Joining NeoCollect Communities

An introduction to NeoCollect's communities, which allow you to meet and share with other collectors interested in similar items.
Watch this Video »

As you saw in the Overview video, NeoCollect helps you manage and showcase your collections, connect with other serious collectors and share your expertise. 

The videos on Entering Collection Information and Describing an Item explained the template for entering information about a particular item, and provided a few ideas to consider when describing an item. 

The Organizing Your Collection video explained how your NeoCollect collections and items can be moved around so they are easy for you to locate, enjoy and share. 

And the videos on Creating a Slideshow and Creating a Catalog showed you how items from your collection can be arranged into slideshows that you can share, and how you can collaborate with others to create more comprehensive catalogues than any single collector could develop alone. 

This video describes NeoCollect’s collector communities, and how to:

• Join an existing community or create a new community
• Link your collections to various communities
• Connect with members and invite new members to join
• Participate in discussion forums, and…
• Place classified ads for items you’d like to acquire or may wish to sell.

A NeoCollect community is very much like a collectors’ club or association that exists in the physical world, but with an array of online features and without any geographic limitations. 

You may have already received an invitation to join a NeoCollect community from a fellow collector or someone else who knows of your collecting interest.  To accept this invitation, you simply click on the link in the e-mail message, log in to NeoCollect, or sign up if you’re not already registered, and then accept the invitation to join the community. 

While a few communities are small and open only by invitation, the majority of NeoCollect communities are public. Anyone can join a public community by going to that community’s home page and clicking on the Join this Community link. 

Once you have joined a community, click the Your Settings link, select which of your collections you would like to link to this community and save these selections. 

You can also link your collections to a community from your collection pages by clicking on the Linked Communities button and choosing one or more relevant NeoCollect communities. 

Once you have joined a NeoCollect community and linked one or more of your relevant collections to it, your user name and photo (if you have added a photo to your profile) are displayed in the Member’s directory. 

The public collections you have linked to this community are displayed on the Collections page. 

The officers of the community may choose to feature one or more of your public collections, in which case these collections will be displayed in the Featured Member Collections section, just above all of the member collections, and become eligible to be featured on the NeoCollect home page. 

When you link your collections to one or more NeoCollect communities, the items in your collections that you have flagged as Wanted or Available for Sale or Trade will be displayed in the Classified listings section of that community for others to browse, in order to help you and others build and refine your collections. 

Just as with collections linked to NeoCollect communities, catalogs, items and classified listings can also be selected by the community officers to be featured on the community’s home page, and the Recent Updates are listed at the bottom of the page so you can keep track of the most recently added features and discussions. 

Any NeoCollect user can communicate privately with another user by clicking on that user’s profile tile and then clicking on Contact This User. You can decide whether to send the message with your name and e-mail address identified, or anonymously, which is the initial default setting.  Just type your NeoCollect message as you would type an e-mail message and hit the Send Message button. 

The messages you send and receive using NeoCollect are displayed in your message box. The messages received in your NeoCollect message box can also be sent to your personal e-mail automatically by choosing that setting on your Contact and Notifications settings, in case you would prefer not to have to check a separate mailbox for messages sent to you through NeoCollect. 

In addition to private messaging, each NeoCollect community has a Discussion Forum where you can engage in an ongoing dialogue with other members of the community on any of several existing topics, or on one that you start yourself. 

If there is not already a NeoCollect community organized for a collecting specialty of interest, you can start your own community.  Just click on the My Communities link, then click on Create a New Community. Type in the name of the community, a simple identifying word, and a brief description of the scope or purpose of the community. 

As the creator of the community, you are automatically an Officer of the community and can therefore control the settings, such as whether others using NeoCollect will be able to find this community in public listings and searches, whether non-members will be able to see the community content such as members’ public collections, catalogues and classified listings, and whether anyone can invite others to join. 

Find a Representative Image for the community by clicking the Select an Image link, find a typical item in one of your relevant collections and then click Create Community. 

You’ll then need to link one or more of your collections to the community.  

You can start by featuring you own collection and then feature more collections as other NeoCollect users link their collections to your new community. 

To invite others to join your community, or other public communities, go to the community home page and click on the Invite New Members link near the top of the page, type in the e-mail addresses of the people you would like to invite, customize the invitation and click the Invite New Members button. 

This NeoCollect pilot website is currently set up for medals only, but we will soon be adding templates for tokens, ancient coins, and eventually for a broad spectrum of fine art, antiques and other valuable collectibles. 

Please watch the other NeoCollect videos. 

And, of course, please e-mail or call us if you need help or more information. 

« back to NeoCollect Help