MRN Development Team

The first significant feature we’ve added is the ability to reply to people’s comments and activities straight from your home page. Gone are the days where you have to go to each person’s page to write on their wire! Now, everything revolves around your “activity stream”. Any activity can be commented on and replied to.

Before this, you’ll probably notice the subtle redesign. Most notably the blue tabs on most profile pages. Most of these are as before, but the home page now boasts a list of options to help you filter your activity stream. You view your activities, friends, groups and mentions (more on this shortly), and you can go even further by just filtering certain activities, such as viewing your friend activities within the MRN Groups.

The last major feature we’ve added is the @mention feature. Users of twitter and Facebook will pick this up pretty quickly. For those of you that don’t use these other sites, you can now “mention” other users by typing in @username and they will see it pop up in their @mentions tab. This is great if you’re directing a comment directly at someone, and avoids you having to post things on their profile page. To find out your friends’ username, you will see a blue box next to their name near the top of their profile page.

We will be working on some outstanding bugs and making some more improvements over the next couple of weeks, especially regarding usability, blog content and making MRN easier to use/learn how to use.

We hope you enjoy the new upgrade!

We are upgrading various features of the site and making the backend of MRN even more stable than before. This will allow us to add new features much faster than before.

We will inform you all of the new features and what else will be coming shortly to MRN. We look forward to seeing you online next week!

Best Regards,

The MRN Development Team

One suggestion we are offering to our users is considering a switch to Firefox or Google Chrome. You may find that these browsers will improve your browsing experience on many sites apart from MRN as they are more efficient (and safer too!) than Internet Explorer and various others.

(We are also currently experiencing issues with our support ticket system. As a temporary measure, click here to send myrecoverynet a message and we’ll answer as soon as possible )

Should you have any issues with the chat room, please contact us via the support ticket system and we will do our best to get you chatting away!

(We are currently experiencing issues with our support ticket system. As a temporary measure, click here to send myrecoverynet a message and we’ll answer as soon as possible )

Whilst we think it’s important to make your blogs as flexible as possible in terms of customization, we also agree that sometimes you just want to jot down some notes!

Enter Press This, a quick shortcut that can have you posting in seconds (depending how fast you type of course!).

To make a quick post, all you have to do is visit the top menu item “My Blog” and select the first item that drops down “New Post (Quick)”.

This method of posting has less options compared to the normal way of doing so, but we hope you will find this useful. One notable difference is that you cannot upload images to your posts, although you can still use images that are already on the internet by providing the URL.

Should you wish to make a more complicated post, you can still post using the old method, which is still accessible via the main menu.

The reason for this move is so new users do not accidentally link their gravatar avatar to this site and possibly show a picture of themselves, which may not have been the original intention.

We apologize for the inconvenience,
MRN Development Team

A spending addiction is similar to a food addiction, it is impossible to abstain from it. We all have a weakness and for people that are aware of their weaknesses they can try to avoid them. Alcoholics will avoid alcohol, drug addicts will avoid drugs. However you cant live without spending money. This can make recovery a bit of a mine field and expect some trial and error in the process. To aid you we have a few tips that can help break the cycle and keep your spending under control:

1. Know why you spend: unlocking your reasoning behind your actions is the most fundamental part of controlling your spending, you need to know what drives your spending habits, otherwise you will be unable to change them. You do not have to have a deep analysis of your behaviour, you just need the basics. Spending is like any addiction, people use it to make themselves feel better. When you feel like you want to spend money, ask yourself why, are you stressed? Bored? Upset? Wanting excitement? Insecure? Once you have found the reasoning you can take measures to put better things in place.
2. Acknowledge your habits and be willing to change them:  now that you know why you are spending you have to be willing to make changes and create new and more healthy habits. This process can be difficult, old habits can die hard and you will always have the thought of  just this one little thing won’t hurt? You must be willing to put the effort in and have a plan of things you can do when you get the urge to shop. For example if you are bored, phone a friend, think of a subject you are interested in and research it or go for a walk in the park.
3. Know your weaknesses and avoid them: the majority of compulsive spenders will have a pattern or ritual to how they will shop. Recognising what these are will aid you to avoid them as best you can. If your particular vice is shoes, then avoid shoe shops or the shoe department. It is good practise in the early days of recovery to avoid large shopping areas, although they have the things you need they offer a lot of temptation for things you don’t need. If you know that all your purchases are done with a credit card, leave the credit card at home.
4. Change your habits: If you must go shopping, always go with a plan. While it can be tempting to go to shopping centres as most things can be found there, this is a bit like putting an alcoholic in a brewery. Pin point what you are going for and go just before the shops close, this will prevent you from just having a look  in your favourite places. If you must go during the day, then never go alone. Take someone with you who will be able to keep your mind clear. Do not go shopping with your usual friend(s) that may have similar shopping habits to you. Wherever possible only go out with cash, take the amount that you need and leave all other sources of spending at home. Do not take just one card or just a bit of extra money in case of an emergency that is what a mobile phone is for.
5. Hold yourself accountable, but also reward yourself : Once you know the areas you can help yourself with, hold yourself accountable to changing them. To help keep you going it is also good to have an incentive, give yourself something to work towards. Keep a budget for the end of the month to allow yourself a treat. It can be advisable in the first part of your recovery to not treat yourself to something that was a trigger for your behaviour or part of the pattern of your old behaviour. Maybe instead of an item have a nice meal out with friends, have a bit of a pamper day like getting your hair done, or a manicure or a massage. Think of one thing you would like to do and then work towards that each month.

These are only suggestions to help you keep control, however the reasoning of addiction is far more complicated and the impact and affect that shopping addiction can have vary from person to person. Make sure that you have a good support network in place and seek outside help from either the medical profession or financial should you need it.

Recovery from spending and shopping addiction is possible, but it will take time and effort. Be aware that you do not have the luxury of being able to abstain from spending so when you do make sure that your have measures in place to control you’re spending and not let the spending control you.

myRecoveryNet 08/2009