Regular listeners will know that our relationship with Faceache has for many years now been a fractious one. There is a separate post that explains why this week Facebook have made it impossible for RRO (and all independents- musicians, labels, self-employed etc) to work with them, but here I want to concentrate on our solution and why it is far, far better than Facebook in showtime, and how you can make the most of it.
It's actually very simple.
ONE.
You have to realise it's NOT facebook. We don't want another "crap, badly coded, designed to only capture what you do and who you do it with so we can sell the data to cold calling bandits" platform! The Forum is designed along the old Chat Room idea and has 3 levels.
The Forum itself. Think of the Forum as a filing cabinet, in which you organise your thoughts. You need a key- which is a free membership sign up- to open up the filing cabinet.
The Chatrooms. Inside the Forum are chat rooms, or the drawers in the filing cabinet to keep the metaphor going. Each show has its own chatroom, and there are rooms for Playbacks, News, Dee, Events, and Showcases & Specials. Unlike FB, you don't have to apply to join each one. Your one key- the initial sign up- grants you access to all the drawers.
Posts & Comments. Inside each chatroom, there are Posts- or the files if you will. For example, let's say you want to listen to The Baron's Rock Show and see what's happening. There is usually a pinned post promoting the next or current show. Click on that, get the skinny, and then see the awesome comments going on- which you can reply to, or add your own awesome comments as well.
TWO
You have to realise it's not Facebook (Part 2). The key thing here is that the Comments are linear. That is, they start with the first one and end with the last one. Some people find this confusing, but when Facebook works (and doesn't put comments anywhere on a post so you don't know where they are!), your comments usually go top down too (i.e. latest comment last).
Unlike FB however, let's say you join a show late (tsk tsk) and there are already 4 pages of comments, and you really wanna post and say what a great job that Baron chap is doing tonight, all you need to do is hit the always on right top "Comment" button. That will instantly take you to the next available comment slot.
Replies of course can be made to each individual comment and they stay with that comment- and there can be replies to replies and so on.
THREE
WE'RE BETTER THAN FACEBOOK. Unlike FB, all your comments and replies can mix words, pics, gifs, videos and so on, in the same comment or reply. You'll see this box below each comment or reply:
From it, you can add a picture by pressing the Camera icon - you can select more than one at a time by the way. Ready made GIFs can be searched for and added by clicking the word GIF - although if you have your own gifs, these can be added via the Camera icon as well. What's super cool is that you can mix and match! The Video Camera icon allows you to link in Youtube vids, the EMOJI button for emojis, and so on.
(and you can use different styles of galllery!)
And you can format your text! Highlight you text and a little submenu comes up with formatting options like:
THIS
THIS
OR THIS
ETC
OR THIS
ETC
and so on.
ALL options are available in both reply and comment mode.
Picture formatting is also provided for by clicking on the image and a submenu appears for resizing, positioning and so on.
All in all we think we got everything covered. You can do a lot more as well but I am aware we don't want to overload you. But seriously, there's never been a better time to join up.
