[Tim Wilson]

Testing imgur video embed

https://imgur.com/gallery/JDvPSFl

Street sweeper

[Tim Wilson]

Hey Blaise,

Turns out that this feature was easier to implement than I thought. One click, done. Settings, man, what a concept!

Right there on the toolbar at the bottom of the reply window, you’ll see the little “attachment” icon.

I’ll add proper documentation for this at some point, but the short version is that a whole lot of stuff is there out of the box, dozens of formats including previews for things like PDF, doc, and PPT. `

Anything that’s not covered at this very second can be worked around by uploading it as a zip for sure, but if there’s anything else you’re looking for, just let me know! It’s super easy to add file types, even if previews aren’t necessarily supported by the server.

For example, I note that you mentioned AE project files. Can you help me build this out? For example, I remember .AEP file types from back in the day, but I haven’t actually used After Effects to build a project myself, uhm, in this century? Maybe? Been a while for sure. Is that still the thing? What about .AEPX?

And can you do a quick glance at the mime type and let me know? I need to enter that in my backend settings.

As I was looking at all the other possibilities, templates and such, I was also starting to think, hey, some of y’all can just use zips to upload this stuff, but basic project files, why not? Let’s try it, see if works!

Thanks again,

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Blaise,

Always happy to hear from you!

And happy to confirm that this is indeed on our road map. We agree, it’s a great feature to have, especially for project files in forums like After Effects, Cinema 4D, etc, where problems can also often not be detected without looking at specific settings. It even came up with a piece of footage in the Final Cut Pro forum just the other day, something about 24 versus 23.97 and pulldown where I answered this question in the forum there.

(No dope slap implied! I don’t expect people to read everything I write in every forum. LOL)

The reason for not having it at this very moment is the same thing that developers of everything have had to face now and again, where, to launch the new thing, you have to temporarily set a few old things aside to take care of the big stuff.

So we’re always happy to answer any question about stuff like this, as well as to take feature request for things not currently on the road map. We don’t even consider what you’re looking at to be a full version 1.0. This is more like a .9, very close to what we want the first launch to be, but we really needed to get a lot of new features working under full load before we really knew what we had.

That is, it all looked good in testing, but there’s a difference between testing and operating under full load. We’ve learned a lot in the past month, a month as of today to be exact, and while we are generally happy with what we see, and thrilled that we’ve had virtually only positive reaction, we really do have an enormously ambitious development path in front of us.

After we get some sleep.

Thanks again! Drop a line anytime!

Best,

Tim

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Kalleheikki,

In the old COW, the “Notify me of replies” checkbox remembered your last setting, so if you ever clicked it once, EVERY subsequent thread would send you notifications, until you unchecked it again.

If you think about it, this is what most people want most of the time, right? Let me know when somebody interacts with a post of mine. Or, if you decide not to, it stays unselected.

But you’re right, having checked that “yes, notify me” box can indeed create conditions where thousands of threads could be triggering notifications. In practice, it doesn’t often happen that people get overwhelmed with replies. We have people with tens of thousands of subscribed threads, and it’s working fine for them.

But you asked about unsubscribing in bulk, which is also something that many people will want to do….especially now that they can actually SEE that they are subscribed! Our old forums did not do such a great job of exposing subscriptions.

The general answer is “Coming Soon!” We have our team working on it right now.

To be more precise, there is a known WordPress-level bug that makes global unsubscribe requests not work. This is insane! They have it as a medium-priority task, but we think it needs to happen NOW.

We don’t want to wait for WordPress to fix it for everyone whenever they get to it, so we’ve already funded the task for our own team to deal with this for our site, as quickly as possible. I don’t have a specific date to tell you, but no kidding, we are working on this right now.

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

@marksuszko wrote:

The project files are proprietary secret sauce – you NEVER just give them away. Either that is negotiated up front and you bill accordingly, or it is left out specifically in the original deal, always spell that out up front.

This, this, this!

I’m glad to hear that your situation has come to a happy resolution so far, Alan, but Mark’s advice is critical for creative freelancers. Yes, the work itself is a work for hire, and clients can in fact make a decent case that the project files belong to them as a result. The project file wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t paid for the project, right? This is why you have to specify from the outset that they’re paying for the finished output, and NOT the project files.

(It also doesn’t hurt to spell out re-editing terms, along the lines that Mark suggested.)

I’ve also gotten into situations where clients have wanted to use licensed media that I used in their projects — sometimes imagery, but in practice, more often music — for later projects of their own. I have to tell them, “No, that license applied to that project. I can’t reuse it later either!”

It’s the same principle in a way. If you want to pay me to never be able to make money from selling this again, there may well be an amount you can pay me for that — but it’s a lot more than what we’re talking about for this project.

[Tim Wilson]

https://player.vimeo.com/video/423361451

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[Tim Wilson]

Haha! Thanks Steve! I know that a lot of people find my complete answers to be frustrating. “But I only asked a simple question!” Ah, but there is no such thing a simple question, my son. LOL

And yeah, it’s coming. LOL

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Steve! Great to see you!

In the COW forums .9 release that you see here (not quite 1.0!), we’re all on UTC. We had to pick one timezone to get out the door, and we landed on UTC because a) London is our biggest single source of traffic, and as the former Greenwich Mean Time, Coordinated Universal Time is immediately obvious, and b) even though Bessie herself lives in Arizona, over two-thirds of her visitors come from outside the US! Most of the rest of the world understands their own time zones in reference to UTC, ie UTC + 5, UTC – 10 etc. For them too, the timezone displayed will be obvious.

That said, local time zones are definitely coming in our next revisions to the member profiles! One of many features that we have planned for what we hope to have as one of the cows primary centers of gravity as we build it out!

I will admit that I am not fond of the way in which WordPress forces single time zones on sites, requiring clumsy third-party or custom development to support local time zones. I am even less fond of the way that there is no built-in way to display which time zone you are using!

So it is certainly easy for me to understand that most Americans who do not do business internationally, and therefore do not typically think in terms of UTC, will simply see the time zone as wrong and frustrating. We understand, and are frustrated too, with this among many other limitations.

Mostly, though, the limitation of time. LOL We have so much we want to do, and such limited time. We can’t wait to show you everything we’ve got in store, and appreciate your patience while we work with Bessie to bring it all to life.

Best,

Tim Wilson

Editor-in-Chief

Creative COW

PS. Also wanting to bring back sigs!

[Tim Wilson]

Can you shoot me an email with the person’s profile? I’ll be honest, my inclination is to suspend first, ask questions later. LOL Somebody who’s legit will always say, “Hey wait a minute, I’m not spam”, but you know how often that happens? Maybe one time out of 50. Maybe less than that. Most of the time, our instincts are correct.

re: leadership, a longer story, but one that I need to start telling, because we need to fix this.

So, once upon a time, we worked hard to recruit leaders, and train them in what we needed them to do. I say “we”, but there was a time when I was just another member who was being recruited. The idea was to teach these leaders the ins-and-outs of the mechanics of the site so that they could answer questions about that, but more important, to help them identify the good things and bad things happening in the site, and help us do something about it.

Exactly as you’ve done here. But also things like, helping turn down the heat when conversations get too intense, so on. Making a point to respond not like a dick, and calling out other members who are being dicks.

Life goes on, things happen, and as the site got so big that we couldn’t manage it with our small team, we introduced a bit of auto-piloting, to elevate people who posted a lot. Well, that’s not necessarily the same as being an actual helper…but that’s fine. If all somebody wants out of their experience in the COW is to answer a lot of questions, blessings on their house! We love it!

(Although, as it happened, a large-ish number of folks who answered a lot of questions could often be dicks about it. We’ve sent a number of those folks away, and have put a couple more on probation. We are actively working on reorienting the COW around niceness, which used to be its hallmark.)

But we’re also looking for people who are willing to step up and do more than just answer questions. There are whole branches of the site that we’ve yet to launch where we’re going to need that kind of help.

For example, we want to launch social groups for COW members to share things that interest them beyond work, but without the invasiveness of something like Facebook or other platforms that track and share your data. (All of our tracking is anonymous, and we NEVER share it with ANYONE.) Stuff like photography, travel, TV and movie watching, musical instruments we play. Anything really.

We’d like to give people the power to start their own groups, which they would manage themselves, without our intervention, as long as those groups follow the same general rules as the rest of the COW (things like no politics, no religion, family-friendly language, etc.). So for those, we’d need people willing to take some sense of ownership for these groups.

You also mentioned badges. Those are definitely coming too. We want a bunch of ’em. Things like posting milestones (5000 posts), time milestones (member for 10 years), this person is an author in our library, and yes, this person is a leader, someone with a combination of experience, authority, and helpfulness.

I really can’t overstate how close to the beginning of things we are here at the COW right now. Six months into the development of what you see before you today, I think we’re going to build more in the next year than we built in our first 20 years.

Anyway, send me an email with more details about this account that you’re watching, and I’ll look into it too.

Thanks again!

[Tim Wilson]

Hi Tim,

Limiting search to a single forum is definitely among the features that we will be rolling out in the next edition of search.

In the meantime, have you tried your search by putting the name of the forum as the first term in your search? If you haven’t tried that, please do, and let us know how it goes.

If you HAVE tried it and you got unexpected results, please let us know that too, including what specifically the search was for. In this time when we’re working on the next rev of search, there’s still a lot we can do to refine the tools we have, so please do get specific with us so that we can zero in on the target.

Thanks,

Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW