Log: incoming feedback in raw format

The idea is that each post/reply on this thread is a feedback coming from one person. We’ve got many coming in in our Karrot Team & Feedback group, so the first step is to copy them here (with the author’s consent), or the thread link on Karrot, then extract the most relevant information into separate topics, for example all feedback about editing activities, the use of calendar, etc.

improving e-mail notifications
original thread

Nick wrote 12 Dec 2022:

Once small thing I’ve noticed that could make a big difference, is I notice the emails have the name of the karrot instance as the prefix [karrot.world] ... then the email subject, whereas having the name of the group would make more sense to me…

(with a similar sense, it might be nice to have it so groups can customize the email footer to say a bit about the group, or add links, etc… all in the name of making it feel like people are participating in their group, not karrot itself…)

more on Use group name in email subject prefix · Issue #2626 · karrot-dev/karrot-frontend · GitHub

Robin Foods Admin wrote on 7 Dec 2022

This link previews would be great. Then I dont have to copy all the text from a public event to our group chats Do you think that its possible and easy to integrate? That would help us really a lot. I guess it should be possible with meta tags in the html…

https://andrejgajdos.com/how-to-create-a-link-preview/
(edited about 1 month ago)

Nick Sellen
about 1 month ago

I think that’s a great idea, unfortunately for us it’s a bit trickier to implement because of the way we have built the app.

those link previews are served up by the server, whereas for us the server doesn’t know anything about which page the link is about.

if you see the URLs, they look like this (e.g. this one for your lovely looking new public activity!):
https://karrot.world/#/a/f0e17f68-2afb-4c56-9e98-defae8df4f8c

… anything after the # is not sent to the server, the server only sees the https://karrot.world bit, which means there is nothing with which to general the nice link preview meta data.

I think we probably should ditch the # bit, but it needs some more work to make that happen.

I created an issue about it here → Support link previews · Issue #2617 · karrot-dev/karrot-frontend · GitHub

original thread
Tomek from Warsaw group 27 Nov 2022

Ok so here is some compilation I made in order of importance for FS Warsaw group also with some questions related to yesterday upgrade :

FR Possibility to revoke admission to a group by a person who accepted it (or even better by a any person with editing rights) but with a restriction that this option is active only for 72h. As mentioned during Karrot days it is very important in our group that we let in only people after multi-stage recruiting process which is run by delegated members of our group. As we are getting bigger and bigger new members(but older as well) forget about this rule and from time to time they add somebody too quickly to the group. Especially with adding functionality of ‘Public events’ we might encounter more and more joining requests and such false admission cases which we would like to be able to revert in some reasonable time if they were a mistake - that is why limitation of 72h
FR Could there be a possibility to scroll list of posts in Wall by date or month with years at least?- we are posting there some important communication and we have encountered that we need sometimes to come back to them which with current scrolling option is very difficult.
FR Possibility to get list of group members with attribute of e-mail address - without option to make simple polls Yes/No we need to use external application when we want agree something with all members of group. For that we need to have option to fetch list of members with email addresses to which we can send it.
FR Simple Poll option with Question and answer Yes/No /Withheld and tab for comment section - looking just like an Issue option
FR Possibility to search for user by their mobile number - sometimes some new member wants to reach us so it is good to be able to find them in group also by their phone number
NFR After upgrade we see in list only Favourite places on the list in the left side menu - to see All places we need to click ‘See All’ - in view of all places we should have also option to choose between tiles and list view
NFR Place which has been moved to archived status should not be visible for members of karrot group in ‘List of Favourite places (on the left side in menu) - if you would want to remove from that ‘Favorites list’ you have to bring it back from archived status to do so. So everyone who clicked ‘Favorite star’ in such Place, once it is archived is removed from its list ‘watchers’.
NFR/QUESTION - Will you bring functionality that action of clicking on empty slot in event is triggering ‘Join Pickup’? It stopped working as it used to after yesterday upgrade. Many of our users got used to that :slightly_smiling_face:
QUESTION Agreements - they are not deployed in our group Foodsharing Warsaw - why and do you plan to switch it on for us?

Feedback from Willi, Foodsharing Fürth Germany

1 Legal Holidays in activity series with „Weekly Frequency“:
How manage a legal holiday? We have about 10 - 15 activities every day.
Change everyone single activity on a legal holiday to „inactive“ looks not good in the „Activity“-listing and everyone who looks for new activities must everytime scroll away all this „inactive activities“ :frowning:.
E.g.: Inactivate a whole day with 1 command?

2 Activity series with enddate:
How can we manage 20 days activity (f.e. pickups at Christmas Market)? Activity series „Weekly frequency“ cannot be end on exactly day and shows always 1 day more and we have to wait 7 days to set this serie on inactive.
I set 7 times everyday the „new“ pickup to „Inactive“. That looks not good in the listing.

3 Meetings, Events:
When the 10 slots are occupied, the others who will take part had to write their name as text in „Additional information“.
We need about 20 slots for meetings and about 30 slots for events.
Perhaps make an automatic extension with always 1 more free slot?
And with a total numbering?

4 Feedback:
Reminder for all open feedbacks disturbes. I see everytime in the „Wall“ the reminder „27 activities await your feedback“. We dont need it.
Weight input is not social for the foodsavers with the small markets. We don`t want to see it.
For statistic we are interessetd to see the amount number of the activities at stores, distributions, …

5 Name of days in „actvities“:
PC web-version shows the name of the next day in the middle of the mainwindow and when you scroll over 10 – 15 activities on every day you overlook the name oft the next day and you loose the orientation on what day you are now.

6 Monogram letters from members in the slots:
The letters need more contrast to the background, because they are samll on smartphone and and hard to recognize by much (sun-)light.
2 letters are not enough. We have 3 x JB. Perhaps 4 letters? E.g…: JoBö.

PC web-version shows the whole name when you touch the monogram letters with the mouse, but the smartphone app does not show the name, so you must open the slot with the letters and than you can see the profile with the name. We are about 60 members in total, we can not know everyone by heart.
After that, you have to start again from beginning and not at the activitie where you have been before.

Here’s the feedback I collected from my local bioregional group:

last night I did a short feedback round within my local bioregionalism group, who have been trialling karrot for 6-8 months now. on karrot the group has 19 members, of which 9 are considered “active”. the in-person group meetings are usually monthly, and 6-8 people attend.

I used the rose/thorn/bud format to collect the feedback, it’s a mix of how karrot is for the group itself, and how karrot is as a tool.

the previous communication tool was a big email “list”, which was just a lot of people in the CC field of an email chain.

roses

  • liberating to use, nice design
  • like the sunday digest
  • lovely content shared on it
  • really really like not having inbox filled up, can dip in and out
  • love knowing agenda of meeting
  • like getting notifications in email inbox
  • a bunch of roses for sorting it out and nudging us to adopt it
  • a godsend! enormous improvement over email threads (many nods), was difficult to keep track of before, a step change
  • nice to see who is coming to a meeting, and use specific chat for the event
  • don’t use email, nice to be able to switch off the email notifications, can dip in when wanted

thorns

  • not sure where to post news items
  • hard to follow flow of conversations sometimes
  • get mention notifications, but can’t find where the message is
  • don’t see all conversations (but blames self) [might be in threads]
  • can’t find past activities, to find out what’s been said, what was on agenda, etc
  • issue when trying to adjust meeting time, where people were kicked out
  • would be nice to have ability to adjust individual meetings in a series for one-off alterations
  • amount of engagement isn’t very high, quite a few big long essays written, don’t have time for that, only a bit of skimming (but maybe this is about me)

buds

  • interested where it will develop
  • loads of fantastic resources shared, podcasts, references, but they get a bit lost in conversations, can we develop a library of resources?
  • haven’t played with much beyond the basics, creating a thread, … interested to see if I can find a place to share my journalling of place and barefoot walking?
  • loads, how to bring communities and software together more
  • would love to attach documents!
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From Daniel, Luxembourg:

Indeed, it is true that we are discussing to switch to foodsharing.network, and I still think it is related to our group size, which does not work so well on Karrot. Here are the main reasons:

Currently, we are asking new people to do a registration on our website to have all their data, a registration on our Mattermost server and a registration on Karrot. Signing up on 3 places and getting used to 2 systems overwhelms many new people, especially people without so many technical skills. This also creates a lot of admin work, especially when having more and more people. One platform would be best for solving this issue.
The trust system on Karrot does not work for our group. We have had issues with people changing places or our group without having the right to do so; Some also did it by mistake “because it was possible”. Therefore, we also don’t dare to use the new trust for “approved” role feature for test pickups; One click is enough to get somebody approved, and there would be no way to undo this by our Onboarding team themselves.
While it is nice that everybody can sign up for each activity on Karrot, this has resulted in some issues. An ecological problem is that people do activities far away, e.g. driving through the whole country for picking up 2 loaves of bread. Cooperation Managers often need more control and want, for instance, to give an introduction pickup as some shops have very special agreements, and they want to keep people from going again when they created trouble in the past, at least as long as the issue is resolved.
Having some sub-groups like the “Bezirke” on foodsharing.network also looks appealing to us to better represent our geographical circles.

Running an own instance of Karrot might solve some of the issues above, but it would require some sysadmin work.

I am happy to exchange further. I still love Karrot. :heart:

Request for bell notifications when new activities are created (from a friend who is trialling karrot for a group in Bath):

Secondly my query was…someone in our group posted a new activity in a place that I had favourited, but it didn’t show up in my notifications on the app. I only saw it as I happened to be looking at ‘history’.

I’ve turned off all email notifications and would rather not use that to hear about things. Is there something I need to do to be notified of new activities or is that just how it works?

From Nick:

Just logging a couple of bugs here that I noticed during a live karrot demo yesterday.

  1. After being accepted into a new group, and being trusted as editor, new activity button on activities page didn’t have list of activity types populated, page refresh got them

  2. Someone just showed me a notification for a membership review where the email subject had the name of the person receiving the email, not the person the membership review is about.

Suggestions from Food Saving Leuven group:

  1. Currently, there is no way of knowing how many active volunteers we have. The ‘members’ tab shows the number of active members based on whether they have logged in to Karrot.world in the last 3 months, not based on whether they have done pickups. It could be good to see the complete list of volunteers in the statistics tab to see who has done/missed/no-shows how many pick ups in last week/month/year.
    (I hope my explanation is understandable, or else I am happy to elaborate).

  2. Continuing on the need to limit ‘no shows’, is there a way to disable signing out less than 24 hours after the pickup? We discussed this in our previous meeting. However, I do not remember what was the final consensus. (I will look up the minutes to find out).

  3. Is there a way/possibility to limit the number of times a person can do a pickup? Some of our shops are very popular, and there is a constant battle to sign up for those.

  4. Is there a way to fetch the contact details of the active members? We would like to send a monthly newsletter to the active members.

From David, Robin Foods:

it would be great if people dont get kicked out by the system after some months of inactivity… is it possible to have a group setting for that? kick out after 12 months or so?

I would prefer 18 Months or to have 3 setting options:

  • 6
  • 12
  • 18 months
    would be enough for me

From Dave…

So now I analysed what we need for really effective organising as we r growing and have more and more events coming up…

Roles (that can act as pariticpant type): I click “add participant types” and can select predefined roles with the description already included… and add additional information if there is something special for that role. eg. cargo Rider: We need resuced veggies, no bread needed!

Share single activities with possibilty to sign up for a lot without registration (would be a definitiv gamechanger feature for our movement) → It will be like a doodle, that we send out and anyone can sign up… maybe a page with captcha to avoid spam and some basic infos and also inform the people that they can do more if they register on carrot to be part of the movement. this will make organising a lot more easier for us…

A “duplicate event” feature would be great. Sometimes we have unregular events of the same type, like fermentation. instead of creating a new text everytime, a duplicate feature would be great. Maybe a filter on the history view with option of a duplicate button would also really help us in organisation.

1 Like