We are taking numerous measures in an attempt to slow spam on SoLinkable. One of which is the submit anti-spam tool. The idea is that almost all spam comes from brand new members. By limiting their submissions, we hope that this will greatly reduce the total amount of submissions by one user group.

All new users are limited to one submission each 24 hours period. Once 24 hours have past, the ban is lifted and they are able to submit another new link. After their first link has been added, any user attempting to submit again will be met with the following screen.

The majority of spam to SoLinkable is submitted by users who sign up, post numerous links, offer nothing of valuable to the community, and then return a few days/weeks later only to submit another group of spammy links. A users submission limit is only lifted once they have reached a certain level of community involvement, determined by their “karma”. As you may already know, karma is a mathematical number generated by taking into account posts, comments, and votes. The more a user participates, the more their karma will increase.

Previous SoLinkable users who have not participated in a few weeks will notice they also have submission limits. This is because the submit anti-spam tool is dependent upon karma. If the user has not been to SoLinkable in recent weeks, then their karma will be low, causing the tool to restrict their ability to submit multiple links per day. This restriction will be lifted once they begin to participate at SoLinkable again.

In the end, this tool is only meant to hinder those out there who spam and move on. Any regular users will rarely see this tool after their first day. The karma limits are set low enough that only little participation on day one is required to have the submit limit lifted by day two.

Happy linking, and as usual, thank you for all your support. Take care,

-SoLinkable Staff

solinkable, spam, submit

Is prettied up a word? Well, if not, I don’t care – I’m still going to use it. Anyway, more importantly, a few of the pages around SoLinkable have been cleaned up. They are as follows:

The feedback and bug report pages have been consolidated into one and (more correctly) renamed to “Contact Us“. The form has been cleaned up a bit (expect an integration with the Niceforms text fields in the near future).  A drop down list of “contact reasons” has also been added in order to increase clarity and will hopefully help us to serve you and your requests in a more efficient and quick manner. The Contact Us page is always the best way to contact SoLinkable regarding any questions, comments, or criticisms.

The advertisement information page has also been redesigned (for the better). It now contains more information aimed at potential advertisers. The new page has information about what SoLinkable is, who reads SoLinkable, and why a partnership would be beneficial to both parties. The plan for this change is to fully monetize SoLinkable, which we will then use to get our name out there and ultimately help the community grow. If any of our users have any ideas or thoughts on finding advertisers, we would love to hear them.

In other news, the Top Karma sidebar seems to be working. I’ve noticed that quotations and Baldydog have both taken advantage of the free contribution bonuses (ie. a free link). Keep up the great work guys.

Just a quick note on what I’m working on releasing in the coming weeks:

• The number of submissions allowed will be directly dependant on a users Karma. This is an attmept to curb spam by users who, upon registration, immediately proceed to submit a bunch of blogspam, and then never visit SoLinkable again. I want to keep this site clean and relevant for the regular users.
• A new Statistics page (alongside the Top Users page). This will have a more in-depth view of the recent (and hisoric) activity on SoLinkable. Maybe we will even have fancy pie tables and graphs…

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I have gone and added a little website promotion to the sidebar. It goes by the name of “Top Karma”. I feel as though I should be giving back to those who take their time to contribute to SoLinkable. Its the community that keeps us going, so this is very important.

It works in the following way (a more thorough explanation is available in the faq): An algorithm is used to determine a single users participation on SoLinkable – this number is refered to as a users Karma. The sidebar is then a list of users Karma in decending order. The usernames found on the list will link back to the homepage specified in their profile.

This is very similar to the “Top Contributer” plugin that can be used with Wordpress. It is my hope that webmasters will see the numerous ways to promote their site through SoLinkable, creating a larger user base and more active community.

The plan in the future is to also use this Karma value to determine the amount of submissions per unit time that a specific user can make. Treat Karma as a sort of “user trust”. But that still needs to be coded…

blog promotion, karma, promotion, solinkable