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Mass invite on iPhone - bug or user error?
2G iPhone (upgrading to 3G soon) - new Loopt user.
Apparently, I invited a whole lot of 'friends' inadvertently while using the new iPhone app.
From 'List' menu on bottom of screen, I scrolled down and selected 'Invite Friends'. Sent to second screen, which brought up my entire iPhone contact list (so far, that's fine). Then selected 'Who's on Loopt' button in lower right. After a few moments, Loopt app returned with a marked up list of my contacts, indicating with a BLUE button those already subscribed, and with an ORANGE button, those who are on an eligible carrier. So far, so good. At this point, I scrolled through the list and clicked on about 5 of the 16 BLUE contacts (already Loopt subscribers). To the best of my recollection, I did nothing beyond this, but shortly thereafter, I received 'accepted' SMS messages from not only those 5 I'd selected (manually tapped, checkmark added by Loopt), but also from others on the list of 16 that I did NOT tap individually.
This was NOT what I intended to do. User error, or bug?
-- jeff
Apparently, I invited a whole lot of 'friends' inadvertently while using the new iPhone app.
From 'List' menu on bottom of screen, I scrolled down and selected 'Invite Friends'. Sent to second screen, which brought up my entire iPhone contact list (so far, that's fine). Then selected 'Who's on Loopt' button in lower right. After a few moments, Loopt app returned with a marked up list of my contacts, indicating with a BLUE button those already subscribed, and with an ORANGE button, those who are on an eligible carrier. So far, so good. At this point, I scrolled through the list and clicked on about 5 of the 16 BLUE contacts (already Loopt subscribers). To the best of my recollection, I did nothing beyond this, but shortly thereafter, I received 'accepted' SMS messages from not only those 5 I'd selected (manually tapped, checkmark added by Loopt), but also from others on the list of 16 that I did NOT tap individually.
This was NOT what I intended to do. User error, or bug?
-- jeff
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Hi Jeff,
When you pressed the "Who's on Loopt?" button, all of your contacts who were Loopt users were automatically selected. While we initially thought this was a good idea, we can see why it's easy to miss and can cause undesired invitations to be sent.
We're going to re-think the Invite Friends screens in our first update, and will fix this feature for real then.
In the meantime, we've modified the "Who's on Loopt?" feature on our servers to return friends as "Supported", even when they are in fact Loopt users. This way no contacts will be selected automatically.
Thanks for letting us know about the problem :)
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Inappropriate?Hi Jeff,
Let me grab an iPhone and try to reproduce what you described. Thanks for posting all the details as well. It makes figuring out what happened much easier :)
Chris1 Comment Add a comment
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perhaps I am a victim of this bug. I just got 2 invites to loopt in sms today from 2 different people and have added myself to the "how do i stop receiving loopt invites by sms" question that's already up. both people I received the invites from use iphones. -
Inappropriate?Hi Jeff,
When you pressed the "Who's on Loopt?" button, all of your contacts who were Loopt users were automatically selected. While we initially thought this was a good idea, we can see why it's easy to miss and can cause undesired invitations to be sent.
We're going to re-think the Invite Friends screens in our first update, and will fix this feature for real then.
In the meantime, we've modified the "Who's on Loopt?" feature on our servers to return friends as "Supported", even when they are in fact Loopt users. This way no contacts will be selected automatically.
Thanks for letting us know about the problem :)
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this answers the question
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Nick and Chris,
First of all, as a former mainframe COBOL programmer (OK, so now you pretty much know I'm an 'oldie'), I want to let you know that you have a fantastic app here - and I have no doubt we'll see some stunning improvements over time.
Second - as a former 'Mac Genius' in Apple retail and a person who understands the value of great customer support, I must laud you and your colleagues for your rapid and professional response to my support post. I'm sure your crew is swamped right now with the launch of the iPhone and potentially, a whole new legion of Loopt users, but if you can get through this little 'fire' here, you'll come out way ahead in the long run. Hats off to ya'! :-)
As to the issue you looked at on my behalf:
I LIKED that selecting the 'Who's on Loopt' showed me who was already subscribed. As you note, what seemed like a good idea at the time maybe isn't. However, if there were some way to indicate which of the Loopt subscribers was ALREADY one of your selected friends, and/or simply allow the user to select a subset of the whole list for a smaller multiple invite (maybe add an 'invite all' button for those who would want to do that), I think you could continue to make use of the function in general.
Best of luck folks - exciting times ahead!
-- jeff elliott -
Jeff, don't worry, as soon as we can release an application update we'll re-enable the indicators that a contact is already on Loopt. Right now the only way to keep them from being automatically selected is to list them as only supported, rather than as a Loopt user.
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