FAQ - Things people wanted to know

Due to popular demand I have put up an FAQ. It's pretty short but contains pretty much the top questions I get emailed about the Recycling Group Finder.

If you think there is something missing let me know, I can add to it as more questions are asked.

New Feature - Google Groups!

I have just pushed live the latest feature of the Recycling Group Finder, support for Google Groups!

It has taken a while to roll out, the changes to the code-base that runs the site were pretty fundamental as the site was originally only written to work with Yahoo based groups. As a result there may be some issues, let me know if you see any.

To get started just email me your Google Groups recycling group URL or head over to the group addition page.

The Recycling Group Finder is even more secure

I just put live support for SSL on the admin section of the Recycling Group Finder. You will notice this if you ever need to log into the site as an administrator as you will be redirected to a URL starting with https, as in this screen-grab:

What does this mean for me?

SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer, and basically means that any data transferred over the connection is encrypted and therefore secure. You can read more about it on the wikipedia page. As a group moderator you don't need to know the details though, just that now whenever you log into the site to make changes your username/password and website session data are un-interceptible.

Let me know if you see any problems with this at all!

Up up and up some more

The Recycling Group Finder has been a little unreliable of late. The company I host my sites with started to become more unreliable than usual in the last few months, culminating in two periods of prolonged downtime in the last couple of weeks.

I moved the site to a temporary server after the second outage, though it wasn't possible to get the traffic graphs working on that server. I then started work on moving the site to it's final server, a much more powerful and reliable server that should have fewer problems.

This post is basically to say that it's there, up and running on the new server with traffic graphs and all. There should be no more issues with the site being down, but let me know if you see anything.

Whoooooosh - the Recycling Group Finder gets faster

I just made an update to the Recycling Group Finder that has made all pages display up to 8 times faster, try it out!

Update: I posted a blog entry on the technical details behind the change.

Help, someone's trying to steal my group!

Don't panic! No-one can get access to your group either on Yahoo or on the Recycling Group Finder.

Some group owners have emailed me asking about an email they have received at their group owner addresses from recyclinggroupfinder.com that looks like this:

Thank you for taking the time to activate your moderator account with recyclinggroupfinder.com.
To complete the activation simple click on the following URL:

http://recyclinggroupfinder.com/account/activate_moderator/46ee4fd33a84452a5c52d1
This was requested by someone@someplace.net. If you don't have access to that email address, or weren't expecting this email then it is possible that the person who did was trying to signup to your group, they may need to be contacted and given help signing up.

The email was sent by the Recycling Group Finder site, but for a good reason.

Why did I receive this email?

On the group information page for each site there is a link to allow the group owner to sign up to recyclinggroupfinder.com, like this one for Vallejo Freecycle:

Once signed up recycling group owners can update the number of members, add notes and re-position the group on the map. It wouldn't be good if anyone could do this though, there needs to be some sort of authorisation process to ensure that only the group owner can make these changes.

Only a group owner can access a group

In order to access the admin area to make the sort of changes mentioned above the group owner needs to first click on the 'Sign up to administer this group' link (shown in the screen grab). They are then asked to create a login for recyclinggroupfinder.com.

Once they have done that the site sends an email to the Yahoo group owner address (not the email address of the person who just signed up to the site) with an authorisation token in the form of a link to the recyclinggroupfinder.com site. The group owner clicks on the link and are then confirmed as being eligible to administer the group.

It seems complicated…

This method of verifying group ownership is necessary to ensure only the right people have access to make changes to their group. It's accurate because the verification process requires access to the Yahoo group owner address, which only group owners have.

I clicked on the link by mistake! Did I just give someone else access?

No, the authorisation token sent to the Yahoo group owner email address is linked to the person who created it. Clicking on the activation link will do nothing if you didn't request it.

So why did I get the email, I didn't request it?!

Mostly this is due to people trying to sign up to your group but being confused about the right place to do so. The Internet is still a confusing place to most people on the planet and the chances are person who initiated the email is just trying to do the right thing and sign up to a recycling group to start recycling and re-using.

I do try to make it clear that this is not the place to sign up to the group, the link mentions signing up to be a moderator, on the next page there is a big title 'Freecycle Group Moderator signup: Your details' header and before you do try and signup, this message:

Unfortunately many people just don't read the pages or just don't understand the difference between a normal user and owner/moderator.

What should I do?

Hopefully help the user. It is most likely that the user is genuinely trying to sign up to your recycling, re-use or Freecycle group and has no malicious intent. Also, if owners sign up to administer their group the 'Sign up…' link is removed automatically as seen on the San Francisco Freecycle group page. Any comments and suggestions feel free to comment on this post or email me directly, the email address is at the bottom of every page on the Recycling Group Finder.

Easy share links

I have added share links to the group pages so it's really easy to share your local group page with anyone on Twitter and Facebook, they are available just under the map on every group info page, let me know if you want more!