Into The Forrst

Forrst Invites Redux

Update as of January 1, 2011, the invite system is based on your Forrst reputation; the users in the 93rd percentile or higher will receive between 1 and 3 invites, commensurate with their standing on Forrst. Reputation is listed on your profile, and may be earned through positive contributions to the community. We feel that this is by far a better way to hand out invites compared to just looking at more simple metrics (likes and comments, for instance).

We also realize that it’s still not a perfect system, and are constantly working to improve it.

Also, if you work on a team, please get in touch here. We’d be happy to chat about getting your colleagues on Forrst.

Finally, one of the most frequently asked questions we receive relates to applying for membership on the homepage, and how one can be invited. Here are a few things to remember:

• Forrst itself typically does not invite new members; instead, all growth is entirely controlled by the community itself
• Sometimes it takes a bit of time to receive an invite
• Members announce that they have invites on Twitter from time to time
• Make sure you have a Gravatar! Most members will skip over applications that are missing one.
• Last but not least: it sounds obvious, but don’t fill in fake information.

Thanks, as always.

The original post follows.

Today marks the launch of a big change in the way Forrst invites work, and I’d like to start off by saying that Forrst welcomes any developer or designer who’s passionate about getting better at their craft and helping others to do so as well, whether they’re the cream of the crop or just getting started (everyone has to start somewhere). It is in that spirit that I’m pumped to announce the Forrst Invite system.

In the past, one could join Forrst one of two ways: getting invited by a friend or colleague, or applying on forrst.com and being invited by us directly. The former worked in theory, but the algorithm that awarded users with invites (based on their engagement with the community) never quite worked, leading to frustration and the frequently asked question: “How the heck can I invite my friends?” Thinking that we could manage the latter method also proved to be inherently flawed. While it was my hope that we could vet all applicants to ensure they were truly a developer or designer (and not, say, a recruiter or “web two oh marketing guru”), that, too, proved too great a challenge for our small team, and consequently many non-developers and non-designers managed to slip through the cracks, leading to some frustration within the community.

So, I’m happy to announce that today we’ve launched a new, two-part invite system. The first part should be familiar — inviting friends and colleagues via email. As a Forrst member, you’ll now be eligible for up to 5 invites per month (given out on the 1st of each month), and can have a maximum of 10 invites at any given time[1]. In order to earn invites for a given month, you must have interacted on Forrst during that month (e.g. by posting, leaving thoughtful comments and liking others’ posts), and your account must be at least 15 days old and in good standing[2]. You can send invites via email here: http://forrst.com/invites

The other half is totally new: members may now view a list of people who’ve applied for an invite from the forrst.com homepage. From here, any existing Forrst member is able to use one of their invites to invite a new developer or designer into the community. The list shows the person’s name, Gravatar (if they have one [hint, hint prospective members: you should get a Gravatar!]), Twitter username, and URL they submitted, along with an Invite button. The power to bring new users into Forrst is now largely in the hands of the community, as it should be. Mike, Adam and I will still be inviting users on a regular basis, but it’s my hope that by opening up the process to the community at large, we’ll all have a much better experience and will be able to ensure that only developers and designers are able to sign up. This new area is available at http://forrst.com/people/invite or from the People nav bar.

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility, and so it goes with Forrst invites: Forrst users will now be accountable for whomever they invite to the site. If you invite Joe Smith, and Joe proves to be a great part of the Forrst community, that’s awesome. However, if you invite Joe and Joe’s posts or comments repeatedly get flagged, or Joe is banned, you will also receive flags on your account (in proportion to Joe’s). Users who have been flagged a certain amount of times won’t be eligible to invite new members.[2]

I hope that with the launch of this new invite system, the quality of the community stands to improve even more. I’m also excited that current users will finally be able to easily invite friends and colleagues. I know it’s been a long time coming, and thanks for being so patient.

Any questions, comments, or other feedback, please don’t hesitate to shoot me an email: kyle at forrst.com

I also want to thank the Forrst community for being generally stellar. Without you, Forrst would be nothing but a pile of PHP.

And, just a note to anyone who’s applied but not yet been invited in: now that the community will be actively involved in the invite process, hopefully we can get the invite delays down to a much more reasonable length of time.

[1] just to clarify: on the 1st, if you have 5 or fewer invites, you’ll receive 5; if you have between 6 and 9, you’ll get topped up to 10 total; if you have 10, you won’t receive any

[2] users who have had posts or comments flagged are not eligible to invite new users until those flagged posts or comments have been appropriately handled (that’s up to our discretion). repeated or especially egregious offenses may result in a permanent loss of invite privileges. sorry!

Forrst App Contest Results

Forrst users have voted and the winner of the first ever Forrst App Contest is Kippt! With DuctMail coming in a close second. Honorable mention Eval and FormBakery. We would like to thank all the teams whom competed and we can’t wait to do it again. All of the final teams will receive copies of HTML5 For Web Designers from A Book Apart and the Kippt team will also receive Forrst Survival kits. Checkout below to see reviews of Kippt and DuctMail.

 Badaboom, badabing, Kippt’s a beautiful thing!

Computers are great for finding reading-material when you should be working, and Ipads are great for reading material when you are on the train. But with your boss looking over your shoulder, how should you go about quickly saving that article from Slashdot to savor on a mobile during a bathroom break?

With Kippt, you are freed from the shackles of self-e-mailed links. Kippt guillotines the Gmail middle-man, allowing you to instantaneously share text or links between your devices. With the bookmarklet, you can simply highlight text, click the button on your browser, and the current page’s URL and your highlighted text will be saved to your Kippt account! Voila!

But, if you really want Gmail to be involved somehow, you can still use it, (or Facebook or Twitter), to sign into this gem of a webapp.

Kippt also lets you spread the content-love to Twitter, Delicious, and Facebook. Just look to the arrow on the right of a snippet you have Kippt.

Have you ever told your significant other to remind you of something? Then they say sure, as long as you remind me to remind you? Then eventually you mention a recursive loop to your spouse, which they quickly Google, which doesn’t seem to help, and you both end up forgetting what needs reminding?

Yeah, I thought so. Statistics prove that 87% of marriages are based primarily on reminding someone to remind you of something. With the advent of Ductmail, you can now be single, and happily go back to playing WoW and eating Cheez Whiz on crackers.

Just do this: send an e-mail, from any e-mail address, to reminder@ductmail.com with the subject line being some sort of time, like “Today at 6pm” or “Next Saturday at 5am” and what it is that you need to be reminded of in the body. It will fire you off an e-mail at that time. Its that easy. It really is.

- Mike

Forrst App Contest

It’s been a long time getting to this point but the final stage of the Forrst App Contest is ready to begin. For those whom don’t know the Forrst App Contest was an event held at the beginning of the month for Forrst members to team up and create awesome web apps over a weeks time. Out of the contest we ended up with 5 complete apps from four different teams. The theme for our first app contest was “productivity” and these are some seriously cool entries.
 
Voting will work as follows. We have a small write up on each app over on Forrst and members are encouraged to checkout each one and for the app they like the most leave a reply with “forrstcontestvote +1”. At the end of voting we will add them all up and to the victor belong the spoils. Please only vote for one app(one man/lady one vote).
 
We are hard at work to fix the problems of the last contest and plan out the next one. We are very open and eager to hear ideas on themes and rules for the next contest. One thing I can tell you is that the next contest will be announced with a month notice and also with a complete contest site prior to launch.
 
Without further ado here are the final four entries. 

• Kippt http://forr.st/~y39
• eval http://forr.st/~y3D
• Formbakery http://forr.st/~y3Y
• Rekindle http://forr.st/~y3q 
• Ductmail http://forr.st/~y3L  

-Mike

Welcoming Mike.

Forrst has been growing by leaps and bounds since its relaunch at the beginning of May. We recently crossed the 10,000 user mark, more than doubled traffic in July, and the site is bustling with activity — users are more engaged than ever. I’m ecstatic to see developers and designers diving in and helping each other improve their craft. It’s a humbling feeling.

Now that the site is substantially more active than it was a few months ago, it’s getting a bit harder to keep up with support requests, moderation, community questions, and the like; I still try to answer everything, but it’s at the point where I can’t get to things nearly as quickly as I’d like (I’m not ignoring you, I promise!)

To that end, I’m very happy to welcome Mike Evans as the first official Forrst moderator. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes on the site will probably come across Mike. He’s been a big supporter of Forrst since the early days of the site, and I’m excited to be working with him; he’ll be helping me handle moderation of posts and comments, as well as pointing members in the right direction if they’ve got questions about the community.

So, welcome Mike!

Forrst Meetup, tonight 7/9 in NYC

I’ll keep this short: The details:

Pizza at Saluggi’s around 6pm tonight, July 7.

325 Church St. NYC (directions)

After, we’ll probably head to Nancy Whiskey Pub (1 Lispenard St; directions) for some beers.

If you’re in NYC tonight, you should come! Kyle, Adam, and Pasquale will be there in top form.

How we deploy new features on Forrst

A few people have asked recently about how rolling out new features is handled at Forrst. While the answer is nothing spectacular, it is something I think is hugely important to consider implementing when you’ve got a fairly active site. Flickr wrote about a few tricks they use — called feature flags and feature flippers — when building and deploying new features to the site. Flags dictate whether a specific piece of functionality is turned on or off, and flippers dictate for whom the feature is enabled or not. Forrst uses a very similar implementation (we call them buckets; you may hear others calling it that as well).

I’m currently working on a few new user-facing features for the site: being able to mark a post as a favorite to come back to later, and being able to like a comment. Both of these new features are already live on the site, but only enabled for certain users. Since Forrst gets a pretty fair amount of traffic and activity day to day, being able to gradually roll out new features (and to quickly disable them if need be) is of great benefit. Here’s an example of how it works on the site; within the template for a comment, there’s an additional logic branch:

<?php if (in_arrayi($this->current_user->username, Comment_Model::$bucket_like)): ?>
// some fancy magic here
<?php endif; ?>

The associated $bucket_like variable is simply an array of usernames for whom the feature should be enabled. (in_arrayi is a custom PHP function that behaves exactly like in_array except that it is case-insensitive.) There’s also a global config that allows me to quickly disable the comment like feature globally.

That’s basically the gist of feature flags/flippers. There are about five or six features currently enabled for a subset of users. I’m also working on migrating the underlying feature flag code to a more powerful library that supports not only username whitelists, but also stuff like enabling features for all users with an ID < 1000, and so forth.

Hopefully this sheds a little light into how we’re doing things at Forrst. It’s definitely nothing groundbreaking, but rolling out new stuff this way makes a ton of sense for us. It allows product to get to users faster, thereby getting us valuable feedback and bug reports sooner, and ultimately leading to a more solid product.