Afternoon folks!  Another update and this one is a big honking bag of bugfixes (and status on bugs I was unable to duplicate), among other things.  Without further ado, here's the skinny:

• In the sweeps list and the bookmarks list it was possible for the bookmark and notify buttons to be enabled when a contest was expired.  They should appropriately show as disabled from here on.
• When a contest is expired, or has not yet started the date in the listing will be highlighted in red to hopefully catch your attention if your current search is showing expired contests.
• Went over SweepsUnleashed with a fine-toothed comb, there were two reports.  First was that there are times when there would always be 1(or more) contests that would stay in the Unleashed batch.  This one threw me for a loop for a bit but it turns out that it's when there is a contest with unlimited entries it adds it back to unleashed every time it's started.  This is appropriate behavior.  The second issue was that Unleashed was freezing at the end of a run.  I ran it probably 100 times and was not able to duplicate this.
• The Next and End pager controls on all lists pages were starting off showing as disabled (though they actually worked).  This has been corrected and all paging controls seem to function correctly now.
• There was a bug when trying to remove a bookmark from your bookmark list.  This has been fixed and you can now remove bookmarks again.
• The Home option in the top navigation will no longer be highlighted when in the SMS
• The position of the status bar (where status messages are displayed in the SMS) was off when using different resolutions.  This has been corrected and the bar should always look as intended.
• The URL for the SMS has changed.  If you had any deep links directly to the SMS they will no long function.  FYI, it is NOT recommended to bookmark pages within the SMS as they may change at any time and you get bounced back to the main site to log in anyway.
• There was a report that in the notification emails the "Last Entered" information wasn't updated correctly and always said "Never".   I was unable to duplicate this and closed the ticket.
• Had a tickets regarding errors in beta applications.  I was unable to duplicate this but it may have very well been solved with some earlier changes to the system.
• I'd filed a ticket about an error when entering contests through bookmark notifications.  I believe this was corrected with the authentication rewrite.

If I said I couldn't duplicate something and you can, please do let us know so maybe you could help us out.  If I can't duplicate it, I can't fix it.

As always we appreciate your bug reports and feedback, please keep 'em coming and feel free to even ramp it up and nit-pick us (please).

Next up for 1.0b.005 release are some highly requested items.  It will begin storing preferences for sorting and searches among other things and bookmarks and notifications are getting a LOT of love.  Going to be barely recognizable when it's finished.

Thanks!

Gerald

Ok, so let's talk about Frequently Asked Questions or "FAQs".  Almost every web site has them.  They span the usefulness spectrum from completely pointless to being a lifesaver.  Most of the time, however, these are created by marketing folks in anticipation of what you, the customer, want to know.  Periodically they get updated with fresh information, but they're generally behind the user's curve and not answering the questions user's really want to ask and have answered.

In working on a new feature we have coming soon called Sweeps University, under which our FAQs were going to reside, it dawned on me that it would be much more useful if the actual users were asking the questions.  The SweepsU.com team know the system and makes assumptions of your needs based on our perspective.  This is often not the most accurate way to go.  After a little research I found something that would fit the bill AND I didn't have to write it.

So I'd like to introduce our FAQ:

You will find the link to the FAQ in the top navigation bar on the right.  If you click on this, you will see a list of categories and subcategories of questions, pretty standard fair.  However, you will also see, in the upper right-hand corner of the FAQ, a New Item button:

Click this and you will be taken to the following screen (abbreviated):

As you can see, I've outlined the steps required to submit a question, and I THINK it's pretty self explanatory.  Tags are basically just words that are somewhat related to what you're asking.  You'll have a small number to choose from now but the selection will grow as time goes on.

When you save your question it goes to a queue for the SweepsU.com team to look at and answer.  After we answer it's pushed out to the FAQ for the world to see.  You guys are building your own FAQ.  Nifty, huh?

The screenshot just above shows only the top half of the screen.  The bottom half allows you to actually answer the question as well if you're posting something for the benefit of your fellow users.  If you have questions and answers you'd like to post, please feel free.  They will still go to the SweepsU.com team's queue and as soon as we look them over they'll be pushed out to the FAQ with you getting the credit for creating it.

Finally, sticking with the theme of SweepsU.com of encouraging strong community participation you can also comment on, rate, print, email, create PDFs of,  and bookmark (favorite) any of the FAQs.

I think that's it in a nutshell.  The SweepsU.com team will, of course, add stuff as we think of it and/or as people as us questions.  But we think the FAQs being driven by you will be much more useful for the entire community.

Let us know what you think!