It works!

As I wrote in the previous blog post I have changed the algorithm that selects which bookmarks make it onto the attractive Netvouz front page and new page. And after a few days of real life testing I'm please to say that it seems to work.

Every day spammers sign up and add new bookmarks but none of these have made it onto the front page. I'm not saying the current solution is bullet proof, but at least it's a lot better than previous versions, where the front page sometimes could be filled with spam bookmarks.

So hopefully we will not have to zap some 50 users a day, which has been the case during the summer.

//Henrik

Netvouz gets more spam protection

Today I made further internal changes to the way the Netvouz front page, new and popular pages work. They still look the same as before but, without revealing too many details, my hope is that there should now be less spam bookmarks and more proper content thanks to the new algorithm that decides which bookmarks make it onto the front page.

I have also done some other improvements to make Netvouz less attractive for spammers. One of them is that it is no longer possible to mark a bookmark as Intranet when you add or edit it. Amazing, but the Intranet feature was actually used by spammers to make their links stand out a bit from the rest. Intranet links are marked with a red text "Intranet link" which spammers obviously liked. I admit I was naive, but when I started working on Netvouz some 5+ years ago bookmark spam was not really a problem... ;-)

I still have some more aces up my sleeves but I want to see the effects of these relatively simple changes first.

So with these updates I hope I can return from my detour in my development plans and continue working on enhancing the site. I get continous feedback from users so there's plenty of improvements to come.

//Henrik

Spammers go away!

After spending a month working in the US, I'm back in Sweden again. Home sweet home...

And today I have installed a new version of Netvouz with all the enhancements that has been developed during the last couple of weeks. So far so good.

However, because of some spamming attempts during the last two months I decided to take a slight detour in my development plans. So instead of delivering several new visible features that I had planned this release contains a great deal of internal improvements, improvements that you do not see but that is nevertheless important. These improvements will help protect Netvouz against those trying to use it as a "spamvertising" vehicle. It is not 100% yet, but it's a start.

But despite the focus on internal improvements, this release still brings some new features that you can take advantage of:
Open link behaviour - allows you to choose if your links should open in a new browser window (or tab if your browser supports tabs) or in the same window. You can choose different settings for normal links and for hotpicks.
Default privacy setting for new bookmarks - allows you to choose if new links should be made public or private by default. This setting is just the default, when adding new links you can always select public or private.

The settings are found in the Tools -> Settings menu.

Both these features are in response to user feedback, so keep the feedback coming! I appreciate it!

//Henrik