Release 21 — Contacts

Release 21

Release 21 has a new feature: Contacts!

As you are "Looking For Group" and engage with other users on the platform you may share contact information with them and they may share it with you. This feature allows you to locate everyone that you've exchanged information with and vice-versa.

What was the problem?

Initially, there was the concept of 'introductions' where there was a requirement that you share contact information with someone if you wanted to introduce yourself (this was to prevent system abuse from bots and the like). Unfortunately, this made tracking down who you shared information with (or who shared information with you) challenging. The new Contacts page solves this problem and adds the ability to toggle sharing of each contact method on a per-user basis.

However, these new features allowed for a transition back to requiring you to introduce yourself again if you disabled all the toggles and that wasn't right. The 'introductions' concept was abandoned and now you can 'Send Message' to a user. The requirement was dropped that you needed to share a contact method to send a message to another user. To protect against messaging abuse, rate limiting for a user to contact anyone is limited to three times a day and ten messages total.

lookingforgroup.social is not a messaging site, but this basic messaging capability is supposed to help get people organized on platforms that are purpose built for online collaboration.

What next?

The site has really matured and it is in need of people willing to let others know that they are ready to be social. Do that by completing your profile and enabling the 'Searchable' property to allow verified users to find you on the map. Another awesome thing would be to join a club or create your own club and then share it with your friends and see if you can add a few more people to your social circle.

lookingforgroup.social was created to get people connected in the real world. We need community leaders (a.k.a. club managers) to form clubs and we need users to enable that 'Searchable' toggle. Let everyone know you're ready to be social!

Head over to lookingforgroup.social and check it out.