Daniel Burka's dashboard

You mean November doesn't have two 2s? Yeah, I see the problem too... that's pretty lame. We'll fix it. Thanks!

Hey there. Here's how you'd do it:

1. Add your students as 'friends'. If they don't have Pownce accounts, they'll need to sign up first.


2. If you've got lots of friends (other than your students), choose to make a set using the link on the left of your homepage. Select just your students and make a set called "My Students" or something.


3. Go back to your homepage. Write a note and in the 'send-to' dropdown choose "My Students". When you hit send, only your students will be able to see the note

Hope that helps!

Simple answer: Right now you cannot change the privacy settings on an individual note after you've sent it.

Changing the privacy on a note could be troublesome. Say you had a Private note and later changed it to Public, it would be confusing for the other recipients. Even the way you're suggesting (making a note more private) could be confusing, since some users used to be able to see your note and now they can't. In the end we elected to keep it simple and not let people change their minds later.

Cheers!

Hey there. I've got a nice answer for you – We've already got such an option! Unfortunately, it's a bit buried, hence your difficulty finding it.

If the person has friended you, go to your 'fans' list (bottom of the left column on your home page). Find the person and hit the Block button. They will no longer receive your notes in their feed automatically and they won't be able to comment. Note that if you send anything publicly, the person could still potentially see your note (it's public after all!) but they won't be able to comment.

I'll work on putting that link directly on fan/stranger profile pages as well as it would be more obvious there.

Thanks, Daniel

That's the newsletter that was just sent out. I only got one and you're the first person that I've heard who has this issue. Must be frustrating, sorry. I'll see if there's anything obvious going on. Can you please email us directly if this persists in sending you more email.

Awesome work! Installing right now to give it a shot. Thanks.

I think the definition of 'where it should be on the page' differs depending on who you talk to. Perhaps we should add the ability to determine where your image tiles from, but we were trying to keep it simple. Since the layout is centered, depending on what you're tiling, it's often better to have it center aligned. Sorry if that's not working for you.

That's not a weird question at all. I designed the logo. It's based on the Sauna typeface: http://www.vllg.com/Underware/Sauna/m...

Hi everyone. I totally hear your frustration. It's been a very stressful time for us trying to deal with these performance issues and I'm afraid the honest answer is that we can't give you a specific time when they'll be fixed. Right now, improving performance is top priority for us, which is a vague answer but an honest one. I'll try to address the questions in the parent post directly:

1. We would like a timeline stating when the outages will stop. How long do we have to wait for this error to get taken care of?

A1) If I could give you an accurate timeline, I'd give you one. However, it'd be disingenuous for me to give you one right now. We're tackling performance from several different angles (database, expensive queries, managing the API, etc) and trying to hit the most effective ones first. However, we've got a small team and some of the issues take longer than others. This won't be fixed overnight, as you've seen. We're trying to do a mixture of short-timeframe fixes that have some effect in tandem with longer-timeframe fixes that will have better effects over the long term. Yeah, I know that's kind of vague, but I don't think it'll be terribly constructive to go into each and every thing we're doing to handle performance.

2. When can we expect better communication. I see pownce has been working on it, but still things remain the same with no end in sight.

A2) Yes, we've been a bit behind on the communication. It's difficult to know what to say when we can't give you concrete answers to your concerns and questions. The best we've done so far is to lament the problems and try to explain that we share your frustrations - and we really do. We really are working on it and we really do take this seriously, but we don't want to give you more substantive answers unless we know we can back them up. At the moment, I can promise you that we're working hard on performance and we'll let you know more when we can give you a real answer that'll mean something to you.

3. For Pro users, will suppliment them for the month or two that pownce has been unstable.

3A) We'll definitely make sure we treat our community right. This is a pretty good idea that we'll discuss as a team. We really do appreciate everyones' patience and we'll do our best to reflect that in real ways.

4. When can we expect to see timelines for new features that would make those who are now put off about buying a pro account, want to buy one?

4A) At the moment, performance is our top priority, not creating 'pro' features. When we shift our focus back to feature development, we'll try to let you know about future plans for pros... however, I think $20 is still pretty good considering the benefits you receive, especially the much larger file size limits we've implemented -- when the site is working as it should!

We're currently having an issue with the file upload process, as you've obviously noted. If you'd like a full technical explanation, I can elaborate but the gist of it is a trade-off problem with Amazon S3 where we host the uploaded files.

Leah and our other developer are working on the problem and we should have a good solution soon. However, if you'd like us to refund your Pro account, we can certainly do that as I understand it's frustrating to not be able to upload your files sometimes.

I apologize that it's not working perfectly right now as you have every right to expect. Let me know how you'd like us to handle your account. Cheers.

You're right, it comes down to that equation. One thing I could imagine would be to have the option of disabling personal feeds for your account... so security-conscious/paranoid people could disable it for themselves.

I actually wasn't in Amsterdam with Leah and Kevin. I'll be in London and Limoges next week for a couple of conference though.

Yes, we're very aware of this and we've followed a fairly standard method of obfuscating the URL of the feed to keep your information private. Each person has a 'secret key' which only they can see. This key is used as part of the URL for your RSS feeds. You can see your key here when you're signed in: http://pownce.com/settings/secret_key/

If you're extra concerned about your privacy, you can reset that secret key at any point. That will change the URLs to your feeds.

I just fixed this on our staging site. Hopefully the fix will go live in the next few days. Thanks for your help!

I just implemented this on our staging site... it'll go live in the next few days. Thanks!

We're struggling with a problem on the server end. Please be patient with us... we know how frustrating this is. Ergh. Hopefully we'll be able to right things soon. This is our top priority until it's fixed.