Curated Social Stream

Too many campaigns I've worked with insist that the social stream be turned off about 2 days after it gets turned on.  While they may realize *some* of the value of publishing a social stream, they especially find the spam-like properties ('content') of a new follower, especially a 'commercial' follower offensive, spam-like, and 'out of control'.

It would help a lot of campaigns (and others) happily take advantage of NB's social stream features if we could curate the social stream entries that we publish.  Although I realize the programming would be a bit extensive, this could be offered in control panels with 2 simple controls:

1.  In site settings, a checkbox under 'Show Stream' that allows the site managers to 'Curate Stream' - if that is set, then the following appears:

2.  A checkbox next to each social stream entry in the Dashboard that, if checked, makes that entry appear in the public social stream.

This would deliver the added benefit of actually getting the campaign staff to pay close attention to their social stream in the private Dashboard, looking for positive social stream candidates (nuggets)  to publish.  Now, many simply turn off the social stream and regard the social stream in the Dashboard as a nuisance they have to get past to go do something else productive (I know, I know...).

FYI, here is some code that will make the 'content' of social stream entries disappear (as long as you set the 'activity_no_content' class to something like .activity_no_content [ display:none; visibility:hidden; ]  

This allows one to publish the fact of a follow, tweet, retweet, etc. but not the content, so thus removes campaign staff objections that we are publishing someone's 'commercial message' (twitter profile) when they follow the campaign twitter feed.  

[% for activity in site.activities limit: 13 %]
<div class="activity">
[[ activity.show | replace: 'activity_content','activity_no_content' ]]
</div>
[% endfor %]

 

Path to uploaded .css and .js files?

Once we upload a file in Themes | Files, how do we learn the path to reference these files in the actual template html code such as a script tag or a link rel tag?

 

Official response from Lilia Villa completed

Ron, good question. CSS and JS files should be referenced in the template the same way as image files; you only need to provide the file name.

For example:

<link href="filename.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Another method is using the liquid output tag filename.css

It would look something like this:

<link href="filename.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

 

RSS Feeds, please?

Could an RSS page type be developed with teh capability of following multiple RSS feeds - then perhaps with the option of making it appear in a column to the right ot the supporter column acress all pages?

I joined on Sat and requested voter data for my assembly district - the data was mounted Sunday night.   You guys are awesome!

'Foreign' submits to NB form handlers

Webhooks are great - with those I can notify offsite servers about changes to people's NB records, etc.  I'd like to see a resource that goes the other way - in other words, if my offsite server has a new person we'd like to inform our NB site about, we simply program the non-nb server to do a form POST to the forms handlers on NB that handle for, say, a new Join, accepting the lname, fname, email and phone to become a new NB record in the 'People' database.  

This would obviate regular .csv file transfers to the NB server (lord, I get weary of those!)

Validation becomes a concern in a use case like this, so I'd suggest the following 2-step validation:

1.  When setting up an incoming webhook, the customer gives NB the domain name of the submitting server.  The NB server reads the http headers for the web address of the submitting server.  No match, no post.

2.  Most servers keep a pretty good track of the correct time, so have the sumitting server calc an MD5 hash on the current time (GMT) along with the hash of each of the 2 minutes before and 2 minutes after that time.  Cat this all into one big string and make it a part of the incoming payload.  After checking #1 above, the NB server calcs the MD5 hash for it's current GMT  time.  If it finds the calcualted hash somehwere in the 5 hashes submitted as a single string, then the POST is allowed. This makes allowances for up to 2 minutes differrences in time either way (as long as the time calc'd is granular only to the minute).

 

'Householding' List Data

I want to do the opposite of what your current householding function does on a list.

Instead af adding in to a list all the other folks in the same household, I want to unique the list we will export and send to a direct mail vendor and send only one direct mail peice to each household.

We are tantalizingly close, because when I click 'Households' on my list of 29,047 I see the number that there are 21,627 households in the list.

Alas, that displayed info does not contain a link that would give me the unique, 'householded' data for that list. Could we have a way to 'household' a list so we only send one mail to each household?

Import full, redistricted voter database

Just got the full redistricted voter file from the LA county clerk.  I've imported many voter files for other customers with very good results, but this is the first time the I am importing the LA County Clerk file over the existing Political Force data we started with 2 years ago.  

Any suggestions as to how I should map the data to ensure that I get the max number of record updates as opposed to inserts?  I intend to map the LA county id to the 'county_id' on NB.  

Any other hints or prectices that wil serve me well in importing these records?

 

 

 

Geo-Coding a County Tag and/or multiple city selects in Advanced Search

State volunterr coordinators usually want to break out their vounteers by county, but since most volunteers join online - the county isn't automatically assigned unless you think to put a list of counties in the volunteer page (and sometimes that's a long list of counties to enter!).

Could NB provide a settings option to add a county tag at geo-code time only for folks who join online (not voters)?   Adding tags like County.Coos or County.Tulsa would allow all county tags to be grouped together on a drop-down and leave no doubt that it's a county tag select if chosen.  

Alternatively, especially if the lead admin is tardy in planning for this, one must get a list of cities in each county, do an advanced search, make a list, do a batch update to add a county tag to everyone on the list, then create a filter for the county tag.  This would be seriously expedited if we could do a search for multiple cities separated by commas just like we already can on the state blank next to the city blank in advanced search.

Using county tags on online supporters instead of the address_county field for voters would sharpen the distinction between activist supporters/volunteers and voters and avoid temptations to 'pollute' the 'authority' of the voter database.