Jan
12
- Author: Web San Diego
- Posted in General
Ok, the former part of the headline is old news obviously. But what I’m wondering is what this will mean for the site in terms of improvements. Things function rather well, no real complaints there. But there are a few pretty simple modifications/fixes that would be nice to see sooner rather than later:
- The homepage’s link to what should be the main directory page for blogs/sites beginning with numbers (perhaps characters as well) points to http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/community/#/ which isn’t exactly a working URL.
- I also don’t like the fact that besides email notifications, there really isn’t a differentiation or a way to visibly (even if just for the member’s eyes only) tell who has added you as a contact if you initiated the contact-adding to begin with.
- I think they’re in “let’s fluff the numbers mode, it makes us look HUGE” by not requiring any type of email confirmation. I mean, if not for the boost in “membership” numbers, then why else make it that easy for spammers? Frofiles, sprofiles, whatever you call ‘em there’s tons of fake ones.
- Would be nice if there was a link to “more hot communities” and “more new communities” rather than just the few they link to with the thumbnails.
- I have a feeling that once they’ve sufficiently used blogs to gain enough members, they’ll allow people to require that members be part of their community before those members images shows on the bloglogroll or whatever that thing is called. Then, site/blog owners could permanently just ban people from their groups. Makes it a little harder for people to do things like put cute little images in mybloglog blog rolls.
- Would be nice if there was a clear way to add multiple authors to one blog/site. It does say “Authors” above the picture area for the author.
As far as dealing with spam they can easily flag accounts or take other measures when they see too many consecutive page reloads. But obviously anyone worth their weight in canned spam is going to take a differen approach. You can just load the URL that triggers your image to appear on a blogroll and counts as a visit to the blog (I assume on that last part), so that has to be watched for as well.
Hi, it’s more hanging on for dear life than fluffing the numbers. We might be forced to resort to an email loop or a captcha for some of these functions, but we’re hoping not to inconvenience sincere users that way if we can help it. A couple of points:
Scott RaferJanuary 13, 2007 at 9:53 am– Look under your picture on your own blog’s page and you’ll see an “Add an Author” link. Let me know if you have any trouble with it though the only issue we seem to have is when the author-invite email gets caught in someone’s spam folder.
– We do plan to offer additional widgets that are more selective about which readers they show, but we won’t withdraw the current functionality for the people that still want it. I don’t have dates I can promise yet, unfortunately.
Thanks Scott. I appreciate the responses.
It seems that even a simple email confirmation requirement would help somewhat. At least spammers would have to create email address and confirm which complicates things a little, and if they have a methodology for doing so it’s likely that it would be more detectable as they use the same domains or freemail accounts.
I wish you guys great luck in 2007 with feature improvements and managing the growth.
Web San DiegoJanuary 13, 2007 at 14:26 pmThe problem is that so many of the confirmation emails are caught in people’s spam folders, greatly reducing the likelihood a message arrives.
Scott RaferJanuary 13, 2007 at 17:32 pm