How do I ... ?

How do I ...accept a request to become a new member of my group which I restricted to Owner Approval?

ah! I think I understand why I'm having trouble: this potential member may have not yet made a demand to join my group, so I do not see any membership request as you stated.

Me too. Mostly it's because they just don't know how to join groups. It's a 2 stage process and many people overlook the second stage I think, clicking the join link, but not seeing the join button or the apply for membership button on the next page. Last.fm FAQ doesn't tell you stuff like that, yet I feel silly starting a topic (how to join this group).

I noticed that, that's rediculous and annoying that sticky threads don't display on the front page. You say it puts the description stuff on a new main page? I've never noticed that, I've never noticed a link for (page 2) on a group's (overview) page. Maybe it's because I see things differently, I'm blind and use a screen reader. Well when I want to join a group I just use a keyboard shortcut like control+f to find a text string, type the word (join) in the box and hit enter and it takes me to the first instance of the word (join) on the page. If I had to do it the hard way I'd have to page down sure. Well should I put something at the top of my description saying (page down to join this group) what do you think? For my group about Mexican music I have a very large description and overview text as well with lots of links to wikipedia articles and tags, and it's in 3 languages to boot.

I just abdicated the group to someone else and had them abdicate it back to me, and now it's working fine.

Weird.

Thanks. I'm thinking about something like
Please page down to join this group.
I also know about
dark read
but if you have the code for a red that would stand out more than those two choices I'd greatly apreciate it. I actually found a hex color chart online, but it does me no good because the hex values are in the color they represent, with no textual color names. I did however find a page with all the color names accepted in BBCode
here.

Your first red text looks great (better than dark red). You could further make it stand out by making it bold. If I remember correctly, the bold tags have to go outside the color tags, or it won't work.

Well, let me try it.

Yeah, that works.

Your flag counter is too wide with the flag labels. You need to set it to labels=0, or go to 1 column. I had the same problem when I tried to use labels here.

That looks great! My only suggestion would be to move the flag counter to the bottom, so that it follows your descriptions. But that's a personal preference; I'm not trying to tell you how to run your group.

Also, the "page down" reference might confuse some, because it makes no reference to paging down after clicking on the "Join this group" link. So they may not know you're talking about the second page. If they page down on the first page, they're going to be lost.

No matter how you do it, it's probably going to be a little confusing for newbies. It's just one of those little Last.fm quirks we have to put up with, because it's all worth it in the end.

The flag counter thing is a personal preference, and I don't want to get too far into that. Just keep in mind that it's also going to be on top of your second page, after they click the Join link.

If you want it at the top, another option would be to put it in the Overview section. You could make it wider, but shorter, using more columns, and even add back the labels. You could also center it, using the align tags. Addicted to Last.fm uses it that way, albeit without the labels.

For this particular group, I not only have the flag counter, but also have an overall number counter underneath it, at the bottom of the sidebar. I also use their pie chart graph as the overview image.

Every one of my groups look a little different, though. I try to strike a balance between what fits the group, what I think looks good, what my visitors would like, and what is user-friendly.

Again, I'm more than happy to help you in any way I can, but I don't want to push my own personal preferences on you. Last.fm would be be boring if everyone's group looked the same anyway.

And no matter what you do, some are going to like it and some won't. For example, the first comment I received on the flag counter overview graph was negative, but others have reacted positively.

Thanks again for the advice. I've centered the flag counter, but I think I'll leave the labels out and the columns at 2 since one of my members doesn't like 3 columns. I also changed the wording of the short tutorial on how to join the group. I hope it makes more sense now. I like TheLight6's idea about Having a javascript drop down. I know why they do it as a 2-stage process, you might click the join link accidentally when you didn't really want to join. Orkut does the same thing with groups and friend requests, but the way they do it is awkward and the uninitiated or the inattentive could easily miss it. Some sites even have dialogue boxes where you have to hit OK or cancel before you complete an action, Yahoo webmail does it if you try to delete all messages in a particular folder in one fell swoop. Oh and about all the extra doodads like the hit counter, I have trouble believing that if you just put a line of BBCode in your group, a remote site can monitor visits to that group. I can't help thinking that it's necessary, for example, for a visitor to my group to actually click my flag counter link itself to be counted. In that case, I can't expect someone to click all of these counter type links, so I just want to have one so I know I'm counting everyone who clicks with that one and not dividing the count between this one and that one. I also choose ones I can read when I go to their pages. The flag counter and my niftymaps visitor map on my profile page are both easily readable by my software, but most hit counters I've visited obscure the number of visits from me. I've also seen some other visitor maps that I would never use because they're inaccessible to me, only showing the graphical map and not giving me a list of locations of visitors like the niftymaps map and flag counter do. Of course when I read a URL for a flag counter in the forum itself, all I can read is (more/fc5Q1) for example, but of course I know what that is now. I'd love to know why that is though, and how. I've read character by character the code and can't figure why that's the only text displayed. It's only the back half of the URL. Some weeks ago I tried to get a URL to display both an image and a text string, but it didn't work that way.

Yeah that's the problem with BBCode, you can have a graphic or you can have alt text, but not both like you can with HTML. Oh yeah, a lightbulb goes on in my head, the graphic gets there from the image URL imbedded in the code, so there's contact with that site from your computer. Now I understand how the counter site gets your IP. Smacks forehead and says duh. I've noticed that with my visitor map it shows my location anew about once every few days, yet sometimes I see some other location repeated 3 times in a row, or there'll be 2 hits from the same country and state/province in a row, but they will have different cities, or one will show as unknown. It happens so often it can't be coincidence. I guess someone visits my page, then a few minutes later they visit again, but their IP has changed and they register as being in a different city. I always register as being in Hayes Kansas though I'm over 100 miles from there, but the FAQ on their website says that's to be expected in some cases.

Or it could be that your IP is being connected faster from a redirected location, hence some people live in America but use the IP from locations such as Nigeria or Taiwan (or such) so they are rare and fast, what are the odds of someone being banned or not allowed to go in a site due to their IP being from there, the FPS is very low as well, making it durable for almost anything.

Point being. About one year ago when they were updating the website they had a minor mistake made from one of the fellas and he accidentally took out the 'join' button on groups (Haha) so people were a bit frantic and paranoid.

The shout box invitations are working splendidly. I'd say I have at least a 50% success rate getting people to join, and probably 75% getting people to at least visit the group. Since I've had some visitors who didn't join, it could just be that they decided not to, but I'm wondering if they might have clicked the join link without confirming. I didn't get a clear picture from this thread about what to do in that case. Would something like this be appropriate and aesthetically pleasing within the group description?

"After you click the join link, remember to confirm it by clicking "Ok" at the bottom of the page."

I certainly don't want to confuse anyone, so
1. Is a message like that necessary? and
2. Does it make sense?