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Social Networking
From KickApps Documentation
KIT Cloud Social Social Networking: Overview
The KIT Cloud Social Social Networking Application is our most popular "app" and is really the core of the platform’s architecture (in fact, most other applications don't work without it!). The main features of the Social Networking Application are login and registration forms, customizable member profiles with activity feeds, private messaging (between members), member update emails, and the ability to “follow” or become friends with other site members. Note that if you do not enable the Social Networking application for your KIT Cloud Social-powered site, you will not be able to accept any user submissions (since users are required to create a valid account on your site before they can make contributions to your site).
Enabling and Disabling the Social Networking Application
The KIT Cloud Social Social Networking application can be enabled or disabled in Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Apps page. (You can get to the Affiliate Center by clicking the “manage your site” link near the top of all your site’s pages.) Once you enable this application, people who visit your site will be able to register an account on your site with a unique email address, username and password.
Note: If you disable this application after members have joined and participated in your site, these members will no longer be able to log into your site and all member profile pages, private messaging pages, etc will become unavailable on your site. People who try to view these pages will see a message that the page has been removed. Re-enabling the Social Networking application will reactivate all of your member accounts and pages associated with them and their contributions.
Configuring the Social Networking Application
Below is an overview of the settings for the Social Networking Application that can be changed on the Configure > Settings > Site Settings page of the Affiliate Center.
- Member Update Emails – Your site’s members can subscribe to receive personalized “Member Update Emails” either daily or weekly. These emails contain a summary of relevant activity that happened in your site since the member received their previous update (either within the past day, or within the past week). The emails contain hyperlinks back to your site, broken down into three sections: reactions to their contributions to the site, their friends’ activities in the site, and a “community highlights” section containing general site activity and statistics for your site. You can disable the update emails altogether, or just disable the last section which contains general “community highlights.”
- Enable Email Notifications for Comments – When your site’s members leave comments on each others’ profile pages, or on each others’ content contributions, our system automatically sends an email to the original contributor containing the name of the member who left the comment, as well as the actual comment that was left. You can disable the email notifications feature if you don’t want your site’s members to receive emails when someone comments on their profile pages or content contributions.
- Private Message Settings – When your site’s members send private messages to each other, they can embed audio and video recordings into their messages. You can disable this feature if you don’t want your site’s members to be able to embed audio or video recordings in their messages.
- Community Privacy – You can make your entire site private, which means that only approved members can access your site’s pages. Anyone else who attempts to access any of your site’s pages will be prompted to either log in or register.
- Media Privacy – When your site’s members add content to your site in the form of photos, videos, audio tracks, blog posts, etc., the upload form allows the contributor to specify that “only their friends” can see the contribution(s). You can disable this feature if you don’t want to allow your site’s members to submit “private media” to your site.
- Profile Privacy – When your site’s members configure their profile pages (more on that later), they can specify that “only their friends” can see their profile page. You can disable this feature if you don’t want to allow your site’s members to create “private profiles.” If you enable this feature, you can further specify that by default, all new member profiles are private.
- Member Ratings – On each member profile page (more on that later) there is a mechanism where members can rate each other with a five-star rating system. The profile page displays the average rating and the total number of times that a member’s profile has been rated. You can disable this feature if you don’t want to allow members ratings.
- Member Security – Depending on which additional applications you have enabled for your site, members can submit blog posts, comments, message board replies and other text-based content that includes hyperlinks to desitnations outside of your control. When other members click on these links, you can display a warning message which explains that the user is about to leave your site and should proceed with caution. You can disable this feature if you don’t want to display a warning message when users click links to external URLs.
When the Social Networking application is enabled, you can specify a default icon to represent members throughout your site (on search results pages, for instance). This icon is used in situations where your site members have not uploaded their own profile photo. You set the default icon for groups in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Default Icons page.
Configuring Member Profile Themes
Your site’s members can customize the look and feel of their profile pages by choosing from a list of themes that you can create and edit in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Pages > Member Profile Theme Editor page. In this section you can enable or modify any of the pre-configured themes that come with your KIT Cloud Social-powered site, or you can create your own profile themes from scratch using the options provided. When your members click to “edit their profile” (more on that, later) they will be able to choose from a list of the profile themes that you enabled in this section of the Affiliate Center.
Configuring the Member Profile Questionnaire
Each member who joins your site can fill out a “profile questionnaire” that is designed to help you and other site members learn more about each other. You can select from a list of available generic questions that each member can answer (occupation, favorite movie, marital status, etc), and you can also create up to ten custom profile questions for your members, which can be specifically tailored to your site (e.g., “What’s your favorite Madonna song of all time?”). You can access these settings on the Configure > Pages > Member Profile Options page in the Affiliate Center. Also, on this page you can determine whether or not you want to allow members to include hyperlinks to external sites on their profile page.
Displaying RSS Feeds on Your Members’ “MyHome Page”
Each member who joins your site gets a personalized “MyHome” Page (more on this, later), which is a essentially a dashboard that features pertinent notifications (new messages, pending friend requests, etc) and a news feed of their friends’ activities on your site. You can include hand-picked RSS feeds on this page as well, which could be used to bring attention to content elsewhere on your site. You can configure these RSS feeds in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Settings > Add RSS Feeds to Members MyHome Page page.
Customizing Your Site’s End User Agreement
Each member who joins your site must accept your site’s End User Agreement during the registration process. They also must acknowledge this agreement by checking a box while adding content to your site (if you have any user-submitted content applications enabled for your site). We provide sample text for this agreement, which you can modify in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Advanced > Customize End User Agreement page. Note: The sample Terms of Use and Privacy Policy are not intended as legal advice. These samples are intended for general guidance only and should not be relied upon without detailed legal advice on your specific circumstances. KIT Cloud Social accepts no liability for losses caused by reliance on these samples.
Editing the Associated Default Labels
The Social Networking application has a few default text strings that you can modify in the Affiliate Center in the Configure > Language section. The “Language Editor” allows you to localize the Social Networking application to another language (Italian, French, Spanish, etc.), or just change a couple of labels to better match your site’s tone.
Managing Members’ Access to Your Site
As a site administrator (Webmaster, Admin or Editor), you can view and manage all of your site’s members in the Affiliate Center on the Manage > Members page. The top section of this page allows you to control how members can log into your site, via the following features:
- Email Verification – When users attempt to join your site, you can require that they verify their email address before their membership is accepted. When this feature is enabled, our system will send an email to the address specified by the user when they filled out your site’s registration form. This email will contain a hyperlink to a page which must be visited by the member in order to activate their account. We strongly recommend that you enable this feature to prevent abuse on your site (like Spam and “ballot stuffing”).
- Member Blacklist – Each time a member logs into your site, our system captures their last known IP address. You can prevent people (and groups of people) from logging into your site by putting their last known IP address on your site’s IP Address Blacklist. Users who try to log into your site from an IP address on your blacklist will receive an error message and will not be allowed to log in from that IP address.
- Disable Members Automatically – Each member profile page on your site has a link that allows other site visitors to “flag” the profile as inappropriate. When that link is clicked, a notification email is sent to the site webmaster with a link to the profile page in question, where you can review the information on the page and decide how to act. You can specify how many times a member profile page can be flagged before it automatically comes down off of your site and goes into your “disabled member queue.” Members whose status in your site is “disabled” do not appear on your site and remain in the “disabled” state until you either re-enable them or block them.
Setting Up Your Site’s Registration Options
(Enabling Janrain’s Engage (formerly known as RPX) App)
Each person who joins your site must complete a registration form that requires them to specify a unique username, unique email address, password and date of birth. By default, people who specify a date of birth which makes them younger than 13 years of age cannot join any site powered by KIT Cloud Social. This is a KIT Cloud Social company policy and can only be overridden under special circumstances.
In addition to the standard registration process described above, you can also allow people to register or log into your site with authentication credentials from third parties like Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, Twitter, etc. You enable this feature be enabling the “Janrain RPX Service” option on the Configure > Settings > Add/Remove Apps page in the Affiliate Center.
Once you enable this option, you can configure your JanRain RPX settings (i.e., determine which third party logins you want to allow) on the Janrain website by clicking the adjacent link on the Add/Remove Apps page.
Finding Your Site’s Members in the Affiliate Center
As a site administrator (Webmaster, Admin or Editor), you can search all of your site’s members in the Affiliate Center on the Manage > Members page. As described above, the top section of this page allows you to control how members can log into your site. The bottom section of this page allows you to search by name for enabled, disabled, pending or blocked members of your site using the simple search form. You can enter a complete or partial username or email address in the search input field to find members that match your string, or you can leave that field blank to return a list of all members according to their current status.
In the Advanced Search form, you can filter your search for members with specific roles (Members, Webmasters, Editors or Admins) by selecting the appropriate checkboxes. You can also filter your query by specifying a date range when members joined your site, a date range when they were last active, and/or you can search for members who have accumulated a certain amount of points by entering minimum and maximum point values in the fields provided.
The first 25 members matching your search criteria will display in a table below the search form, sorted by their join date (most recent at the top). You can re-sort the results by clicking the column headings in the table. You can navigate through the results by clicking the pagination links at the bottom of the page. You can modify the profile information for any of your members, or disable the member by clicking the appropriate links in the “manage” column of the search results table.
Exporting Your Site’s Member Data
You can export the entire set of member search results by clicking the “CSV” link next to the Export Options at the bottom of the page. Clicking this link will prompt you to save a “comma separated value” file to your desktop. This file contains a wealth of information about every member of your site, including all of their answers to your profile questionnaire, their join and last login dates, their last known IP address, “calculated data” like the number of views to their profile page, the number of ratings that have been applied to their profile, their average rating, etc.
Editing Member Data
You can navigate to the “Member Details Page” in the Affiliate Center to view and edit the details on any of your site’s members. This page exposes the member’s answers to your profile questionnaire in editable text fields, allowing you to change any of the values.
You can also change a member’s role on your site. Any member can be an Admin, Editor or Member. Click here for a complete description of the various roles and the permissions associated with them.
If you have enabled the Points & Levels application, you can alter a member’s point total, as well as their level by manually entering values. Click here to learn more about the KIT Cloud Social Points & Levels application, which is often used as a “loyalty program” on the sites that we power.
At the bottom of the left column on the Member Details Page you can view, edit or delete any comments that have been left on the member’s profile page.
At the top right of the Member Details Page are some basic statistics about the member, including the date that they joined your site, the date when they last logged in, the number of times their profile page has been visited, the number of times it has been rated, the average rating, etc. As the site owner, you have the ability to modify the average rating of any site member by repeatedly casting your own vote in this interface. In fact, since you are the site owner, each time you apply a rating it actually counts as ten ratings. And there is no limit to the number of times the site owner can rate a member. So if you really want to increase someone’s status in your site you can use this handy tool.
The next section in the right hand column of the Member Details Page exposes some controls which allow you to disable and block members who cause problems in your site. You can disable a member and simultaneously reject any media contributions that they have made to your site, like photos, blog posts, videos, etc. Or you can disable a member and leave their prior contributions in place. You can also add the member’s last known IP address to your Black List (described above). This will help prevent them from creating a new user account with a different username and email address. When a member is disabled their profile page becomes inaccessible and anyone who visits that page will see an error message. You can re-enable members at any time and all of their profile information will remain intact.
When you modify a member’s profile information or disable their account, you have the option of notifying them with a message to their email inbox.
Reporting on Social Networking Activities
Usage of the Social Networking application is tracked along with the rest of your site’s content in the Reporting section of the Affiliate Center. For instance, you can see how many members joined (broken down by gender and age), how many were disabled, and how many “friendings” occurred, for any date range. Click here for more information on KIT Cloud Social Reporting.
Members and Feeds
The KIT Cloud Social system produces RSS Feeds of your site’s members. Data associated with each member in the feed includes their username, their profile photo, a link to their profile, their response to the “about me” section of the profile questionnaire, the number of friends they have, the number of points they have accumulated (if you have enabled the Points and Levels application), and a wealth of other data. You can grab member feed URLs from the bottom of each Member List page (which is accessed by clicking the “Members” tab in your site’s global navigation strip), or by conducting a search on your site while the “members” checkbox is selected in the advanced search form. Depending on the type of member search that you conduct, you can produce a list of members with the most views of their profile page, the most comments on their profile page, the highest ranking within your site, the most points (if you have enabled the Points & Levels application), etc. You can also manually construct RSS feeds by using the Feed Builder tool in the Affiliate Center, or by passing specific filtering and sorting parameters to an RSS feed URL that we make available to all KIT Cloud Social publishers. Click here for more information about manually creating custom RSS Feeds for your site’s members and content. Click here for more information about our Feed Builder tool.
Each member profile page in your site includes an “activity feed” which itemizes all of the member’s actions on your site and links to the appropriate page on your site where the action occurred. For instance, if a member leaves a comment on a photo in your site, the feed item might read, “msommers commented on Maya at the Beach (a photo) last week.” In this case the title of the photo (“Maya at the Beach”) would be linked to the details page in your site where the photo is displayed.
Finding Members on Your Site
Each member that joins your site is immediately indexed by your site-wide search engine and is made available in your site’s search results within a few minutes after the account is created. When you enable the Social Networking application for your KIT Cloud Social-powered site, a “Members” tab is added to your site’s global navigation strip. Clicking the “Members” tab will display the most recent members that have joined your site, with options to sort the list by most viewed, most comments, highest rated and most points (if you have enabled the Points and Levels application). In addition to the “Members” tab in your site’s global navigation strip, a “member” checkbox is added to the Advanced Search form on your site, so that users can perform keyword searches against only your site’s members. Click here for more information on the KIT Cloud Social Search application.
Member Profile Pages
Each member of your site has a profile page at a dedicated URL that is automatically created by the KIT Cloud Social system, based on the name of your site, and the username that the member chose while registering for your site. Unless you have a unique configuration for your site, each member profile can be found at the following URL: http://yoursite’sdomain/{username}.
Each profile page contains the following information:
- On the “baseball card” personal summary at the left hand side:
- Your username and avatar image
- Your age
- Your custom level (levels and how to achieve them are configured by the webmaster)
- A count of how many views your profile has had
- A count of your current fans
- Your average rating
- A measure showing when you were last logged in
- A measure showing when you joined the site
- A link to your blog
- A link to the RSS feed for your site
- A link for others to send you a site message
- A link to send an email to your current list of friends
- A link to edit your profile
- A link to edit your profile photo
- A link to a summary of all of the media you have contributed
- A link to a list of your friends
- In the main content area:
- An “about me” module in which you can publish any summary describing yourself
- A feed of all your most recent activity
- Several modules showing your most recently-submitted media types (e.g. photos, videos, audio, blogs). If your site does not have an application installed that powers a media type, the respective modules should not show on your site.
- A comment module at the bottom, which allows your profile visitors to post comments to your page.
Editing Member Profiles & Account Information
Members can edit their profile by clicking the “Edit Profile” link that appears on their profile page. The “Edit Profile” page provides access to control:
- Apply a custom category to your profile
- Provide a custom “About Me” description
- Set Tags that describe you
- Set a custom theme for your profile
- Set RSS feeds that show on your profile
- Include links to sites that are relevant to your profile
- Check out “Getting Started” tips
- Edit your Account, including:
- Set your email address on record (this is where system-generated emails will be sent)
- Set your email options
- Update your avatar image
- Set your first name and last name
- Set your gender
- Set your date of birth
- Set your address
- Configure email for mobile uploading
The MyHome Page
Each member of your site has a MyHome page at a dedicated URL that is automatically created by the KIT Cloud Social system. The MyHome page can be thought of as each member’s “daily dashboard,” and its main features are the “Since you were here last” section for notifications like friend requests, new messages, profile comments, etc. and the “My Friends & My News” section, which contains a news feed of your friends activities on the site. Logged in members can navigate to their “MyHome” page by clicking the “myhome” link next to their username after logging in. Features of the MyHome page include:
- A “Get Active” Module that provides quick-links to the most frequent activities associated with engaging with your site and membership
- A “Since You Last Logged In” dashboard that quickly gets you up to speed on recent developments in your site and membership
- A “My Friends & My News” module that features the most recent events in your site and friends
- An “RSS Feeds” module which will show summaries from any RSS feeds available on the Internet
- A “Most Recent Videos” featuring the most recent videos posted
- A “Most Recent Discussions module that features your most recent message board conversations
- A “Most Recent Blog Posts” module that features your most recent blog posts
- A “Most Recent Photos” module that features your most recent photo uploads
- A “Most Recent Audio Tracks” module that features your most recent audio uploads
If you disable an application associated with any media type, its respective module will automatically collapse and not show on MyHome pages.
Members on Your Site’s Homepage
You can configure your site to include a pre-configured “community home page” which contains a bunch of modules that primarily feature the most recent content that members have contributed to your site. There is also a section that displays the “most recent members,” which automatically gets updated as members join your site.. (Click here to learn more about configuring your site to include a pre-configured “community home page.”)
Members and Points
The KIT Cloud Social Points & Levels application allows you to automatically award points to your site’s members when they perform certain activities on your site. If you have enabled the Points & Levels application for your site, you can configure the application to award points when your members join a group, for example You can also devise creative names for your levels to motivate specific types of people and reward certain types of behavior. Click here to learn more about the Points & Levels application.
Members and Other Media-Sharing Apps
In multiple places around the site, a member’s username will show up adjacent to the media they contributed. In general, this username will link to their profile, and there will be some mention made of how long ago the user contributed this media.
Advertising on Social Networking Pages
There are two different types of pages on your site associated with the KIT Cloud Social Social Networking application. If you navigate in the Affiliate Center / Control Panel to: Configure > Advertising, you will see options for “Profile Page Advertising” and “Profile Management Advertising.” “Groups” and “Message Board” advertising templates are also dependent on Social Networking, so they are also related.
Each of these types of pages mentioned above have “ad slots” in them that you can populate with whichever content you want. You can configure these ad slots in the Affiliate Center on the Configure > Advertising page.
System-Generated Emails
The Social Networking application sends email notifications to site administrators and members when certain events occur. The contents of these notifications can be modified by editing your site’s Language settings, as described above (see, “Configuring the Social Networking Application”).
To view a full reckoning of what email notifications get sent from the Social Networking application, including the “trigger events” which cause the notifications, visit this resource.
API Support for the Social Networking Application (For Developers)
This document is intended to provide an in-depth look at the Social Networking application on the KIT Cloud Social hosted platform, to help you understand how the application can be enabled, configured and managed on a day-to-day basis.
If you prefer to host all the Social Networking front-end pages on your own web servers, or if you’d just like to use bits and pieces of the Social Networking application, KIT Cloud Social offers a complete set of REST API calls which allow you to construct whatever kind of user interface you can dream up.
Regardless of which front-end deployment option you choose, the functionality of the Social Networking application (and the content created by it) is managed in the Affiliate Center as described above. Learn more about configuring KIT Cloud Social REST API.
- This page was last modified on 22 June 2012, at 20:03.
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