New Release FAQ
From Doc
The following questions and answers are related to June 25, 2009, update of the Phanfare service. If looking for our general FAQs, please go here.
Q: What are the main changes included in this release?
A: We made sharing at Phanfare simpler to understand and use. You now have a site URL that is short: yourname.phanfare.com, and you have the option of protecting that URL with a password. When you create albums, they are created as private (unpublished) and when you are ready for them to be viewed, you publish them to your site.
Also, for new signups at http://www.phanfare.com, there is no longer a free level of service. We have moved to a 14-day free trial. After that, the service is $49.99 a year. If you decide to continue to invite people to connect with you as friends, family, and groups to view your albums, they can still register with Phanfare and do so at no cost (see
below for more information).
Q: Will I renew at the lower $49.99 a year price (previous pricing was $54.95 a year)?
A:Yes. The cost of an annual Phanfare Premium subscription is now just $49.99.
Q: What about all the friends, family, and group connections I already have? How does this change impact them?
A: You still have all of your connections. If you choose to continue to use Phanfare’s social networking sharing features (now optional), you can. We kept all the functionality for those who wanted to continue to use Phanfare this way, but we did change your workflow.
If you login to Phanfare and click Share on the Phanfare ribbon at the top of the page, you can select Friends and Family or Groups from the dropdown to view your current connections, add other ones, or go view connection’s sites. However, when you create an album now, only site publishing options are shown. To use the Phanfare friends and family features you will need to publish the album and then go into album options and make it visible to your friends, family or groups by clicking the friends and family button. Once a new album is visible to Phanfare friends, family or groups, it will be included in automatic email notifications. When a friend visits your album through an automatic notification, they will be shown by name in the visitor reports. Otherwise, if they just go to your URL to view it and aren’t signed in, it will count them as an anonymous visitor.
Q: If I continue to use Phanfare by inviting people to connect with me as friends, family or a group member (requiring registration), is it still free for them to accept? Are they registering for the free trial?
A: It is still free for people to accept your invitations to connect with them on Phanfare, register and view your albums. They are a registered viewer and are not part of the Phanfare trial.
Q: Are you going to bring back album passwords, too?
A: We don’t have any current plans to resurrect album passwords. To share an album with just one person, create the album as private (unpublished) and share with others via email invite or external links or use Phanfare’s optional social networking to share that album with those that you connect with as friends, family, or a group. Please see the latest entry at http://blog.phanfare.com for information on the new subsites feature we have planned. We believe for those who really need to to segment their audience, that this feature will be of interest.
Q: Will Phanfare still send automatic notifications of my new albums to my friends and family? Will I still get automatic notifications and news feed items when my connections post albums?
A:Automatic notifications are part of Phanfare’s social networking tools. If you don’t use those tools and if your friends and family don’t use those tools, then you won’t see any automatic notifications. We expect most people will simply publish albums to their site and hence you should be seeing far fewer and possibly no automatic notifications going forward.
If you choose to make a new album visible to Phanfare friends, family or groups using our social networking tools then Phanfare will include the album in automatic notificationsYou can still opt to turn off automatic notifications in your account settings.
Q: What does this change mean for my visitor reports?
A:If you publish albums to your site URL (with or without a password) and inviting people to view them, all their visits to your albums will be counted as anonymous visits unless a viewer happens to be a registered member of Phanfare and is signed in at the time of viewing.
If you publish an album to your site and then go back and also share with friends and family, it will only show you the name of a visitor if they viewed your album from the automatic notification they received or when logged in. If they went directly to your URL and viewed the album when they weren’t logged it, it will count them as anonymous.
In an upcoming release, we do plan to introduce tracking for invites you send within Phanfare to view your site. So if you publish an album to your site and invite Aunt Betsy, we will be able to tell you Aunt Betsy viewed the album if she viewed it by clicking the link in the invite. Again, if she goes directly to your URL instead, we will have no way to tell you she visited. There is a fundamental trade-off between allowing people to view your site without registering for Phanfare and getting fine-grained information about their viewing activities. See our help page on this for more information.