New forum and community features

Hi Guys,

We've been working hard on updates based on your great feedback and released some fresh features late last night.

Our main focus for this update are the forums and community where we've seen tremendous growth over the past few months. Many of you have told us how important the forums are for your motivation and support - we hope we've made things even more useful so you'll find traineo an even more valuable resource to help you towards your goals.

Here are the new things you'll find when you login:

Forum Search

This was a big feature request from the community that we're very happy to finally be able to offer. It's simple, just search and you'll find a list of the topics based on the relevancy of your search keywords.




Improved Navigation

With so many new posts coming into the forum we've focused on improving the overall navigation in the main forum index and within each sub-category. You'll see a few things such as links directly to each category. This should help you browse the categories of your choice from the main index.

Topic Bookmarking

We had some great feedback from users who wanted some way to bookmark or track the topics they want to follow more efficiently. In addition to the email notifications you are now able to bookmark any thread by simply clicking the star on the left hand side of the index screen. This is similar to Gmail where you can jump to your bookmark list simply by clicking the starred tab at the top of the forum index pages.

Ask a Question

We've added a new feature to allow you to contribute and share valuable information in the forums in a slightly different way. Now you can 'Ask a Question' as well as post a new topic. Clicking on this will flag the thread as a question in the index navigation and within the thread itself replies to the question will have a simple voting mechanism so the community can vote on each response.


Groups Update

traineo Groups have now been updated with a simple makeover to make them more functional for their main purpose which is to allow users to share information about a particular interest or sub-community. Inside the groups you'll now find the same updated forum features and a more efficient layout for posting and sharing information.

We hope you all enjoy these updates and please give us feedback on them. As always we'd love to get any new ideas and suggestions so please let us know your thoughts.

Alasdair

Twitter Weight Updates via Direct Messaging (DMs) Now Available

Due to popular demand we've just released an update to allow you to update your weight discretely via Twitter Direct Message.

Just follow us and we'll follow you back, then tweet 'd traineo xxx lbs' and your weight will be updated within 15 minutes.

Let us know if you have any questions!

Getting Started With traineo

We're focused on building simple visual tools to help you reach your health and fitness goals. We've learned quite a bit from our user's feedback and thought it would be a good idea to put together a quick video on how to get the most of out our current tools and features.

Using the traineo site correctly vastly improves your chances of reaching your goals so we've aimed to highlight a few of the most important areas in this quick presentation.

Here is our first draft of 'Getting Started With traineo':

We'd love your feedback on ideas how to make this more effective for our new users.

Thanks in advance for your support!

Get fitter with Twitter! (and traineo)

If you're one of the rapidly increasing number of people using Twitter, or even if you've just heard of Twitter (everywhere) and haven't decided to jump on the bandwagon yet, please read about our latest update below - it's likely to help you reach your health and fitness goals!

There are a couple of ways you can integrate your Twitter account with traineo:

1) Update you weight remotely from Twitter - This is a very simple and easy way to keep your weight up to date on traineo. From your Twitter account simply tweet @traineo with your weight and your traineo account* will update automatically with your weight within 15 minutes.

e.g. '@traineo 150 lbs', or '@traineo 75 kg', or '@traineo 12 stone 5 lbs'
* You'll have to link your traineo account with Twitter via the Profile > Edit Profile > Twitter menu or by authorizing traineo to access your Twitter account via your start page (see below).

2) Send a daily health update from traineo to Twitter - We're going to post another piece about this new feature but if you've logged into the latest version of traineo recently you'll have seen a field at the top of your start page where you can 'micro-blog' your daily commitment to improving your health and fitness.

This feature posts to your traineo profile so you can document the things you're doing to change your life. Unlike some of the things many people tweet about this is scientifically proven to help you towards your goals!

When entering your daily update you'll see an option to 'Tweet this' - if you've given traineo authorization, your update will be automatically tweeted.

If you're a Twitter user and you're also a traineo a member get started right away. If you're new to Twitter and are puzzled as to why you'd ever tell anyone what you're doing every five minutes I think you'll find this a great way to use Twitter for something productive that will help get you fit and healthy at the same time.

New Feature: Latest Progress Photos

Another quick update to announce another new feature. Last week we added a Progress Photo feature on the profile pages.

The Progress Photo feature allows you to upload photos and tag them with your weight and date. Privacy settings allow you to display photos publicly, only to users logged into the traineo community, only to your motivators / contacts, or just yourself. It's a great tool to visualize your progress so if you haven't logged in and added a photo give it a shot...it's an extremely powerful motivational tool.

We've seen some great Before and After threads in the forums so we wanted to combine the concepts with a new public gallery of 'Latest Progress Photos'. You'll find this link in the Community drop-down - here you'll find a gallery of the latest progress photos from traineo users (only of users who've set their privacy settings accordingly).

We hope you find this a great motivational asset to the site. Let us know what you think and check out the Latest Progress Photos right here.

New Feature: Forum Topic Subscriptions

It looks like everyone is enjoying the forums and sharing more tips, advice, and mutual support than ever! Great job.

With the increase in forum activity we've been working on some tools to allow you to keep track of hot forum topics. Our first one is a simple subscription toggle that allows traineo to ping you via email whenever a topic is updated:

At the top of each topic you'll now see a check-box with 'Notify me by email when someone replies to this topic' next to it. Just click the box and traineo will subscribe you to the topic.

We hope this improves the forum experience. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions!

New Feature: Progress Photos

We hope you're enjoying the warmer weather (if you're in the Northern Hemisphere or not here in Boston!).

The traineo team has been working hard on a number of great features. I'm happy to announce we've just released 'Progress Photos'.

You'll now see a Progress Photos tab on your profile page and on the Profile drop down in the navigation bar. This will allow you to upload a photo and tag it with a date and weight (traineo will auto-populate the weight based on the date based on your profile data...you can override this of course). Your gallery of Progress Photos can be viewed by various types of users based on privacy settings.

So go ahead, start uploading as many photos as you like and document your lifestyle change with traineo!

As always we're keen to get your feedback on this one so let us know what you think and if you have any suggestions.




We're looking forward to seeing all of your photos.

Alasdair