Well my friends, sweet to see my little old group given such attention. 多谢！All you say rings true. Especially the bit about my head being like a giant hand. It's handy (呵呵) for grasping ideas, but you bump into things a lot.

Jenny, 你太棒了！John, you're Luke Skywalker, you must balance the force, beware the dark side! Catherine, 你的头像真漂亮！

I'm from England by the way, living and working in Shantou (汕头) in Guangdong Province since 2004. I'm a teacher of English. I really must drop in on you one of these days.

中文吧 (current membership 107)

I Have a Question (current membership 112)

These two began November 2009 kind of as sister Groups. Xiaophil and some other of us agreed that we wanted to reserve a little corner on CPod in which we would communicate only using Chinese and not fall back on English. Thus 中文吧 ("Chinese place/hangout") was created. This is one group I really hope can be made as easy to find as possible, in part because it's great to have as many native speakers as possible see it and drop in. In fact we want as many users as possible to drop in to chat (Twitteresque short posts also welcome!). Let's use the Chinese we've been learning here!

At the same time many of us were concerned, as eager as we were to start writing away in Chinese, that we would be unintelligible in our learner-level Chinese. So we (Xiaophil really) thought we could highlight any section of our own Chinese writing that we felt particularly unsure about, then explain in English what we were trying to say there and ask for help in a separate thread, in I Have a Question. This Group welcomes any Chinese-related questions however. CPod teachers drop by sometimes too to help answer, as do trial native speaker users, and helpful regular poddies. Please do make use of it!

These two Groups have over 100 members already, but seems to me many more than 100 CPoddies would be interested in their purposes! 欢迎大家来加入！

Grammar Discussions (current membership 15) I personally would hate to see get lost and buried although it hasn't seen any activity recently. This was an idea of Simonpettersson's, though Sebire was the one who kindly did the setting-up for us October 2009. I linked to not the Group front page but Simon's post "Great Cpod grammar discussions" because that's where he explains what we want to do here in this Group. Basically it's a directory, to any grammar point discussed well and yielding good answers that any of us come across in lesson or other discussions on the site and deem very valuable--keepers. I posted links there to some very valuable discussions from 2009, a couple of which were started by Xiaophil. Not everybody likes grammar, but for those who do (but even if you don't necessarily like it, some very common grammar questions are highlighted here!), we hope this group can over time collect more finds and eventually end up being a great guide. I made my last post there in Oct 09, but always have this Group in mind and have my eyes open for gems and gold nuggets in our discussions. Hope more of you can join us in this effort too!

And of course this week's featured--Transcripts with Tal (current membership 68)--is one of the most important Groups to me; it's an example of great user-generated content on CPod. It isn't just that the transcripts are helpful to look at--transcribing the Chinese banter between the hosts is hard work but really good listening practice too. Hope to see more poddies join us and try their hand at it!

There are more mention-worthy User Groups I want everybody to know about and that I personally have a stake in (in that I'm also posting there myself), but will stop here. For now. （＾ｖ＾）

I look forward to seeing the featured User Group of the week in the coming weeks, and do appreciate you guys doing this in News & Features--just that I'm a bit impatient and couldn't wait another 3-4, or 6-7, weeks for these to show up!

* tech issue--when we go to edit our comment why do some spaces between words get deleted? I just spent a good 20 minutes copying my own comment, deleting it, pasting into the comment-writing box, putting all the spaces back in then re-posting. please please do something about this bug!  Cheers

I think the filtering would really help to manage your conversations if it actually filtered your conversations :) Currently it shows everything - e.g. I get advanced on my dashboard conversations lists and I'm not subscribed to that.

John, I'm a bit confused - how do we see all the new comments in a thread if there have been several new posts in different places? That would definitely be useful!

Oh, and Grace sounds lovely! What a fun teacher to have :)

There appears to be some controversy about haibao

Seems to me gumby looks a lot like 人

You filter via the dropdown box at the top. When you select a group there, both the contents of the lesson list box and the conversations box are filtered. The default view is "All My Groups," so by default the only thing filtered out is all the groups you're not a member of.

Now you will see all the new comments in a thread as separate updates in your dashboard (and on the Community Conversations page), in reverse chronological order.

A little confusing, I know. We will fix this, but we have a fewer higher priorities now, such as a few uncooperative user feeds, etc.

I think you need to read xiao liangs comment again. He is saying that groups he is not a member of are NOT being filtered out. I am seeing the same issue. Im sure he is smart enough to use a drop down box.

As for your second comment - this is not true, each new comment in a thread replaces the one before it - it is not added to the list in chronological order. Just as your comment to xiao liang was quickly replaced by the comment to go manly (but you intended to answer zhen li jiang.) Confusing isnt it.

I posted a comment today (April 25) however the Conversations Page showed April 15 as the date for today's comment.

I'm not making any judgments of intelligence here... it's a new system, and it's bound to be confusing for many people (even if it worked perfectly). I certainly understand that. I only wish the only issues were getting used to the new system, and not technical as well.

As for the second issue, it would appear the new format hasn't taken effect yet. My apologies for adding to the confusion. It will start taking effect soon.

Are you talking about this comment? That's the only one I can find labeled April 15 in your public profile.

Thanks for lending your support to my two groups. (They are all of ours, actually, but you know what I mean.)

And look at the Community Page for Connie's post today " It's very rude to say "不送" and stay sitting down..." in "Everyday Expressions that Native Speakers...." It is shown as posted 7 days ago.

I think the problem is that the Conversations page is showing the date of the original post instead of the date of the latest comment/reply. It looks like this is only affecting the Community > Conversations page. If you go to your public profile page the dates are correct, right?

Should be an easy fix, and we will get to it ASAP. This looks like a simple display issue, not a data issue.

Hope my little plug won't jeopardize all these groups' chances of being featured in coming News & Features. "Official" CPod endorsement has already resulted in over a dozen new members joining Transcripts with Tal. 加油加油

I take great offence at your implied slight to my intelligence! (only joking). :-)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8642558.stm

http://bit.ly/cS8nWE

I don't think he needs to worry though, there's nothing on Earth that isn't easier to get from asteroids. Except for women, I guess.

"Then she picked up the tape recorder and microphone and rushed to the podium, asking Xu Wei for comments on the two plagiarism incidents. At the same time both Chinese and foreign media swarmed in and surrounded the podium."

Gumby looks like the Chinese character 人 to me, which was around thousands of years before Gumby - talk about plagiarism.

Question: Will it be difficult to enhance the Dashboard capabilities that when a comment is posted to a group, all members of the group are alerted of the post? For instance, I just posted a comment in the East Brain, West Brain group which I started some time ago. How can the members be made aware that there is a new post in this goup?

Good to know more of you. Why did I think you were Japanese?

Well it could be my grace, good manners and charm! Or it could be that old avatar of mine featuring Masaaki Sakai playing 孙悟空 in the old Japanese TV show Saiyūki (西遊記), or Monkey as it's usually known in the West. This was a show that was part of my childhood in England, you could say it was the way I first heard the great story of China, the way I first drank in the wisdom and humor that comes from the Journey to the West.

对了，here on Chinesepod there is a fine lesson on this subject, The Monkey King, and there is a transcript for this lesson too, done by my good friend zhenlijiang.

Tal

Hey everybody there are a number of works in progress on Transcripts with Tal now. Sebire's doing the oldie Upper Intermediate

Arrival in Jizhou (link to lesson)

and I've for three months now haha been toiling on the Media lesson 奥巴马访华

And have a look at Xiaophil's helpful

Tips for making Transcripts thread.

Well, they'll see it on the dashboard or Community page, under "All My Groups". It will also be mentioned in their email notifications.

What other forms of alert were you thinking of?

John,

Well, I received the start of Cpod's group activity email today and it looks like it is sufficient to alert members of a group when there is a new comment posted. A necessary feature which should increase the Cpod's community activities. Good job!

John, for what it is worth, I think it is not necessary to segregate or report activities in the Lessons Groups. People visit the lessons Comment Pages all the time (for the sake of learning more about a lesson ) whether or not there are comments they've started or replies to them. So where's the added value to the reporting of activities in the Lessons Pages, which perhaps may also increase the risk of servers crashing?

We're always interested in feedback, positive, negative, or neutral...