We have just pushed a major change to the site. The Community tab has replaced the Forum tab. Here you will find your own profile image, info and bio. You will be able to find, view and add friends on LingQ. You will see your own Progress Snapshot as well as that of other members. On the right side you will see the Activity Score rankings which can be filtered by target language and country and you can see the most recent 10 comments from the Forum. There is also a link to the Forum home page.
We will be gradually adding more functionality to the Community section but we think this is a good start. As always we are looking forward to your feedback.
I have experienced the same problem right now. This appears to be a bug. I am sure Mark and Henry will get on it right away. Meanwhile we just have to use the Back function on the browser.
Under the picture of the person you want to add as a friend you will see an “Add to Friends” button.
To find friends, you can either click on anyone’s username on the forum or on the site or you can use the “Find friends” link to search for friends by target language and/or native language.
Gracias Mark, tratare de agregar unos cuantos amigos justo ahora, realmente creo que esta nueva seccion tendra un gran exito, les agradezco su entusiasmo y dedicacion, gracias.
You’re welcome, Alex. We’re excited about it as well. Here is what Alex said after being run through the Google translator. My Spanish is not very strong!
Thanks Mark, I’m trying to add a few friends right now, I really think that this new section will be a great success, I thank you for your enthusiasm and dedication, thanks.
The new Community section looks good. I see since joining LingQ over a week ago, I have read around 4000 words in Spanish and managed to learn, um, -5 words! Or should that be I’ve forgotten 5 more than I started with? At this rate I’ll be getting worse at the rate of 250 words a year! Oh well!
When you see negative numbers in your Known Words total, this is because you have either changed the status of status 4 words to 1, 2, or 3 thus removing them from the Known Words total or you have saved words from a text after having previously indicated that these words were Known by pressing the Update button.
If you change the period for your statistics to the last 2 weeks, you can see that your actual Known Words total since you started is 264. If you choose a new item, LingQ the unknown words from it and then update it, you will of course, see an increase in this weeks Known words.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but…
I can’t see the point of seeing my own information every time I enter the community section. If I’m thinking in “socializing” I’m more interested in my friends activities.
From a programming point of view I understood that you pointed the profile and community pages to the same code. But from the users point of view, this doesn’t make much sense…
When I go to someone’s profile I’m indeed interested in his/her data, but when I go to my community page, I want to see my friends data, not mine…
Now, an idea.
I guess the key for the success of the community idea behind social software is their dynamic nature.
So, I guess that I VERY SIMPLE twitter-like micro-blogging box (in place of the quite static “bio” one) would improve tremendously the sense of community and help people to keep studying and documenting their progress.
This could be simply a list of small (limited in size) scraps telling people the last news from that person. People would be encouraged to frequently write things like: “today I’ve studied this and that” “I’m feeling a little tired of studying English…” .No comments, no replies. It’s more like a personal public diary of language learning.
Then, when I opened my community window, I would see at first a list of the last movements of my friends. I guess this can be powerful to keep people tuned.
Don’t blame me guys, I’m just trying to contribute…
Ana, you make some good points and we will be implementing changes in the future. Keep in mind that this is just a starting point for the community. Your idea of a Twitter like feed from your friends is a good one and we’re already thinking about how it might work!
Irene, we thought of giving people the option to hide their statistics but in the end we decided that there wasn’t any real good reason to hide them and that seeing the statistics of a strong learner is motivating to others just as having your stats visible is self-motivating.
I think the community is a work in progress, thanks for all ideas.
Irene, at first I also felt the way you do, that this is private information. However, we are already publicizing our most active learners when we select our learner of the month. For the vast majority of our members, especially the less active members, we think this will stimulate more activity, which is good for everyone. Not everyone learns the same way. But only active people will learn. Seeing how others are doing definitely stimulates our own learning. This is part of the appeal of a classroom. Learners are together. It is one of the weaknesses of an e-learning situation, where learners are on their own.
We are a community. The closer and the more open we are, the better we will all do. I hope you will get used to the community. Please keep telling us how to make it better.
Wow great work on the new changes! It looks great!
Ana: I’ve seen this on a lot of fitness forums. They call it a “progress journal” and it is done very easily. A sub-forum is created and a user simply starts their message entitled “So and so’s progress journal” and makes entries. Other users can then chime in. I’ve seen progress journals run in to the hundreds of pages and it can be quite motivating to see others progress and handing out / receiving tips and advice. I totally agree!
However, I think the option for hiding your stats as Irene777 mentioned is something worth doing. It can really drive people who are competitive to great heights, but it can also drive people who are not competitive / timid away.
A good example of how a tempered / slightly restrictive system fares better: Facebook vs MySpace. The very fact that you can guard yourself in so many ways and prevent people from knowing certain things about you is what tipped Facebook over the dominance of MySpace. If someone tags me in a photo that I don’t like, I delete the tag. Simple! If I don’t want people knowing my email, my age, etc, it’s gone. So too we’ve just seen - almost immediately - one user at least which doesn’t like having their stats shown. I have a feeling she’s not alone. I guess from what we’ve seen, stats may be considered something “personal” by many people and may be a bit more sensitive than initially perceived.
Also, at the end of the day, I’m sure this site’s goal hasn’t changed: helping people learn languages. It is, as Steve puts it… an intensely personal activity. It’s you the learner versus the language. The tutors are there as a resource. The site is there as a resource. The community is there as perhaps more motivation - but when I log on to lingq.com even if it had a myspace or facebook like community, I’d still go straight to my workdesk and pull up my latest assignments and there may be some days or even some weeks where I won’t even click on community. I’m here to learn languages first and foremost. I like the icing on the cake, but it will always be just that to me - “icing”. What I really want is more cake (read: “content”, “transcripts”, interesting dialogue, audio books, movie transcripts). If you can get the entire series of LOST or Battlestar Galactica or Grey’s Anatomy on here with transcripts, I will be on lingq.com like you wouldn’t believe.
That being said the community looks fantastic and I hope it forges an even stronger community!
I’m sure there is a happy medium somewhere and I hope you guys find it and are always sensitive to users concerns.
At first, I also think that the forum is more important and should come first.
Secondly, regarding our statistics Roy pointed out the good and bad thing of showing people statistics. So to motivate people, it can be a good point to show each other activities (As Steve wrote, it is already publicized for selecting the learner of the month). Nevertheless, the fact to show the progress snapshot should be a choice made by each learner or it could be automatically seen by the people who agree to be friend in this community.
I think that making this as a choice could be good; we can already choose to show our skype name, email address…
