A few upkeep items
  1. Batch delete
    1. Matthieu : I get an error whenever I try to batch delete spamming accounts. Do you experience the same problem ?
    2. Anand : Yes, I also get this.
    3. Nick  : We should create a ticket in Trac for SFU.
  2.   Privacy for logins
    1. Anand :  Right now it seems that if you are a generic user and you log in, when you "see changes" you can also see who else has logged in recently, which to my mind is a bit intrusive.  So we may want to consider making the login time information / profile changes visible only to administrators, say.
    2. Matthieu :  You're right, and I think Nick raised the issue with SFU a while  back. If I remember correctly, it may not be that easy to fix.
    3. Adriaan: I agree!
    4. Nick  : I talked this over with SFU, but then I used this "feature" to catch someone in a lie.  So I don't mind having it.
  3. Administrator Mode (Adriaan) 
    1. Adriaan :  I think I already mentioned it once, but I think that even for the administrators it would be nice to have an "edit mode" and a "view mode". In the view mode, I'd like to have a similar look and feel as a normal user, and in the edit mode, we'd have the interface as we see it now. I don't know whether this is easy, but maybe we can ask.
    2. Amin :  I am more interested in seeing what I have done, as a user or an editor. I have a similar suggestion to Adriaan. But, in the "edit mode" I would like to see what I have done or even partly done. For example consider creating a news. On the top page we can only see three last news. So, when I create a news sometimes I have t o wait for a couple of days to activate another news, so all the news have visibility. During these days, there are so much recent changes that I cant find them in the recent changes. I keep the links. However, it would be nice that I can see what I have created or partly created.
    3. Amin :  Also, that would be interesting if in the "view mode" we can have regional (or whatever the user set) changes. Right now if I post an event for kitchener/waterloo section in Canada, this news/event will be posted on recent changes of everybody. For example if we can give some options to a user to localize the news that might be interesting. For example he/she might be interested in regional activities/news/... or some regional neighbors. He /she may be interested in activities in his/her country, .... I am not sure if this implementation would be an expensive implementation or hard/easy one.'
    4. Nick  : Easiest way to have more than one view of the system would be to create a user account with minimal privileges that we all share to check the non-admin mode.  And to see the content you have created, you can simply go to http://www.itsoc.org/author/<username>.
  4. Registration policy
    1. Anand :  We should put some guidelines on the registration page so people know to put their affiliation, one ITSOC publication, etc to help us decide whether to activate their profile.  Emailing 90% of people who try to register is getting to be a pain.  I tried to figure out how to edit the createMember page/script, but didn't see how.
    2. Matthieu :  Ok, that will be mentioned to SFU asap.
    3. Adriaan :  So you mean that we ask applicants to provide more informationbeforehand, and have the website check that all fields are filled out? Would an alternative be to get registration info from previous ISIT(s) and populate a database with that information? This information is probably more detailed, and we could use some of that to interact with this site. It would also make it easier if we were to think of using the site for conf. organization. I'd be happy to be involved in such a discussion.  Populating some database from previous conferences would be a very good 
      option, as a back-up (Just remember that there are some people with the same name). Do we have access to such info.?
    4. Anand : That would involve writing a translation script of some sort and would cost $$$, so I'm not sure it's worth doing, especially if we are not planning to integrate conference management into the existing site *yet*.  For the future it would of course be nice.
    5. Nick  : My impression has been that this would become very expensive, and we have higher-priority needs.  But I could imagine exploring the idea at some point.
  5. Deceased members
    1. Anand :  I was trying to clean up the Shannon Award page and realized that  we have a lot of profiles to create for famous deceased information  theorists.  Is there a source for "official" obits/bios that we can  put in there, maybe with a photo, so that when someone clicks on  that name the information comes up?  I think that would be a really  nice thing to do for those people who won our highest award.
    2. Matthieu :  Agree. We should try to get a hand on past newsletters, they usually  have all this info.
    3. Adriaan :  It would be nice to have some templates for this - I guess we'd need a few (name only, name + photo ... always hard to decide which photo),  former affiliations, meta-info (e.g., other websites), etc.  
    4. Amin :  I was also adding previous members of itsoc student committee and about sergio servetto I didn't have a clue to what info I should add. A template would help to have similar info. He recently passed away and the info in his website is ok, but finding the right (complete) information about someone who passed away a couple of years ago might be difficult.
    5. Anand : Making a list of people for whom we need profiles is a start and then we can try and get one at a time.  The photos would be the hard thing.  There is always an "official" IEEE bio that we can use.
    6. Amin : Do we need to prevent these profiles from appearing in the first page?
    7. Anand : When we create the profile we can check the box saying it shouldn't appear.
    8. Nick  : All very valuable.  Agreed we should not highlight these folks on the first page.  I think we need to be a bit careful about the tone of the biographies, but we could certainly extract some useful stuff from their obituaries.
  6. Adding past BoGs
    1. Anand :  It's boring, but we could start adding in previous BoGs so that people's profiles are more filled out.
    2. Matthieu :  Are you volunteering ? :)
    3. Adriaan :  I am volunteering - however, I'd be happy to get help :-)
    4. Amin :  I can help :D
    5. Nick  : Wonderful, thank you for taking this initiative.
  7. Highlighted profiles
    1. Anand :  Perhaps only profiles with pictures should be highlighted on the front page?
    2. Matthieu :  Agree. I have started making profiles private whenever I see one, and  I edit those that have a fancy formatting.
    3. Adriaan :  Is there an easy way to ask for pictures, e.g., we could have a "dummy" picture with the text "picture not yet available/uploaded" and put that on all profiles (if that can be done). Maybe that is an incentive to replace the dummy.
    4. Amin :  I agree. Specially that several times I saw there were some names. Since the profiles didn't have any info. How should I know someone with just his name? At least if we don't limit them to profiles with pictures, we should limit to profiles with information.
    5. Anand : I think Matthieu's solution is ok for a temporary fix -- the problem with adding in a dummy picture is that we'd have to ask SFU to do it (although maybe it's easy) and I am willing to bet that more than half the users are too lazy or don't care to put in a photo even if there is a default.  However, making people's profiles private without telling them seems a bit bad.  Maybe we should make a little list/policy thing so that people know that they need a photo to be highlighted on the main page?
    6. Anand : Also, does making a profile private have any other side effects?  As in, can people not see your profile if it is private?  Or they can only see it if they are logged in?
    7. NIck  : Might be worth asking SFU for some details on the "private" functionality.
  8. History (Amin)
    1. I just noticed that whatever we change a revision is kept. If you look at the history of some news that I made like http://www.itsoc.org/news-events/recent-news/2008-isit-student-paper-award/versions_history_form , you can see that there are 7 revisions, including small changes . This eventually takes a lot of memory space.
      1. Is there anyway that we can delete them?
      2. Can we ask them if something has not published yet, only one revision is kept (the last one)?
    2. (Anand) : I think that it's actually storing diffs, not the whole copy.  While it does lead to disk bloat in the short term, disk space is cheap and I don't think we should worry about it.
    3. Nick  : If and when this becomes a problem, we can "pack" the object database to keep revisions from the last X days.