Running into problems with family plan

Hosting on Micro.blog
1

I just started evaluating the family plan, but my family member is having a few problems.

Sign-up

I created a second blog for the family member with their username as the subdomain. When they went to sign up with that username, it “wasn’t available”. I checked micro.blog/username and got “user not found” to be sure, so there’s something strange with the availability check there.

I finally figured out a workaround: I needed to delete the new blog, and they were able to sign up. :man_facepalming:

Adding a blog

I then went to add a blog for the family member, again with the username as a subdomain, but now that subdomain was unavailable. As a hunch, I had them delete their new account’s default blog and I was then able to add it. Luckily, they hadn’t made any posts yet! :face_with_peeking_eye:

Theme is rendering wrong user

After all that, I added the family member to their new blog so they can finally get started. We bring up the site and it’s showing my username and avatar instead of theirs. I hope there’s a way to fix that. :man_shrugging:

Frustrating

I’m trying to imagine—what is the intended experience here??

So I can create 5 blogs, but they’re all actually mine and family members are just secondary authors? Wouldn’t it make more sense to invite someone onto the plan rather than individual blogs they don’t control?

There’s something to be said here, too, about what happens if e.g. a partnership ends. The primary account holder has all the power? I can see that playing out poorly.

I was initially excited about bringing family onto micro.blog, but the family plan is pretty disappointing and certainly not living up to what’s advertised. I’m hopeful these issues can be fixed, but we won’t be spinning down their other site just yet.

2

Sorry you had so much trouble with the family plan! That is a bad experience.

The way the usernames and subdomains work, basically it won’t let you use either one if anyone is using the same name. However, with the family plan, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, now that I think about it… I’m going to change this so that anyone on the same plan can use the same names as long as they are available.

The intention with the family plan was mostly that someone would be the account “owner” and that everyone else would also get access. That’s why the theme reflects the original user.

Here’s what I think we can do:

  • It is possible to customize a blog so it uses someone else’s name and profile photo. Click on Design and change the blog name there.
  • For the profile photo, it’s unfortunately a couple of steps… As an example using the Sumo theme, you can upload a new photo and then open the theme and add a microhook-profile-photo.html template that references the new photo. I’m happy to walk you through this in more detail.
  • In a future update, we should make it easier to essentially “hand off” a blog to someone else so that they have complete control over it.

Also, if you send me a quick email with the site URL and anything that needs to be changed, I can help with this so that it’s set up exactly like you want it.

3

Thank you for the response @manton.

The intention with the family plan was mostly that someone would be the account “owner” and that everyone else would also get access.

I understand Family from that perspective now. I think micro.blog’s concept of the family use case doesn’t match our expectations. We don’t want to co-author a blog, though I can see how some folks might want that. Instead, we primarily want independent blogs that share access to premium features under the same plan.

In a future update, we should make it easier to essentially “hand off” a blog to someone else so that they have complete control over it.

This could support our use case, but our top request is having an account model where the primary pays the bill and invited accounts are fully in charge of their allocated blogs, authors, newsletters, etc.

  • As the plan subscriber…
    • I don’t want to know anything about an invited account’s blogs unless I’m invited as an author.
  • As an invited plan member…
    • I want to manage my blog newsletters, plug-ins, authors, …everything, without relying on the plan subscriber.
    • I want to be able to move to paying for my own subscription and retain ownership of my blogs and their configuration, content, etc. without relying on the original plan subscriber or convincing micro.blog customer service. The consumed blog count is credited to the original subscriber’s quota.

Thanks for clarifying the situation and offering to help with the theme. Though, we may decide that it’s better to wait for micro.blog to support the account model we need.

That theme change might work, but it’s important accounts I invite don’t experience any friction managing their blog or its theme.

Is there an author list in the data available to the blog, so the /about page could get something like author = site.authors.find(author => author.username === '...') and the image would be <img ... src=${author.avatar}>? If a blog has multiple authors, it seems like that data must be there so posts show who authored them.