In our Plans for 2007 we talked about the new Community Website that we were planning to launch this year. At our Customer Open Day we showcased the site and those that attended seemed to really like the style. The PlusNet Usergroup and our forum moderators have been helping us out for a couple of weeks, but we’re pleased to announce that it’s now opened up as a “Public Beta” for customers to signup to right now!
http://community.plus.netThe site is entering the final stages of Development, but we would like your help finishing it off. We want to know what you like and don't like about the site and how we can improve the experience for you all. We also know that you guys are great at spotting and reporting bugs - so we'd like to enlist your help seeking them out!
Why are we launching a Community site?There are numerous reasons why we are introducing the community site now, two of the biggest ones are :
* Our comms team, and customers, currently duplicate a lot of their efforts between the portal forums. People often ask the same question on different forums, meaning the knowledge from contributors is diluted and not shared. We hope bringing the forums together will enable us to better interact with everyone in our customer base.
* The Community made up of our customers is very important to us, and we want to provide a good environment for everyone to interact. This is not just about forums; we have plans to expand the site to enable customers to create their own blogs and develop their own tools for use by other customers.
What are the future plans for the community site?We have plans to expand the site over the coming months to introduce a host of new features. We have lots of ideas, but would also welcome customer contributions and suggestions. The community site, after all, should not just be about what we think!
* Staff and Customer Blogs
* OpenID authentication
* A community news service, with RSS, on the homepage.
* Chat System for PlusNet customers
* Support groups UseNet Reader
* More PlusNet Webcams
* Public knowledgebase tool (For later development by the community).
* Public URL Book marking / rating tool
* Customer survey tool
* Simple front page vote/poll
* More interactive features
* Anything else anybody thinks of ?
The community site is available to all customers of PlusNet, Force9, Free-Online and Metronet. So - get signed up now!
A note about support!As the Community site is in Beta it will not be supported by our networks and development teams out of hours. If it dies, it will wait until the next business day to be looked at. Our Support Centre also will not be able to handle queries on the Community Site, so if you have any questions - raise them to us in the forums!
