ensure we have captured all of the images and old content.

We hope our guests and visitors enjoy the new layout and presentation.

- The GLRF Team

In recognition that GLRF is a worldwide community with members from 40 countries, we have worked very hard to find a translation solution for the articles portion of GLRF Categories.

Our initial hope had been to allow a drop down selection inside the iframe of the displayed article, allowing our members to read a Google-translation version of the article on the spot. However, the complexities of coding and iframes prevented us from achieving that goal.

Now we have a solution. You will find in the sidebar to the right of every article a translation block. It has been configured to serve every member who visits an article, matching the member's registered country language with the default translation language. So for those in most countries, all you have to do is click the translate button. For Canadians, and the Swiss, expats like Adrian or Italians living in France, you may need to select the language you feel is most appropriate.

We hope you find the service useful. There is a lot more going on in the worlwide rowing community than you may realize. Yes, we know that Google Translate only works so well but we hope you do get a sense of the article.

If you would like a different shape for the translated article popup, please let us know!

To encourage all GLRF members to participate in our forums and content commenting (news, calendars, blog entries), we are adding a content voting feature called Stamp It!. The idea is that people can comment or vote, if you will, on a post in a forum topic, or on any type of content on the GLRF website without offering an explanation.

Want to see it in action? Visit @omac's topic in the GLRF United States forum.

Why the need for this voting feature? We already have a 1 - 5 star rating system in place but that isn't the point. The fact is that the 80/20 rule exists throughout our culture and it certainly exists with online communities. That means 20% of the people make 80% of the comments or posts. For those who enjoy a healthy debate and have a strong skin, they can endure mudslinging and arguments. But for the GLRF members who want to avoid drama but want to interact with the content, this Stamp It! feature allows you to offer an opinion(vote) on a content piece. To ensure that everyone feels safe, you can even cast your vote anonymously.

While we don't have any noticeable online bullying nor would we tolerate it, the fact is that some members won't even venture to make a reply or a comment for fear of retribution. The Stamp It! features offers a way for the the meek, the shy, and the reticent the ability to express their opinion without fear of attack or retribution.

The new feature has been enabled for all the forums and will soon be added to the calendar events, the blogs, and the regional news.

The Stamp It! feature is incredibly versatile, allowing for any number of voting selections that can be tied to one or many forums. This means we could have German votes for the GLRF Germany forum, and French votes for the GLRF France forum, as examples (if you visit the GLRF France forum topics, we have enabled a test Stamp It! example there). The versatility also applies to the other content sections, like blogs, calendars, and regional news. So we could have different vote selections for news than we do for forum posts.

You can change your vote and even decide to go invisible, if you want. After a piece of content has a vote, you will see the summary of types of votes cast by members.

Tell us what voting selections you think would be useful!

If you look at the MY GLRF page, you'll see a block that says My Unread Content. It is a quick way to see if you have any new content on items you follow.

But many of the GLRF members may not know or have the desire to go through all of the different aspects of their member profile: forums, calendars, regional news feeds, and social groups, to enable following all those aspect of the GLRF network.

So the GLRF Team did the work for you.

Now all members have been set up to auto follow these items:

- your country forum (so you'll see when a new topic is added to a forum but you won't automatically follow every topic (and reply) in that forum)

- any 'other country forums' that you have checked off and want to follow

- your local regional calendar (that means when a new event is added, you'll be notified)

- your local regional news category

- any news and forum discussion activity on a social group you follow

But don't worry; you can unfollow a forum, a calendar, a news category, and even the news and discussion forums for social groups you joined. All you have to do is visit those items and click on the button at the top that says "Unfollow this xxxx."

We did this to make the MY GLRF page more timely and meaningful to every members.

Let us know what your think.

25 Sep 2014 edit: also, you can easily unfollow the forum, the calendar, the news category, and the social group news and forum by simply visiting the items and clicking on 'unfollow.'

About three hundred of the GLRF community received the 11 September 2014 Community Digest before it was killed.

Even after all the testing, we seem to still have a few issues and what went out was not good.

Hopefully, with the 18 September 2014 issue of the GLRF Community Digest, all of the issues will be sorted:

• All featured article links will open a new tab with the actual article instead of the Network-Home page
  
• All featured video links will open a new tabe with the actual article instead of the Network-Home page
  
• The digest should arrive for most everyone in html format, so that you can click the links directly from the page instead of having to read the useless list of non-links and click the web version of the digest
  
  • For those of you whose email applications do not handle html-formatted emails, you will (read should) receive, automatically, a text version of the digest and you will have to click on the link to experience the links of all the sections, from the GLRF web version of the digest
    

Thanks for your patience and continued belief that we will get it right and that it will be interesting and convenient for you.

Please let us know if your profile says "yes" for receiving the community digest and you don't get one in the mail this week or next week, or any week.

Thanks,

The GLRF Team

After several weeks of testing, we are very confident that the new 'digest' is ready to launch. We will add a link to the first live issue as soon as it is published.

The whole reason for a digest is to provide the GLRF membership with a recap of activity on the GLRF website for the past 7 days. Whether it is a new calendar event, a blog entry, a classified listing or any activity on the forums, the digest will show it. The digest will only show forward-looking items for two areas: new polls and any classifieds that are due to expire in the next week.

We think this is important for providing timely information to our members who post and hope to get a reply, and it also helps to promote the new Categories feature and highlight not only all of the content that has been added to each of the GLRF Categories but also to draw attention to newly featured articles and videos.

Of course, you can find much of the same information on the "logged-in" home page of the GLRF website, also known as GLRF Central but unless a member logs in frequently, they may not know about new activity that might be of interest to them.

Some or many might wonder why the digest appears kind of skewed. Why are there three columns one week and two columns and a blank space the next week. The answer is the digest template is fixed, and each column serves as a placeholder for various 'update' blocks. If there is no new activity, that block won't appear. So if there is no new blog activity, it won't appear. If there are no new or expiring classifieds, that block won't appear, and so on.

Why the "live and fabulous" link? The digest is sent as an html template. Not all email clients will support html, and some of you will see the plain text version of the digest which looks horrible and has no links except for the link to the web version of the digest. We are trying our best to make it easy for you to see a user-friendly layout of the digest.

The digest is designed to be automatic and timed to distribute every week, on Thursday, at 12:45h GMT. So if you want everyone to know about an event, you need to add it before that deadline or it won't appear until the following Thursday.

Subscribing and unsubscribing is easy by simply changing the settings on the GLRF Preferences page. If you are subscribed but not receiving the digest, check your spam box and make sure that rowing@glrf.info is added as a safe email.

After several months of development, the GLRF Categories application is now online. This new feature offers the worldwide GLRF membership the ability to connect with others in the rowing community who share a common focus. The application features rowing-related news articles and videos from around the world, something we think all GLRF members will find useful. To help support each community category, there are forums, social groups, llinks, and galleries to support an active interaction among GLRF members.

Each category offers a poll feature that are planned for a 7-day window in which GLRF members can cast their votes. Past polls will be available for review. Every GLRF member can submit ideas for polls that can be added to queue.

The application launches with 9 categories that address the largest segments of the rowing community. Coaches can connect with others. Likewise for Juniors and University level rowers. We included a category called Race Officials that includes both race officials and regatta organizers. Additional categories can be added if there is a demand, such as for coastal rowing.

The application mirrors the other aspects of the GLRF website. The Categories-Home page showcases the latest from all of the categories. We highlight featured articles and videos that we think the entire GLRF membership might find interesting. In addition, to facilitiate a quick scan of new articles, there is a grid box of the latest articles from each category on the home page.

From there, GLRF members can explore their individual categories of interest and read articles and watch videos that are refreshed daily from a sophisticated news aggregation script, and assigned based on a moderators review to one or more categories. As of Wednesday, 20 August 2014, there are already 2501 articles and 1805 videos added to the database. Our only regret with the development of the application is our inability to add a translate feature within the frame that displays the news articles. However, we feel the entire GLRF membership will benefit from the collection of news articles since GLRF is a worldwide organization.

To encourage community interaction, members can submit their own articles or add articles they found on the web.

Every member has the ability to curate their own list of articles and videos with a My Saved Articles and a My Saved Videos area.

GLRF is a worldwide online community. Our membership now counts members in 40 countries and only 56% of our overall membership is from the United States.

Although English is very often cited as the universal worldwide language, it is arrogant to assume everyone can or prefers to use English.

Accordingly, we have uploaded 16 language packs to compliment the All Oars Network. At the same time, we have run a database sort that assigns all of our members to a language, depending on their country. What this means is that any French members who login will now see their default language as French. The same applies to our members who speak one of the following languages: Swedish, Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Croatian, Portugese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Turkish, and Polish. For those members whose country language is not yet included, their default language remains English. However, every member can change their default language selection. So if you're Serbian and don't speak English, perhaps you speak Russian and you can select that language as your default.

Okay, great but why are all the pages still in English? We will never have the entire website entirely translated. If you visit the forums, you'll see most of the languages have been translated and we are ordering more translations.

Your other question will soon be why a particular country page is not translated for your language. That's because all of the country pages will only feature one native language translation. The French Country page will only be in French. The Danish Country page will only be in Danish, and so on.

We hope these improvements will be more inclusive and inviting for all of our worldwide members.

The GLRF Team has been hard at work with the phenomenal web developer from Brooklyn, hashing out the final details for the new GLRF Countries application. When complete, it will replace the existing GLRF Countries pages that you now see by either clicking on the country flags or by clicking on the 'COUNTRIES' navigation tab.

At the heart of the application is the ability to instantly update every country page where a GLRF member is registered. Currently, GLRF has members in 40 countries.

Unlike the previous process of adding a GLRF country page, the new application is very automated and a new page can be added with a WiFi connection on a flight over the Atlantic, or if the GLRF Team found ourselves in the living room of a beautiful house overlooking the Sydney harbor.

The new GLRF Countries pages will feature feeds from:

• the Latest News categories
  
• the Classifieds categories
  
• the Gotcha! Gallery country categories
  
• the regional Calendars
  
• the individual country Forums
  
• the individual country Links
  
• the individual country Groups
  

The GLRF Countries communities are intended to foster a connection among GLRF members within their country. To that end, we have added a second country page, Country Membership, that not only displays the existing Country Map but also adds a list of GLRF-defined regions (if any) for each country, and a member count in each region. Additionally, we now draw from the GLRF database to provide a listing of all the metroareas where we have members. Those metroareas will also display any club or rowing programme that members have added through the GLRF Share A Link feature.

So far, the only country page that is 100% complete is the United States page. Other countries that are around 85% complete are:

• Canada
  
• Australia
  
• New Zealand
  
• Ireland
  
• United Kingdom
  
• Belgium
  
• Switzerland
  

The easiest way to see if your country is "online" is to visit the MY GLRF page and click on the Jump to My GLRF Country navigation link. Throughout the month of March, we will be adding more and more countries.

The final feature that will be added is a complete translation for as many of the non-English pages as we can obtain from real translation services (as opposed to Google Translate).

We hope you enjoy the latest addition to the federation of rowing communities known simply as the Gay + Lesbian Rowing Federation.

The newest feature for the GLRF website, Share A Link, is now live.

The motivation in creating a link sharing feature was to enable our community to list their clubs and programmes. Since the GLRF membership spans rowing communities from juniors to national teams as well as masters, we needed to create a facility wherein our members could list their clubs in a "shared" environment.

By adding the ability to edit the link descriptions as well as comment, our community also has the ability to endorse 'gay and lesbian friendly' programmes, organization, and resources. For juniors and university rowers, that can be an important factor.

For new and returning rowers, finding a centralized source for local rowing clubs that have been shared by our community is very important.

As the design for Share A Link began to get underway, we realized the overwhelming task of how to organize and catalog links from different aspects of our varied rowing community. The result is a list of 15 categories that we hope will encompass most if not all possible links. However, the Share A Link feature can expand to meet the needs of unanticipated categories.

In addition to cataloging links, we have added a variety of geographic and topical tags that allow for easier searching and sharing. Based on earlier experience where overly enthusiastic members have added 50 or more tags to a given item, we have created a defined, closed set of tags and tailored them for each category. Based on community feedback, we can adjust those tags to better suit individual categories, and add additional tags that would be useful. Each country page will display a list of links with a country tag.

Finally, the tags can be favorited or 'fav'd' by members to mimic bookmarks. But more than just personal bookmarks, the fav'd feature allows our community to share those links that are the most popular. These fav'd links will appear in a variety of blocks throughout the GLRF website: My GLRF, and in our demographic Categories community pages.

If you find any issues or problems, please add a comment here, or send us a pm: .

Two additional features for Share A Link are still under construction:

1. a link widget for each All Oars Group where group owners can display links for local clubs or useful resources
   
2. the ability to pin links based on a member's tag or geographic preference (we anticipate a huge list of links once the community sees the possibilities)
   

The December 2013 Cox Box Squax newsletter went out to the entire GLRF membership, whether they subscribed or unsubscribed. Why? Software updates.

We use a software script called Phplist to send out the newsletter and it had a major upgrade from version 2.10.4 to version 3.0.5. The upgrade is great but it affected other software plugins that provide the membership subscribes and unsubscribes.

We're working on a full fix but in the meantime, we have a manual database query that we will run before sending out any newsletters or updates, ensuring that only those members who want to receive the news, do so.

Our apologies for the annoyance and thanks for your continued support.

Now hang on, it isn't what you think! Although the name might be considered super suggestive in the gay community, Mandrill is actually a "transactional email" platform from the very popular Mailchimp email marketing company.

So what exactly is GLRF doing in bed with Mandrill? Resolving email delivery problems. Although GLRF has its own virtual dedicated server, emails were often delivered to member's spam boxes. Mandrill resolves that by providing automatic email authentication so email boxes like Hotmail don't think GLRF emails are spam.

Over the past three weeks, we have reconfigured all of our email transmission codes to route through Mandrill and so far, it is working like a charm.

• The GLRF Cox Box Squax newsletter, transmitted through Phplist, now routes email through Mandrill.
  
• The All Oars Network, originally configured to send emails through an organic phpmail script, now routes email through Mandrill.
  
• Members who register with GLRF or who need a password reminder, and who previously were sent emails through a phpmail script, now receive their emails through Mandrill.
  
• All of the GLRF email boxes that you see around the website now route the outgoing emails through Mandrill.
  
• The new GLRF ecommerce site software, Prestashop, now routes all emails through Mandrill.
  

Okay, so you have to be a total geek to feel some embarrassing swelling in your rowing shorts about Mandrill but ensuring everyone gets their emails the first time is critical.

Finally, there is a revealing feature with Mandrill - it shows every email that goes out, who it went to, and if the email was opened by the recipient, and on what date and time.

Gotcha!

Excuse us, we need to turn around and 'adjust' ourselves in our rowing shorts ... :rolleyes:

You don't realize how difficult it is for the librarians and archivists of the world until you step into their shoes for just a few minutes.

We have now gone through a second complete reorganization of the categories, super, main, and sub of the Gotcha! Gallery in order to sort images in a logical manner. Probably the most difficult was how to handle regattas. Where do you put the regattas so that they are easy to find? Juniors want to see junior regattas, and probably masters want to see masters regattas. But how do you file the Royal Canadian Henley or the Head of the Charles, or any variety of regattas that feature a broad spectrum of the rowing community?

The latest iteration is to list regattas that do not specifically focus on just one aspect of the rowing community in a broad country regatta category. So all Canadian regattas are now listed under the Canada country image category.

On the other hand, regattas that target just one aspect of the rowing community, be that masters, juniors, university, or elite level rowing, all of those image categories are now featured under that specific category of the rowing community. So Junior Regattas are found in the Juniors section of the gallery. Similarly, University Regattas are found in the University section of the gallery.

Now we just need to come up with an effective, "don't make me think" navigation display that helps people find all these categories and not hunt around everywhere!

When we made the decision to drop the old social network platform, known as Network Now!, there were a few vocal dissidents who felt we were losing a critical asset. The focus of the harsh outcry was the loss of the "wall" that each group offered. It provided the ability for members to post a comment and allow other group members to reply.

The decision to forego the attractive features of Network Now! was made with the view towards a broader interconnectivity among our community components and our individual members.

Since that time we have been building that seamless connectivity by adding customized software scripts that allow members to view an activity portal, to view calendar features all over the website, and to push updates from blogs and forums to our twitter feed and facebook page.

We can now announce that the 'group wall' has returned for every All Oars Groups. Over the next few days, we will be populating each group with this new feature, and group members will be able to add an informal social media interaction within their groups.

Each wall allows for every member to make a text comment of 140 characters (configurable by group), and optionally add an image from the Gotcha! Gallery. All group members can make a text reply, very similar to a mobile text message layout. Although the wall is not intended to be a discussion (that's why each group has a forum), it allows group members to share links and thoughts.

The icing on the cake is that by default, all group members will receive a notification in their Dashboard and Updates box, anywhere on the GLRF website, when someone has posted a comment or a reply in their group's wall.

We have just updated each of the All Oars Groups, adding a separate news feature that is independent of the discussion forums.

It was felt that using a forum structure for news was confusing. In general, news is supposed to be presented as unbiased and factual, and can invite comments but is not really meant to be formatted as a discussion.

Additionally, the news forums were a subset of the main group discussion forum and that made it all the more confusing for members.

Now news items are presented three ways:

1. a truncated block that displays the last five news items
   
2. a group news page that presents a summary of all the news items, with pagination
   
3. an individual news entry page that displays the full text of the news item with commenting blocks below
   

You will also notice that each of the three news presentations has a comment summary icon that shows the number of comments for each specific news article. As before, you can follow the news section by simply selecting Follow Group News and if you are tired of too much news, you can always click Unfollow Group News!!!

One you comment on a fact. The other is for discussion and debate. Hope that makes sense.

This is another creation from the GLRF Wonder Developer in Brooklyn.

We are very excited to introduce a new enhancement to the All Oars Forums: personalized forum viewing.

Now members can select between viewing the entire forum view, including 9 GLRF Category Forums and 37 GLRF Country Forums, and their own, personalized forum view.

Using the geographic registration data in a member's profile, each member will, by default, see the forum of their identified GLRF Country, but members may also select additional GLRF Country forums. This is useful for Australians who might be living in the United Kingdom and would like to see the GLRF Country forums for Australia and the United Kingdom but may not be as enthusiastic to see other GLRF Country forums. European GLRF members might find this personalized forum view particularly useful since they are interested in the forums of the European region but possibly not in North or South America.

Similarly, all GLRF members may select some, all, or none of the GLRF Category forums to connect on topics related to a rowing interest, such as University, Women, Adaptive, etc. Juniors will find this feature very useful since they are usually interested in Juniors and University but not Masters, Open, or perhaps Coaching.

To update your personalized forum view, simply visit the Update Your Profile page, click on the sidebar link for GLRF Preferences, and select the GLRF Categories of interest as well as the GLRF Countries of interest.

We are now testing a much-needed additional feature for the All Oars Groups: events.

Now group adminstrators and moderators can create a group event, and even choose whether the event is public (viewable by all GLRF community members) or private (viewable only by the group members.

In addition, a group administrator or moderator who sees a public event that he/she feels would be of interest to the group can "snag" the event (for non-Americans, that means copy and paste) to display on the group home page.

If you visit a group homepage, you will see a new block that is labeled as 'Upcoming Group Events.'

For those who may not see the wisdom of snagging an event, consider the just created calendar event for the GLRF Events calendar. It announced that GLRF was hosting a booth at a big Juniors regatta in California.

With this snag feature, we were able to add the event to the California Juniors group - something they would be very interested in knowing about.

Chat Visible Sitewide

We just moved the chat button to the Dashboard and Updates widget. Now you can see the chat icon and the number of current "chatting" users from just about any page on the GLRF website. It's a great way to connect with people who are also online.

Some may ask if there will be a separate room feature for isolated chats - unfortunately, no. But you can chat privately with someone. Once they are in the chatroom, you just click on their link (no right click) and you'll see a drop down to go into a private chat. It is a quasi separate room but it is only 1 - 1.

Here they come: Classifieds!

We hope everyone likes this new feature! It took some time to decide how to structure the categories. It made the most sense to group them by regional geographic areas, since why would someone in Buenos Aires be interested in a set of oars for sale in St.Catherines, Ontario, Canada? We're open for suggestions on the categories in a given region but after looking at Craigs List for inspiration, it made sense to have general categories for housing, employment, and services, and then have more specific categories for boats, oars, and equipment (accessories better?).

For the first month, all GLRF members will be able to list a classified listing for free. Starting in May, OnTheWater members will be able to list for free but Shoreside members will have to pay a listing fee.

We have created a funny test listing. There are some amazing features with this applicaiton: rss feed, question and answer, and in the area called 'features,' you will see the country where the listing is located.

We plan to create widgets for the home page as well as region listings for each of the country pages so you can quickly see items that are for sale in your area.

As always, tell us what you think!

- The GLRF Team