September | Updates, Recurring Events, and Founder Spotlight
Greetings!
In this month’s newsletter, you’ll get a glimpse at the new recurring events feature, which makes it easier and quicker to add your entire calendar of events to the site. We will also be sharing our story with you by sitting down with our founders and contributors to learn about why they joined the Plug family. 
But first, here’s a quick update about what we’ve been doing in our day-to-day to bring this vision to life!
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What’s New
After quite a lull over the summer, things have begun to move at a more desirable pace in terms of development, team building, and marketing. As we all have lives and commitments outside of Plug, our goal has always been to make our work process smooth and manageable for everyone involved, all while simultaneously creating opportunities for new people to meaningfully contribute.
We need to flow, in confluence, and grow as a river heading towards the same sea. This is difficult. Even profitable companies with paid employees hardly achieve this, and dreams alone don’t pay your electricity bills.
Our most important priority right now, and where more people can contribute to the project, is by improving the site’s usability and making it easier to understand. This is especially true on mobile, where most people first find out about us.
For this reason, we have been preparing a comprehensive review of the site, using surveys, establishing focus groups, and conducting analyses of the user experience. Our aim is for more people to learn about the site so that they can give us honest feedback and suggest features we should prioritize. We want more people to feel a sense of ownership over Plug. That it is truly their social network because it was built to serve them and the communities they care about.
We will formally begin this process next month, starting with a review of the search function. If you would like to be involved please reach out on Plug, send us an email, or on Facebook:
Exciting Developments: Recurring Events
Perhaps you have events that you repeat periodically such as a 3-week tango beginner’s course on Saturdays that you run every second month. You could duplicate that event and then adjust the dates, but it’s much easier and more convenient to use the new recurring events feature!
To use this feature when creating an event, select the Course with multiple sessions as the Scheduling Type:
From there, you’ll be able to set the recurring event details such as frequency and when the event ends:
User Support Channel
We have also implemented a user support button for users who are signed in, which you will find in the personal menu in the left column.
Stay tuned for more details to come!
More Recent Updates…
- Showing related orgs/events in conversations. When you receive a message from another user, you’ll be able to see if it’s related to/about a specific event or org.
- Update your email address under My Account. Want our communications to go to a different email address? You can now update your email address when navigating to My Account.
- No more blurry profile photos.
- We have removed the interest-in-common rule when creating events, organisations, or conversations
- Now when creating an event we do not allow ‘as an Org’ if users have not created one
- We have improved the UI copy in a few places, for example when linking events
- We modified the location fields that are visible if an event is online-only
And a few bug fixes
- Interest added to profile doesn’t show immediately – page not refreshed – FIXED
- No more blurry photos!
- Search Suggestions now only display on entering the field
- If users are not confirmed we don’t allow them to hold Roles at organisations or events
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Founder Spotlight
Without Ciarán’s vision, Plug wouldn’t exist today!
Learn more about his background and what inspired his journey to create the platform.
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We have more exciting updates and features in the pipeline. So, be sure to keep an eye out for more news from us here at Plug.Events.
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at hello@about.plug.events.
Cheers,
The Plug.Events Team
