Hyra | Free Application Centres & Activity Tracking

Is all data stored with firestore or do you have a separate database for that?

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Absolutely everything is stored in Firestore.

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Pretty nice app center, one question though. What framework you used? Angular? Vue? React?

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they’ve just used webflow lol

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Hi there! Main app subdomain uses Angular. :slight_smile:

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The front page uses webflow, as a team of people update that who do not know how to code.

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Hm, is there any reasons why you choose Angular over other frameworks? Considering Angular is famous for being bloated?

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guess whose back, back again

Here’s a detailed review of Hyra to help you decide if this product is worth your group, as well as to put some questions to Hyra about their product.

Overall, Hyra is a good product. Although it has shortcomings in privacy, it is better than some competitors; you can trust Hyra with your data.

You shouldn’t be using Trello to run your group, especially as Trello is changing rapidly as their parent company is directing the product to be geared more towards large businesses than individuals (such as Roblox groups).

Privacy

Firstly, I applaud Campfire (who operates Hyra) for being transparent about their data protection. For anyone curious, being registered with the ICO means that if they violate data protection rules, it’s easy for a consumer to file a complaint and to ensure that your data and privacy is protected.

With that said, a good data protection strategy is to reduce the data collected, and unfortunately Hyra is lacking in this area.

Hyra, as per their privacy policy, collects data about users for marketing purposes:

  • full first and last names
  • phone numbers

This data is not necessary.

It also directly stores billing information (such as credit cards, addresses) without reason, when payments can and should be confidentially handled by third parties such as Stripe or PayPal.

Storing data like your OS, browser, screen resolution, etc. appear to be unnecessary to be stored without a seperate opt-out; this kind of data is routinely used in fingerprinting and tracking.

Hyra also does not follow ‘Do Not Track’ signals sent by your browser, according to their privacy policy. Hyra also admits in their Privacy Policy that they use fingerprinting and fingerprint-like technologies to track users cross-device.

I would like to publicly ask Hyra why they collect this personally identifiable information on users (which is not made clear in their privacy policy), what they do with it, how they store it, and who can access it.

Additionally, what data can be seen by ‘gold tier’ or ‘enterprise’ workspaces?

It’s really easy to download your personal info in Hyra at once click, however adding a 30 day cooldown seems unnecessary when it’s just one click. A better cooldown would maybe be a week or so, enough to prevent abuse.


Product

Hyra is a good product. It is feature-rich and well-designed, using modern web technologies such as Angular.

However, the product appears to take a little bit of time when doing most things (usually in the range of 200ms-600ms); this likely won’t impact customers, but it may be worth considering if you need a high-speed solution.

There are several help links (e.g. Contact Us) throughout the product, however these appear to be broken. I’d imagine they’re meant to open a live chat session, but when there are no agents (or if the live chat widget is blocked by a privacy plugin) it appears to do nothing. This is more damaging if you try to delete your workspace, or if you want to make changes to your workspace info; which requires you to talk to Hyra support.

The admin page is very nicely made, however it may be difficult to be used efficiently if you have lots of users.

Hyra’s ‘Feed’ feature allows users to post announcements or important information; it’s possible for you to control who can post on the feed. However this is a general lack of granular permission control for groups that want to keep perms locked down.

I’ll excuse a few minor things as this product is marked as in beta.


User Flow

When you get started, Hyra will play you an introductionary video. This video is not great and is borderline painful to watch, with rapidly moving transitions.

The user flow is guided through videos to help explain users on how to use the product; these videos are incredibly helpful, however they are very basic videos and are visually unhelpful, it would be better if the videos showed the product (which could help user experience).


Conclusion

  • Hyra is better for your user privacy than competitors, and it is easier to make a complaint with regulators if you feel Hyra has violated data protection regulations. However there are shortcomings; Hyra hasn’t fully revealed specifics about data usage, or the rationale behind collecting private info of users.

  • Hyra is a good product, however there are minor glitches that can be excused as the product is in beta

  • Hyra is very easy to use, even if you don’t have technical knowledge. The guided tutorial is very helpful, even if it can be a little bit annoying.

  • Hyra does not have an SLA published. If Hyra is down and you are dependant on it for your group, you may experience problems. Hyra does not have a published status page.

this post shall not be construed as an endorsement of Hyra or Campfire, neither should it be construred as disapproval.

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This looks AMAZING! I have never seen anything like this before! I will definitely use it and spread the word about this to other groups!

I have a question though, how will the activity tracker work? Like will it connect with the amount of time the staff member is in-game?

I know most cafe and hotel groups have staff members clicking a monitor or button to start working and getting hours in, so I don’t know if I missed it, but how will the activity thing work?

Also, will there be an activity tracker or maybe even an action log for the website? So you can see how active staff members are on the website and you can see the action logs, to know when someone makes an edit or changes something, just so if someone messes things up or abuses powers, SHRs can know.

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Thanks for firing your questions our way. I’ve recognised your positive feedback and constructive criticism and taken it on board.

I’ll do my best to clarify and elucidate all of them in as much detail as possible for you.

Privacy

We take privacy seriously, and allow users to download their data at any point now (sorry that it still says 30 days in the site, the button will always work, we are now removing the ‘30 day notice’)

We may collect first and last names, if they are provided to us, to help us personalise your user experience. We use these respectfully and courteously, moreover, these are never gathered without your knowledge. These are then used to improve your retention and user experience, making the entire Hyra experience feel more customised, though typically first and last names, as well as phone numbers, are mostly only taken for high-value customers.

The purpose for which we may store phone numbers for high-value customers is that our team typically does routine and customary phone calls and meetings to ensure they are getting the most out of Hyra.

As phone numbers and full names are necessary for our high-value sales & customer success team to do their job, they are necessary data. This information is not collected for 99% of users.

In regards to storing your payment information, this is all housed in our third-party platform, Stripe and never stored by us.

We collect OS and browser for support and bug-tracking purposes. This information is not used for tracking purposes.

Screen resolution is sometimes stored for analytics purposes, as we feel it is critical to learn what sizes of screens users are viewing Hyra on, so we can build the app to be performant for that subset of users.

We currently are not offering a ‘gold tier’ or ‘enterprise’ system, and when we do offer this we will publish articles regarding what data they get access to, though we aim to make enterprise about features, rather than a deeper dive into a data layer.

Product

Thanks for your kind words.

We believe that 200 to 600 ms is very swift and performant for most users, considering it takes most users about 1-2 seconds to load the group admin on Roblox.

These links have operated as intended for the bulk of users, so if you were having an issue on your end, I’m very repentant.

Thanks for your feedback on the admin page. Did you have anything in mind regarding how we can develop and improve its functionality?

We are working on a more granular permission system for the feed and we predict this will ship in Spring next year.

User flow

We are actively working on improving our sign up process and will be adding valuable and effective guides to more of the product soon.

Lastly, to touch on your SLA policy, groups which need it will be able to purchase enterprise which will include an SLA. See more here.

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Hi there. By default, this works by installing a loader that we provide in the ‘Admin’ page of the website. It tracks from when a player leaves to when a player joins.

If you would like to, you can also implement a custom approach to this, by leveraging the Hyra Developer APIs for activity. See the documentation for this if you’re interested. Our Developer Support team would also be more than happy to lend a hand, should you want a more artisan installation.

We do log all changes made to activity as well as ranking, what we don’t log is changes to application settings, though this is coming soon.

If you have any further questions just let me know.

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Missed one thing off, sorry, we do have a Status Page and that’s available here.

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Sorry, I missed your reply.

We chose Angular over other tools because we weren’t intending to build a lightweight application here. The purpose of Hyra is to be a wealth of information for your team, and there wasn’t too much of a trade off involved when choosing Angular.

Angular is still really heavily used in the field (although not as much as React), and several major companies and startups (notably Microsoft and ClickUp) are using Angular in their stack.

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I am friends with the founder of both of them but this stands out to me but I want people to know that there is an auto ranking system.

There is an automated ranking system in Hyra.

Hey there,

This is simply AMAZING! And will be using it for my development group - speaking of which it would be great if there were some ‘developer’ features such as web analytics, developer tasks, etc.

I have an entire list of stuff that I believe an online developer platform should have, and can attach if you would like.

I will be using this immediately.

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Similarly, some kind of administration would be neat! Being able to ban, kick, moderate remotely is just what my team needs, and having it all in one place like Hyra would be a dream.

Why does the website needs so much cookies? @Aotivatial

Hi cursecode! :wave:

Thanks for your kind words.

We’d love to hear your feedback. So existing users can vote on your feedback, could you leave it on our feedback board?

I look forward to you using Hyra very soon.

Sounds interesting! We’ll definitely consider this for a future update.