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  • kiwikiwi
    17th September 2017 at 11:54 am #8979

    Ron

    I number of distinct issues there.

    1. A user can now contact me by clicking on the Contact icon in the top menu bar – but when I try to use I get a 500 error

    I logged into your site and confirmed your error 500. Took a bit of digging, but then I checked your kiwitrees email configuration. You had nothing in the “Send email from” field. Mail server requirements vary. Some will accept the default “no-reply@localhost” but these days most will not. I added your email address there and now it works.

    Screenshot-2017-09-17-11.22.50

    2. If I want to contact a user I tried by identifying him in Administration – Users – Manage users and clicking on his Email address. I have a problem here – a new page appears with my site header and top menu icons, and a tab with the title ‘Contact us’ – but nothing else.

    Yes. As noted by Wim, that is definitely a bug. I will fix that asap. I will also transfer this part of your post to the bug list. You will find the solution there in due course 🙂

    3. Registered users of the site used to contact each other by using the Widgets-Message route which of course no longer exists. How can they do it now? I’m guessing that they should do it via the Contact icon, but no drop-down list of potential addressees appears – only my name.

    That’s a hard one. As mentioned before, in my research across as many kiwitrees users as possible I concluded that 99% + never had any requirement for the old messaging system. That was generally discussed as “the storage of messages internally”. But another part of that was the ability/need for users to contact each other via kiwitrees. I believe very few (possibly only you?) used that, instead of seeing all communication as being from a single user to admin and vice versa. Hence both the storage and the drop-down list of user ids were removed.

    There is no possibility of putting back the storage feature, but the drop down user-to-user option may be possible. If you feel it is important I will look into it. There are a couple of ways it might be done.

    However, I feel it important to mention one issue with it. As implemented there was an assumption (never explained to users) that by registering on a site a user would automatically be making their contact details available to all other members. There is a user option “Visible to other members” to set “Preferred contact method” to “No contact”, but this would normally only be set or unset by admin and it defaulted to “yes” “Kiwitrees sends emails”. Users could change it, but only if they bothered to review their account settings AFTER registration. Normal privacy rules would suggest that such a setting be either disabled by default, or if enabled it should be explained in writing during registration that this would be the case. Do you or anyone else regard this as an issue? Does anyone have a detailed privacy policy for their site (perhaps in FAQs?) that explains this?

    Finally (for now) going back to your opening sentence:

    I’m, having difficulty understanding how the new contact system is supposed to work, and what I have failed to set up in order for it to work correctly.

    The “Contact” menu item at the top is an option only. If you disable it (Administration > Modules > Contact: Disable) then the display defaults back to the older contact link in the footer. Which you want to use is up to you.The result of clicking on either is the same.
    Also, as currently configured your site has no contact link for non-members. You have set the menu item “Contact” to “Visible to members only”. That’s fine if it is your intention, but unusual. Even if the drop-down of member ids is added back to the system, that would still never be shown to non-members under any circumstances. Visitors can only ever contact admin (either or both of the Technical or Genealogical contacts set in the Family tree configuration.

    ADDENDUM:
    Another thought has occurred to me. In the old code where we list the user for messaging purposes, they all display real name and user id. Is this the right way to do this? Wouldn’t users expect their real names to be protected? Or do we accept that as they are all registered members it shouldn’t matter?

    Nigel
    My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info