HisReach.com

We have begun to notice more people discussing inappropriate topics on HisReach and since we hold the purity and safety of HisReach to the highest degree, we will be cracking down on any sort of inappropriate discussion.

What is inappropriate discussion considered?

1. Sexual conversation of any sort.
2. Blurbs containing questionnaires that have inappropriate or lewd questions. For example (and yes these are actual posts we have seen), responding to questions about being caught naked, showering with the opposite sex, being home alone with the opposite sex, etc. Thankfully most of your answers are no, however, it is inappropriate content matter to even ask within HisReach.
3. Name-calling. It is not appropriate to call people names, even in jest.
4. Abbreviations. Using abbreviations for inappropriate terms is no better than using the actual term.
5. …and the list goes on

If we discover you are posting content of this type you will be either warned or permanently banned from the HisReach community. We must uphold the quality of HisReach and we need your help.  We understand that it may seem strict, but God calls us to a higher standard.

We’ve added 18 new backgrounds for your profiles. They are all for Tooth & Nail bands (which totally rock!). Check them out in your ‘Edit Profile’ section. Bands include Anberlin, Emery, Mae, Number One Gun, Thousand Foot Krutch, and Underoath.

We are going to try to add more profile backgrounds more regularly. Send your suggestions!

As you probably noticed, HisReach was down for some time today.  Well… the good news is that it wasn’t our fault.  The power went out for the entire city where our server is located and there seems to have been some power backup issues with our server warehouse.  Anyways, things seems to be stable for now.  Sorry for any inconvenience!

For those of you musicians on HisReach that have been experiencing issues with the player not playing your songs after reordering or deleting a track.  The issue is fixed and you should be able to go along happily sharing your music with everyone.

If you haven’t noticed this issue…ignore this message =)

I’m sure many of you have noticed, we now have music profiles on HisReach. We are still doing some work to get them perfect, so be patient while we work out all of the kinks. Just a few things to note about music profiles:

1. You must own the rights to the music in order to post songs to HisReach. If you don’t and we find out, your music profile and member profile will be permanently deleted. In short, No…you can’t post your favorite songs to a music profile…even if you bought the CDs.
2. If you don’t see your favorite band on HisReach, we need your help. We are working to get the coolest artists on HisReach, but it is an involved process. How can you help? Send an email to the band, leave messages on their MySpace, post on their websites. Tell them that you are on HisReach and you want them to be too. Fans are the top influencers on how bands reach their fans.
3. If you see something that isn’t working how you might have expected or if something justplain doesn’t work. Please let us know in the Suggestion Box on your home page.

Thanks for all the suggestions and support. We hope you enjoy!

So some of you may have noticed tat over the last few days, we started showing Amazon.com ads on HisReach. Amazon is obviously a really cool company because they offer such a wide range of different products. So our thought at HisReach was that you might be interested in the wide variety of items they have to offer.

We decided to use a system from Amazon called Omakase which basically automatically determines what types of products to display based on the content of our website. Well, it turns out that 1) when Amazon offers everything under the sun for sale…some of it is not appropriate (to say the least), and 2) we remembered we have had limited luck in the past with automated ad generation.

Needless to say, we have discontinued our affiliates program with Amazon and have gone back to only serving ads that have been pre-approved by the HisReach team. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you experienced or any inappropriate material you may have seen on the HisReach website. We are working very hard to make sure that HisReach is the cleanest, most secure site on the web.

If there is ever anything that you see on HisReach that you disapprove of for any reason, please let us know and we will work to resolve the issue immediately.

As if Yahoo and Microsoft weren’t making a big enough wave lately, I’ve got a bone to pick with mega-corporations…

Why is it that so many of these companies that “define” the Internet get that privilege? I realize that they are worth billions of dollars and also are revolutionizing how we use the Internet, but they are so inflexible. They create everything they do to fit their individual needs. Where does that leave the rest of the Internet? Either a) scrambling to fit to mega-corporations standards or b) developing a “from scratch” solution. The issue with this is that when designing to corporation’s standards we are at their whim. Change a function name, we are scrambling for a fix. Discontinue an offering, we are scrambling for a fix. Frankly, it sucks…

Enough ranting and down to my point. We are continuing to experience some issues with sending mail to Yahoo email addresses. What types of issues? Namely, up to 5 day delays on the emails that are sent out. Now, I would ask you…is that a reasonable delay time? I realize Yahoo receives millions of emails a day and that they have to incorporate spam control and malicious attack defense. My issue is that you all have asked for these emails and you want to know when you get new friend requests and mail messages. As a Yahoo email user, don’t you deserve to get those in a timely fashion?

The solution: We’ve chased down their maze of automated customer service and online request forms for several weeks now with little to no response (this is another spot that bugs me to no end about mega-corporations…simply horrible customer service). We are still working to get our mail server whitelisted with Yahoo so they will stop delaying HisReach emails. In the meantime, I have two solutions:

1. MOVE TO GOOGLE’S GMAIL - I’m just waiting to hear someone contest what I have to say, but Google is so amazingly flexible. They fit themselves to what the Internet needs. They aren’t worried about making it impossible to export me email addresses (Hotmail) or forward my email to another provider (Yahoo) because they know I will appreciate that as a user and might just have a really good reason to do that. I could go on for an hour about how much more developer and user friendly Google is as a company, but in short I will say…GET A GMAIL ACCOUNT … YOU WILL NEVER LOOK BACK! So why am I endorsing Gmail?
   1. They do no block or delay HisReach emails. This means that you will actually get your email within seconds of when it is sent.
   2. They do not have crazy standards for what an email needs to look like to be considered a legitimate email.
   3. They have the best SPAM filter on the Internet (yes, this is an opinion).
   4. You will be supporting a company that is all around Internet friendly (another opinion).

   After you move to Gmail, you can change your address on HisReach in your account preferences.

2. The second solution is to add “no-reply@hisreach.com” to your webmail address book. We realize that there is nobody behind that email address and you will never email it, but with the way Yahoo works it may help. By adding us to your address book, this tells Yahoo that you know who we are and are accepting email from us. Your results may vary, but I have read that it helps.
3. The last solution is really a request. If you don’t want to receive notifications from HisReach, that is totally fine. We would just ask that you PLEASE not mark our emails as spam. In truth, it isn’t spam because you actually did sign up for it. If you would like to discontinue receiving emails from HisReach, no problem. Just turn off all your notifications in your account preferences. If you mark your emails as spam, you may be actually causing other people’s emails from HisReach to be marked as spam too.

So, in summary, sorry for the email delays. Know we are working on the situation, but also think about the switch….it will be totally worth it.

We’ve added some new Relient K profile backgrounds to HisReach.  Check them out on your Edit Background page.

We’ve added a couple of new Switchfoot backgrounds for your profile.  Check them out on your Edit Background page.

We are currently experiencing some issues with sending emails to Yahoo! email addresses. We know that a lot of you out there have Yahoo! email accounts, so we are working as fast as we can to resolve this issue. You will receive all your emails from HisReach, but they will most likely be significantly delayed. The best thing you can do is add “no-reply@hisreach.com” to your address book so that Yahoo! will see mail from HisReach as mail you recognize and not mark it as spam. We apologize for the inconvenience and will have things up and running ASAP.

UPDATE 01/28/08: Yahoo! seems to be playing more nicely with our emails. Let us know if you are getting emails from HisReach after longer than you would expect.