An article was recently published in the Missoulian about Grupthink Pro:

For all its usefulness, the Internet can be overwhelming.

Sure, there’s a lot of information – sometimes too much – but how do you trust the information you find is accurate and timely?

How do you harness that knowledge to become better informed, improve your workplace, strengthen your business and tackle pressing issues that affect your decision-making challenges and successes?

More importantly, how do you get feedback that you can use?

The conundrum was compelling enough for Modwest, a Missoula Web-hosting business, to put its energies toward a solution.

Read on…

Tonight, June 25, at around 5pm Mountain we’ll be taking Grupthink sites down to run an update. We’re fixing an intermittent problem with ballots that is affecting some people on certain topics. This problem allows for an answer to be listed twice in the ballot, and then causes errors whenever the user tries to change the ballot rankings. Downtime is expected to be about one hour as we fix the root issue and run a script that fixes any affected ballots.

Update! I failed to mention that this update includes these improvements:

• Fixes “double answer” ballot bug.
• Changed link styles to use underline effect on hover instead of background color. This fixes a number of minor display annoyances with linked images.

Grupthink Pro:

• Fixed color of tab links in admin to use site colors instead of white.
• Improved some verbiage in the Facebook App tutorial and settings pages.
• “Reports” now shows on the admin home page.

Tonight we’re deploying an update around 5:30pm Mountain, which includes these changes:

• Fixes issue where html syndication widget affected non-widget link colors on the published page.
• Fixed “bouncing” friend lists in IE7.
• Replaced the missing “view all friends” link on member profile pages.
• Replaced your “History” on your home page with the new “mini-quilt” version.
• Added Facebook icon to welcome mesage in header, personal home page, and public profile page, if your account is linked to Facebook.

Thanks for reporting bugs!

Today we released Grupthink v3.2! Check out these notable:

• Facebook Connect: Grupthink members: Click the Facebook Connect button on your home page to link your Facebook account to your Grupthink accounts. That will enable faster/easier login and reveal new sharing options for your Facebook Wall.
• Facebook Connect: Non-members can sign in and register easily, using their Facebook logins.
• Vastly improved widgets! Click the small “<>” icon in the “Share:” area on topic pages to see the widget options.
• New notification option: Auto subscribe to all topics you’ve voted on
• New notification option: Auto subscribe to favorite topics
• Simplified Grup Topic Privacy options: “Wide open”, “Panel”, and “Private room”
• Many minor UI improvements and streamlining
• When logged in, home page now shows topics with new or recent activity instead of the relatively static “most popular” list.
• Fixed bug where new members would lose the answer or topic they created while registering.
• Various other bug fixes

Grupthink Pro Updates:

• New “Simple Invite” feature for recruiting members to public or private communities.
• Option to enable Facebook Connect
• Option to disable registration in public communities
• Favicons should be working again!
• New Grupthink Pro community admins now get logged in automatically after signup
• Other bug fixes

In the past year, our updates have been largely composed of back-end, foundational improvements, and they happened about once every 3 months. Many of those changes were geared at things like optimization, refactoring, or paving the way for custom Grupthink-powered Feedback Communities. All these changes, I said, would lead to quicker improvements later on, and it’s starting to feel like we’ve reached that point! Our past 2 releases were just 3 weeks apart and included some great user-facing improvements, and our release today is no different.

We’re expecting to release around 4pm Mountain (6pm Eastern). Unlike the past two releases, we expect downtime to be just a few minutes. Follow Grupthink on Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates.

Stay tuned for 3.2 release notes later this afternoon. The theme? Facebook.

We’ve switched to much quicker, agile release cycles, so we’ll have new updates roughly every 3-4 weeks. The 3.1 release marks the end of our first 3-week cycle, and here are the notable changes:

• Topic “mini histories”: Finally, you can get a quick, complete picture of “who’s been where” while looking at the topic lists. Before, it was common to miss out on activity, because we only showed the very latest post within each topic. See the new “mini quilts” at http://www.grupthink.com/top/ !
• Answer Chart!: Go to a topic and click the “chart” tab to see a nice new visual on the data.
• Smarter and cuter “Rank your votes” and “Vote for more!” reminders for newcomers
• Various bug fixes and optimizations

Grupthink Pro Updates

• Grupie Point Report for Admins: See who’s been earning the most points.
• Customize permissions for members: Now you can assign or unassign elevated permissions to all regular members. (Eg, Group Creation, topic editing)
• A Feedback Community for Grupthink Pro! Admins, you’ll now fund a link in your admin panels that will auto-invite you to our new private feedback community.
• Other minor fixes and improvements

Thursday, May 28, at around 5pm Eastern, we’ll be taking Grupthink.com down for an upgrade. Downtime could last a few hours. We have a couple fabulous features included. Stay tuned!

Hi all. We’re going to taking things down temporarily in a few minutes. We expect it will be about an hour, since we are optimizing server performance. You can follow updates at http://twitter.com/Grupthink

Thanks!

There are a variety of topics covered in the fastest moving polls this week. Manilaman wants to know “What’s O.K. If you don’t get caught?” Stealing cable and trespassing are high on the list. If you’re a fan of Prince or the Artist Formerly Known As, like lifeisthemeaningoflife, you can post your choice for favorite Prince song. Kiss and Raspberry Beret are the top vote-getters right now. Tereck would like to know what you think the United States is best known for; McDonald’s, Capitalism, and Hollywood are currently holding down the top three spots. Holotone wants you to post your “Top signs you’ve been reading too much Ayn Rand.” So far grupies site seeing selfishness as a virtue, and all of their conversations including a 40 page monologue as their top signs. And, finally, PSU532 is looking for your choice for the first black James Bond. Will Smith and Denzel Washington are holding down spots one and two respectively. That’s the wrap-up for this week. As you may have noticed, Grupthink v3.0 is up and running so be sure to check out the new features, and as always, post what’s on your mind!

Grupthink.com will be down for at least 2 hours *see our tweets for the best estimates* as we perform the 3.0 upgrades. Thank you for your patience. You can get quick updates at http://twitter.com/Grupthink

*Update* You can follow our tweets here, too:

Thanks!

- Steven