It’s here! We have finally redone the logo. It’s now far more inline with web 2.0 styles, and more importantly, looks MUCH better than our original logo. With so many new members daily, we really wanted to put our best foot forward.

We wanted to include all three of the main soLinkable colours (black, blue, and green), whereas the previous logo only included a shade of blue. The huge focus on blue took away from the logo and made it fade into the background. With the new green hue, the logo is given more prominence and brought to the front of the page. The idea is that the logo will have more of an impact in the mind of the potential user.

So, without further ado, I present the new soLinkable logo, and it’s derivatives:

We put a lot of thought and effort into these logos, but I know that there is still a lot of work to go. We are far from finished. Thanks to all of you for your support, and look for more great updates in the near future!

design, logo, solinkable

Good news everyone! Two big updates have taken place at SoLinkable in the past few days. You may not have noticed, but we were busy working behind the scenes. The two main areas of focus were security and spam filters.

First off, SoLinkable has been upgraded to SWCMS v1.1. This update offers numerous security and stability fixes, but little in the way of increased features. So, as a user, you shouldn’t notice anything at all – SoLinkable should keep working as it was before. If you have noticed anything strange going on lately, be sure to notify us.

Though security hasn’t been an issue on SoLinkable as of yet, we like to remain proactive in this respect. With the recent high-profile hackings of other notable pligg sites (ie. Design Float), security around the pligg community has been of utmost concern. As a reminder (if anyone read my old blog post about it), security fixes were one of the most important factors in our decision to switch to the SWCMS system.

Secondly, we have implemented the Askimet wordpress plugin. We have high hopes for this one. It has become one of the leaders in comment spam prevention, and we hope that transfers to social bookmarking spam as well. It is still in testing, and not completely implemented as of yet. If we find that it’s catching spam,  we will turn it on fully, allowing it to automatically hold back links which it deems spammy. This, combined with the submit anti-spam tool has the posibility to greatly reduce the number of spam submissions here on SoLinkable.

Thanks and keep up the linking!

solinkable, swcms, upgrade

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

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