Recent Site Updates – 21 October

I am sure some of you have noticed the recent updates and downtime, so I thought I would write briefly to let you all know what is up.

Updates Overview

Hotlinks

The most obvious update is the addition of the hotlinks to the site. These are a daily updated list of links to other sites that I think might be of interest to our readers. You can also use the small form at the bottom of that page to submit links that you think might be interesting. Because this page takes people away from the site, I have added a popup advertisement on it – this is to help offset the cost of losing viewers.

Front Page

The front page is now updated with a weekly “Featured List” – so that new people can get a headstart on some of the older interesting lists. I will be updating this once a week on a Saturday.

Today In History

I have put a Today in History list on the right hand side of all the pages – it contains 8 items of interest from this day in history. You can also subscribe to it separately from the site in your RSS reader. I am considering turning this in to a real list – but this will mean more time taken up so I might need a volunteer to put it together each day. I still need time to think this over.

Karma updates

There was some debate about the comment karma on the forums as to whether or not we should keep the karma or remove it. I have now decided to keep it, but to make it more useful I have now disabled voting for non-registered users. Non-registered users can see the vote buttons and scores, but clicking the buttons will take them to the register/login page instead. This should hopefully make the comment karma more meaningful. I am still unsure how I will use it in the future, but for now we should try to get used to using it so we build up a good rating system.

Contributions

The rules and regulations for list contributions have been updated. They now include information on copyright and I am introducing a sliding scale of payments. It will now be $20 only for fully original lists with no text copied from other sources, and $10 for virtually all the rest.

Donations

I have now added a Donations button to the right panel. This is at the recommendation of some of the readers. The default price is $20 but you can modify it to any lower or higher amount. As you will see in the downtime section below, all extra money will be very handy.

Forums

I have now added two adverts at the top and bottom of the pages in the forums to help with over all costs of the site. Make sure you check the forums out regularly as I normally post the site updates there as they happen.

Daily Question?

I am thinking of adding a “Daily Question” to the site – where I will ask a very obscure or difficult question for you all to answer. What do you think? We could maybe have a prize for it. We would probably need to put it in to a different section so that people can comment – so we would then have Lists | Daily Questions | Today in History (if we started posting a today in history list, rather than just a set of links). This might be a quite large expansion so it might take some time. Give me your views.

New Users

At the top of every page we now have a welcome message for our new users as well as the nicknames of the three most recent registrants. clicking their name will take you to their user profile.

Most Frequent Commenters

On the left side of each page you can now see a list of the most frequent five commenters. It only uses data from the last month. Registered users have links to their user profile and unregistered users are non-linked.

Downtime

We recently suffered 3 hours of downtime due to the server’s inability to support the load of incoming connections. I am currently looking in to alternative hosts and it is looking like the overall price of hosting is going to double. Alas we have no choice as the site is growing very rapidly and we must expand to be able to cope with that.

Exciting News

This last month has been quite exciting – we have appeared on the front page of IMDB for our movie misquotes list, we have appeared on the front page of Fark and twice on subpages of fark, and 3 times on the front page of Reddit. We were also chosen for a Yahoo Picks. These sorts of things are great for the site because it drives new traffic (and new comments!) here.

In closing, thanks everyone for the great comments and ideas – keep it coming!