Allowing someone else to post alerts?

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KD0TAZ

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Ok so in the process of setting up a facebook page for my feed, I found out that one of my die hard listeners had already set one up and is very active in following events and posting live updates about them. I teamed up with him, making his page my "official" page, and I was wondering if there was any way that I could allow him to post alerts to my feed without actually giving him access to my account. There are times when I don't tune in until something is already underway, or can't stop what I'm doing to post, but he's right on top of it. I'd like to allow him to post alerts but I don't want to hand over my keys. Is that something that is possible or that could be implemented?
 

KD0TAZ

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Mine are tied together.. Because it's a legacy/grandfather premium account from pre-BCFY?

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If separating them would affect my premium sub for being a provider, I don't want to change it.
 

fredva

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I don't know that there is currently a way to do what you are asking, and giving blanket permission to non-feed providers to post alerts would cause significant concerns.
 

KD0TAZ

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I'm not suggesting in any way shape or fashion that there be "blanket permission" to post alerts. That would be stupid beyond belief. What I'm saying is that it would be nice if there was a way that I could, from my dashboard, assign another member or two who are allowed to post and clear alerts to my feed, but not access the dashboard or make any other changes. So I'm envisioning once I assign permission to a user, they'd have the Manage My Feed gear button show up for them but they would only have access to the Alerts and Stats tabs.

I just had a perfect example of why this would be good today.. As I said I just teamed up with one of my die-hard listeners who has made a FB page for the scanner. There was a major situation occurring this morning (4 hour multi-agency chase/standoff) that I didn't know about because I was still sleeping. He was posting updates to the page from the very beginning. I didn't know about it until 2 hours later, and even then I hesitated to post the alert for a little bit until I knew it was going to be ongoing. We could've gathered a lot more listeners, and by proxy more likes and shares (we gained over 500 likes and reached just a shade under 25,000 people just off this one event post) - if he had been able to post a BCFY alert for me 2 hours sooner.

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richtidd

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Ok so in the process of setting up a facebook page for my feed, I found out that one of my die hard listeners had already set one up and is very active in following events and posting live updates about them. I teamed up with him, making his page my "official" page, and I was wondering if there was any way that I could allow him to post alerts to my feed without actually giving him access to my account. There are times when I don't tune in until something is already underway, or can't stop what I'm doing to post, but he's right on top of it. I'd like to allow him to post alerts but I don't want to hand over my keys. Is that something that is possible or that could be implemented?
I'm not suggesting in any way shape or fashion that there be "blanket permission" to post alerts. That would be stupid beyond belief. What I'm saying is that it would be nice if there was a way that I could, from my dashboard, assign another member or two who are allowed to post and clear alerts to my feed, but not access the dashboard or make any other changes. So I'm envisioning once I assign permission to a user, they'd have the Manage My Feed gear button show up for them but they would only have access to the Alerts and Stats tabs.

I just had a perfect example of why this would be good today.. As I said I just teamed up with one of my die-hard listeners who has made a FB page for the scanner. There was a major situation occurring this morning (4 hour multi-agency chase/standoff) that I didn't know about because I was still sleeping. He was posting updates to the page from the very beginning. I didn't know about it until 2 hours later, and even then I hesitated to post the alert for a little bit until I knew it was going to be ongoing. We could've gathered a lot more listeners, and by proxy more likes and shares (we gained over 500 likes and reached just a shade under 25,000 people just off this one event post) - if he had been able to post a BCFY alert for me 2 hours sooner.

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We would not allow anyone other that the feed owner to post alerts, admin, make or request changes to feeds.

Doing so will create kayos for us to admin feeds.

We have policies re what type alert message can & cannot be posted.
We already have issues from time to time with feed owners posting improper alerts like "feed status", our "our ham net is active now", and other that not allowed.

When there is an issue like this, any email we send will go to the feed owner, no the poster.
So we will be deleting & they will be re posting over & over.
This will result in us terminating the feed as the feed owner would be responsible.

I have that happen with a feed owner vs a poster.

If something needs to changed to a feed, the feed owner needs to submit a help request from the HELP tab their feed page so we know the request IS from the feed owner vs sending an email that can be spoofed by anyone.

Best is to give your die-hard listeners your phone number so they can call you & you post the alert etc.
 

bctrainers

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We're looking at revamping our alerting and notification this year... and this is a feature we've been asked to consider more than once. I'll be putting it into the roadmap for this year...
While this idea may seem a bit weird, it would be nice to have the ability to have an option for "Local Alerts", "Regional Alerts", "Global Alerts".

Thus allowing users (be it mobile apps or web) to select a feed to receive alerts from based on the setting above.

Where local alerts would be within the county/counties the feed covers, regional would be X miles from users location (if on an app), and Global would be what we have currently.

Not sure how feasible something like that would be.
 

KD0TAZ

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We would not allow anyone other that the feed owner to post alerts, admin, make or request changes to feeds.

Doing so will create kayos for us to admin feeds.

We have policies re what type alert message can & cannot be posted.
We already have issues from time to time with feed owners posting improper alerts like "feed status", our "our ham net is active now", and other that not allowed.

When there is an issue like this, any email we send will go to the feed owner, no the poster.
So we will be deleting & they will be re posting over & over.
This will result in us terminating the feed as the feed owner would be responsible.

I have that happen with a feed owner vs a poster.

If something needs to changed to a feed, the feed owner needs to submit a help request from the HELP tab their feed page so we know the request IS from the feed owner vs sending an email that can be spoofed by anyone.

Best is to give your die-hard listeners your phone number so they can call you & you post the alert etc.

I think you missed the concept of what I said, just like fredva did. Once again, I'm not talking about giving blanket permissions or allowing multiple people to make changes. I specifically said that in the second post that you quoted. I was simply positing that it would be nice to allow other designated users to post alerts ONLY. Not make changes (I specifically said that), just have the Alerts tab and a Stats tab on the dashboard, nothing else. It wouldn't affect you at all. And of course I'd have responsibility for what the people I designate post. If they do something wrong, I would EXPECT it to be on me. If they break the rules, I (or an admin) could simply take away their permissions - because I don't want my feed deleted.

We're looking at revamping our alerting and notification this year... and this is a feature we've been asked to consider more than once. I'll be putting it into the roadmap for this year...


Thank you! I think if implemented properly it could be a great tool to have, and not cause the sky to fall on the admins lol.

While this idea may seem a bit weird, it would be nice to have the ability to have an option for "Local Alerts", "Regional Alerts", "Global Alerts".

Thus allowing users (be it mobile apps or web) to select a feed to receive alerts from based on the setting above.

Where local alerts would be within the county/counties the feed covers, regional would be X miles from users location (if on an app), and Global would be what we have currently.

Not sure how feasible something like that would be.

It's already built into the apps (Scanner Radio at least). You can receive "Nearby Alerts" and specify the radius from your location.
 
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One13Truck

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We have policies re what type alert message can & cannot be posted.
We already have issues from time to time with feed owners posting improper alerts like "feed status", our "our ham net is active now", and other that not allowed.

This along with a hopeful revamp of the alert system is music to me. I am considering some sort of facebook, telegram, or other sort of group to post notifications of anything happening just for space reasons on the initial alert and ease of updating as something is going on all in one place and I rarely ever use the existing alert system. However I do have the apps on my phone and iPad that send the alert notifications and many times a day I just scratch my head and think "Really? THAT needed to be sent as an alert?".
 

KD0TAZ

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This along with a hopeful revamp of the alert system is music to me. I am considering some sort of facebook, telegram, or other sort of group to post notifications of anything happening just for space reasons on the initial alert and ease of updating as something is going on all in one place and I rarely ever use the existing alert system. However I do have the apps on my phone and iPad that send the alert notifications and many times a day I just scratch my head and think "Really? THAT needed to be sent as an alert?".

I do have to agree, and while I am guilty myself of posting alerts that might be of questionable severity re: the official criteria, I have to question the whole "Could appear on national news" stipulation. No house fire is EVER going to show up on national news, whether it was 1, 3, or 5 alarm, unless maybe there were a bunch of fatalities - which could easily happen with a one alarm fire. Fires are local. Period. Pursuits and manhunts, unless they are for a federally wanted terrorist or drug kingpin, or involve a celebrity, are not going to make national news. The one I referenced in my first post (which was for an attempted murderer) went on for 4 hours, involved over a hundred participants representing over a dozen local, county, and state agencies including the KBI, and it didn't even cross the AP newswire. It was only reported by local/state news. The only thing that makes national news these days are mass shootings, disasters, sex scandals, Trump's gaffe of the day, and of course the detailed rundown of whoever the Kardashians are screwing. So if they really want to stick with that, they might as well just remove the alerting system because it'll never be used.

That said, a Facebook page could absolutely work for you on the local scale. Ours has grown exponentially in the past two months into basically a hyper-local news outlet with almost 2500 followers to date. There are a couple guys who transcribe/post certain types of calls and keep the page updated, and we have even teamed up with a veteran media videographer/commercial drone pilot who brings us exclusive video of some of the incidents. We recently had a "shots fired" call at our Walmart (turned out to be an accidental discharge), and without even putting out a BCFY alert I had over 850 listeners (I had top feed on BCFY for about an hour) just from posting on the FB page. Naturally there were some from listener threshold alerts and seeing it climb the Top Feeds list, and some from seeing it as the top feed, but my point is the first several hundred came just from the FB post getting to our followers. So it's definitely worth doing! ;)
 
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