Simpsons Compatibility Test

I just pushed a Simpsons Compatibility test live onto Facebook and MySpace.

If you have a Weblist that you think would make a good compatibility test, let me know.... but here's the catch - every item will need to have a picture and description.

Baseball Compatibility Test Now live

Check it out on MySpace or Facebook.

General Compatibility Test

Guys, I made some tweaks to the general compatibility test on MySpace and Facebook. There was feedback that some of the items were too obscure for a general test, so I replaced several items with more mainstream things.

So, if you login to the app on Facebook or MySpace, please take a few minutes to complete the remaining items of the general compatibility test.

This is cool

Trebon is my friend on Facebook and on MySpace. We both took the Star Wars Compatibility Test.

Now when I open the RateItAll App on either Facebook or MySpace, I see my compatibility score with Trebon... it's like RateItAll + MySpace + Facebook is all one site.

Star Wars Compatibility Test Live

The Star Wars Compatibility Test is now live on Facebook and MySpace. Many thanks to Numbah for his advice and counsel in this area.

and we're back...

....

Site Maintenance is Beginning Now...

.... we are estimating 30 minutes.

MySpace Testers - I'm Ready for You

Thanks to everyone who expressed an interest in testing RateItAll for MySpace - it appears that a lot of RIA'ers also have MySpace accounts.

So here's what I would like you to do:

Step 1

Login to your MySpace account and go the RateItAll for MySpace page (we call this feature "Compatibility").

Step 2

Add the app ("app" stands for "application" / feature) by clicking the big button.

Step 3

* Before doing anything, merge your RateItAll account with your RateItAll for MySpace account*

You can do this by clicking the "My Reviews" tab, then clicking the "Join RateItAll and share ad revenue...." link in the right hand column.

Then scroll down and fill out your RateItAll login information in the "merge accounts" section and hit "Merge."

(make sure NOT to join RateItAll again by filling in the info at the top, only fill in the "merge" section)

Step 4

Have at it. Try a compatibility test. Try the search engine. Try reading and writing reviews.

Anything you post on MySpace will show up on RateItAll under your regular account (and on the recent reviews page), and you can accumulate helpful / funny / agree votes on MySpace from friends who have the Compatibility App that go to your RateItAll totals.

Once your MySpace friends add the Compatibility app, you'll be able to see their reviews (and award helpful votes), via the "Friends' Reviews" tab.

Stuff that does not yet work

Currently, none of the invite tools work (MySpace hasn't turned this feature on yet). So if you finish a compatibility test and check the boxes next to the names of your friends that you want to invite, they WILL NOT receive your invitations. The only one to invite them currently is to manually send them a message with the link.

We also don't yet have a Profile Module to display your reviews and compatibility tests - that should be coming in the next few days.

Please give it a whirl and let me know what you think....

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight: 1:30AM EST

Guys, we're dropping some more memory into our new database server late tonight. This shouldn't take more than 30 minutes. Really.

Video Game Compatibility Test Now Live on Facebook

We've just launched a Video Game Compatibility test for our Facebook app. Many thanks to RateItAll member ILikePie who contributed many of the suggestions for this test.

How to Merge Your RateItAll account with your Facebook RateItAll Account

1) Go go Facebook and open the RateItAll Compatibility App.

2) Click on the "My Reviews" tab

3) In the right hand column, click on the link that says "Join RateItAll"

4) Scroll down and fill in your RateItAll login information in the section that says "Merge your Facebook account...."

That's it, your done.

Back Up!

OK, we're back up.

At about 7:30AM this morning we tried to replace a damaged drive on the database and the system would not detect the new drive. When we went back to the damaged drive, it wouldn't detect that one either.

So we had to replace the whole database server. What was supposed to be a 15 minute exercise turned into an all day affair as we scrambled for and configured new hardware. Data was restored up until about 27 hours from the time the site went down - anything that was posted after around 2AM EST yesterday has been lost.

We will also be running the db on 2GB of memory for the weekend (it was 4GB), but will be ramping up to 8GB on Monday or Tuesday. The site might be a little sluggish until then.

We're taking steps to ensure that this doesn't happen again, including refining our db backup process.

Update

What was supposed to be fifteen minutes of downtime has turned into a larger exercise. We're still working on swapping out the failed drive on our database. It might be a while.

Down for Maintenance

Guys, we're replacing a faulty drive on the DB. We should be back up shortly.

Have a MySpace account? I could use some testing help

Hi All, we are very close to rolling out a RateItAll feature for MySpace. It might be as early as tomorrow.

If you have a MySpace account and would like to try out this brand spanking new feature, please let me know... by messaging me on the site, sending me an email, or commenting on this post.

The new feature basically allows you to do RateItAll stuff - rate things, read reviews, accumulate helpful votes, take compatibility tests - all from your MySpace account.

New RateItAll Group on Facebook

Guys, I've found a better tool for us RIA members to find each other on Facebook - it's the RateItAll Group.

It's an open group - anybody with a RateItAll account can join.

Join Us.

Music Compatibility Test is now live

We've turned on a Music Compatibility test on Facebook. It's a long one - 28 items I think - but should give you a good idea of who your musical neighbors are.

As always, to check your compatibility, add the RateItAll Reviews App on Facebook, and become a fan of the app on the same page so that other RIA'ers can find you.

Fix to Compatibility Tests

We've just rolled in a fix to the compatibility tests. There was a problem with how we displayed compatibility test results - if somebody "skipped" an item on the test, our system was not processing a friend's compatibility score. So even if you finished a test and your friend finished the same test with a skip, the compatibility score was not being generated.

We've fixed this now so that the system is smart enough to accept "skips" and still crank out scores.

However, in order for this fix to take effect on tests that you've already taken, you have to go back and finish the tests you've already taken - choosing the "skip" option is fine now.

More Tests!

We now have a Spain compatibility test, courtesy of Jose the Wonder Intern, and a St Patrick's Day compatibility test.

Movie Compatibility Test Live on FB!

Check it out.

This link will only work if you have joined Facebook already and added the Reviews feature.

RateItAll on MySpace

We are working very hard to build a RateItAll feature for MySpace that will let you do cool things like post reviews, read your MySpace friends' reviews, and check your ratings compatibility against your friends.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, my goal is to make RateItAll available on ALL of the sites that folks spend their time on - blogs, Facebook, MySpace - it shouldn't matter. I want you to have access to all of your reviews, and to be able to accumulate helpful votes wherever you spend your time on the Web.

Stay tuned....

Compatibility Test Results Now Displaying on FB Profile Pages

Check it out

Lots More Compatibility Tests on FB

We've launched a few more compatibility tests for our Facebook App:

• March Madness Compatibility
• Test in Men Compatibility (I did not make this test, not that there's anything wrong with that)
• NBA Compatibility
• Web 2.0 Compatibility

We have more in the works as well.... Star Wars (thanks for the suggestions Numbah), Movies, Music, etc..


To check them out, add our FB app.

I am 64% Politically Compatible to Wiseguy

That seems to be about right.

Want to test your own compatibility against me or Wiseguy? Go get the RateItAll for Facebook App, find us here, and challenge us to a compatibility test.

We also have compatibility tests for beer, the NBA, San Francisco, Taste in Women, and more....

If you are on Facebook....

.... please become a "Fan" of the f the RateItAll App here. This way RIA regulars can find each other on Facebook.

Also, feel free to post your RateItAll nickname in the thread so that folks can decide whether to add each other as friends on Facebook.

Why would you want to be friends with RIA'ers on Facebook? Because we have these cool Compatibility Tests on RateItAll for Facebook that allows you to check how compatible you are with other folks in things like Politics, Taste in Beer, etc.

Wiseguy is completing the politics compatibility test now... and we'll find out once and for all how politically compatible we are. I'm not overly optimistic that we're going to be very compatible :)

Tampa!

Is going on live on RateItAll's local business review directory.  Here is the Tampa Directory.

Let me know if anybody else has city requests - Twansalem has been adding stuff to Iowa City and it's starting to take shape.

Changes to Recent Reviews Page

Have you noticed that they Recent Reviews page looks a little different?

We trimmed down the time stamp that was displaying seconds, we reduced the breadcrumb trail to show only the item name and the list, we put the item name in bold, and we've added the image of the reviewer to the review.

Looks better, no?

We have one more tweak in the works as well....

Database Clean-Up (with some collateral damage)

Guys,

I'm sorry to report that any ratings / reviews / and lists posted yesterday are gone. We had to revert back to our backup db that was updated through Monday at 1AM.

Here's what happened:

A long time ago, we set up our system so that non registered users could rate and review things. These reviews would not post live on the site until the person registered, but we had to save user information about EVERYBODY - registered or not.

Well we quickly realized that people found this system confusing, so we scrapped it. However, we did not scrap the process that "remembered" anonymous users. So every day, we were accumulating thousands of these "anon" users in our database, that were just taking up space.

So as of yesterday, we were up to MILLIONS of lines in our database of worthless anon info. We kept putting it off, and putting it off, because a clean up of this magnitude is a big exercise.

RateItAll's CTO last night made the call that it was time to clean this stuff up. In the process of removing all of these anon listings, there was a problem with the db. We were forced to go back to Monday morning's backup (this is why we do backups every single day).

The good news is that all of those ANON listings are out. The bad news is that we lost a day's worth of data.

We're making a concerted effort to get our technology in order, to make the site faster and better. This was a very unfortunate side effect, of an initiative that in the long term will improve site experience.

San Antonio is now Live

We just turned on our San Antonio directory in RateItAll's local business review channel.

Add your city to RateItAll Local

Twansalem recently suggested that we add Iowa City to our local business directory. Unfortunately, I didn't have the data. So what we've done is added a skeleton Iowa City Directory with a couple of categories - Iowa City Pizza, Iowa City Restaurants, Iowa City Bars, etc.

Twansalem can now add his favorite establishments at his leisure, and if is participating in the RIA economy program, get a rev share on any any local business listing that he adds to the directory.

Let me know in the comments if there are other cities that you'd like to see represented, and I can see if we can work something similar to what we did for Iowa City.

Two New Cities in RIA Local

We've launched two new cities as part of our local business reviews section: a Richmond, VA Directory and a Madison, WI Directory.

You can now rate restaurants, doctors, hotels, mechanics, bars, and much more in both Richmond and Madison.

Best Song from the 1990's?

I don't know what it is, but you can probably find it on Jamie McBain's Music from the 1990's list.

I was speed rating this list, and I couldn't get through it. Nearly 800 song titles, all with descriptions.... incredible. Remember, on these song lists, you can actually embed the track by grabbing song widgets from Imeem.

Found that Phoenix News Story about RIA

Here's the link.

Weblist on Phoenix Local News

I've heard from a couple of reliable sources that HistoryFan's weblist "Worst Valentines Day Gifts" was featured on the Channel 10 local news in Phoenix.

Nice work HF.

Check out RateItAll

Don't burn yourself....

... on RateItAll's screamingly fast web pages.

RateItAll's new CTO, Mathew, was up most of the night working on our database. He upgraded some software that allowed us to fully use more of the machine's memory, and he fiddled with some settings.

In poking around just now, the site is flying like I haven't seen before.

Nice work Matt.

Scheduled Maintenance Tonight: 12AM PST

Guys, we're bringing the site down tonight at midnight PST for no more than 2 hours while we drop in some new db software that should help performance.

Thanks for your patience.

Profile Page Fix

Several of you have commented that the links from the section on the profile page called "Reviews from My Trusted Network" weren't working. Well, they're working again.

Super Bowl Ads

We have the 2008 Super Bowl Commercials list up, and each commercial has the video embedded. Try speed rating it... it's cool.

Some Good News from the RIA Community

Slow databases? Broken web pages? These aren't problems. Problems are what ZB describes here. If you have a sec, send some congratulations to this man and his family. They've earned it.

Some Small Fixes / Changes

Couple of things we've been working on:

• You can now read RIA's entire database of reviews on Facebook. Before you could only read your friends' reviews and write reviews. Try it out - the easiest way to see the new functionality is to try searching for something, then click "read reviews."
• We've fixed a design issue that caused the hottest reviewers section on the home page to occasionally jumble.
• Also on the Facebook App, we've made it easier to see what your friends are reviewing. To try this out, click the "Friends' Reviews" tab.
  

Debrief on Yesterday's Performance Issues

Pretty much all day yesterday there were performance problems with the site related to rating things, and adding new things to the database.

As this site is called Rate It All, these sorts of problems are pretty devastating.

Here's what happened. When unregistered reviewers rate something, we create a "state" that remembers their review so that when they go on to register, their review can post. These folks are stored in the database as "Anons." As you know, no review can go live on RateItAll until there is a registered user behind it. We have to do it this way, or the spammers would overwhelm us.

Well, it turns out that a lot of folks abandon ship once it gets time to join RateItAll.

We hadn't cleaned out the Anons in a little while, and there were 2.7M (yes, MILLION) Anon accounts that were jamming up our database.

This is why things were sluggish yesterday, and we're still working on cleaning these accounts out. Going forward, we'll create a process so that these abandoned Anon accounts are deleted if they do not complete registration...

I spoke too soon...

....we're still working on it.

I think we have things working again

Cross your fingers.

Man, this has been a long day... up at 4am and still working. My eyes hurt.

downtime imminent

Guys, our database is acting strangely. We're going to reboot it, and it may take another hour or so until things are running smoothly again.

I'm noticing a bunch of performance issues on the site

I'm having problems rating things, and submitting new item suggestions.

We're looking into it.

Speed Rating Just Got a Lot Better

I think that Speed Rating is one of the better developments on RateItAll in recent months. But one thing that really bugged me - if you clicked "skip" on an item that you didn't know, it would eventually feed you the item again.... sometimes almost immediately.

Well, we've fixed this. If you skip an item while speed rating, you will not see that item for the rest of your session.

This also applies to our compatibility tests on Facebook. Hopefully, this will eliminate reviews like this one.

BTW, if you haven't tried the compatibility tests on our Facebook app, you should... they're fun.

Be Careful Out There

Don't be fooled into thinking that the Internet is this parallel universe in which stuff we write and post doesn't have real life repercussions. Check out these guys who got arrested for their YouTube video.

It can feel sometimes that RateItAll is a small, insulated, private corner of the web. It's not. We get a lot of traffic, and a lot of people are reading what you post. Please be careful of saying things that you might regret, and that might get you in trouble in the real world.

Two Weblist Tweaks Went Live

We rolled in two new changes to how we manage Weblists today.

Change #1 - On RateItAll, we let people leave whenever they want, removing all of their content in the process. We firmly believe that your thoughts are your own, and if you want to leave - for any reason - you can do it, with no questions asked. We're pretty unique on the web that way.

However, one point of contention has been that when disgruntled reviews self purge they not only remove their own reviews, but by deleting weblists that they had published, they remove all of the reviews that others had posted within those lists. At times, this has bordered on the catastrophic. Hundreds if not thousands of other peoples' reviews deleted in one fell swoop.

Well we changed this today. You can still leave whenever you want, deleting all of your reviews, comments, helpful votes, profile, etc - but from now on, all public weblists and their associated reviews will be relocated to this account should the list's creator choose to leave. This will eliminate the scenario in which a disgruntled member has the power to delete the reviews of others.

Change #2 - As some of you may remember, we have a "User Page Only" status that can be manually applied by admins to Weblists that don't adhere to our guidelines. Typically, this status is only used on lists that are exact duplicates of lits that already exist on the site. This User Page Only hides the list from our main index, and prevents reviews posted from showing up on the recent comments page. Today, we've also hidden these lists from our search results. The idea is to avoid confusion for new users who may see numerous identical lists and listings in the search results.

Couple of Fixes Went Live Today

• We added the HOF link
• We darkened the link color a little more (yes, I know I said I wasn't going any darker)
• We've added "add description" and "add image" links to Rate-O-Matic / SpeedRate. So if you're speed rating, and an item doesn't have a description or a photo, you can add one. This sort of editing is really helpful for your fellow Weblisters (and RIA)
• We've added the Yahoo! shopping ads to the right side of the Speed Rate pages. This is one of those instances where I think ads actually make the experience better, because of the photos. For example, I was speed rating an actor list today, and it was helpful to see photos for the folks I couldn't identify from their names.
• We fixed a bug so that the text is now showing up besides list and item page images, as opposed to below
• We blended the AdSense ads into the site better (this actually happened two days ago)
• We fixed an annoying bug where none of our Drama Movies were showing up in the search results. Now they are.

Thanks to Jan and Peter for their hard work in getting these fixes out today. Next week we're making some fixes to our FB app and hopefully, rolling out a Bebo app.

* Oh Yeah, one more: It is again possible to post YouTube videos, and other Flash widgets, in reviews (as long as you're posting from the item page."

RateItAll Hall of Fame Link

We've added a HOF link to the main nav bar - you can see it right next to the "about us" link on every page.

This page tracks the top 100 all time reviewers on RateItAll in terms of helpful votes. We've also added columns that show total Funny votes, and total Agree votes.

Couple of things jump out at me:

- Numbah is running away with the funniest reviewer title.
- LadyJesusFan gets an impressive number of "agree" votes
- One of the folks with tons of reviews and not a single "funny" vote is my friend in real life Wiggum. Coincidentally, Wiggum is not very funny in real life either.

Expect to see some changes to the helpful rankings... I'm still working through the best way to deal with some of the helpful vote giving shenanigans that were going on a few months back. The best thing I've been able to come up with is to come up with a cap that represents the most helpful votes that an indvidual could have naturally, and in good faith given to another individuall by this date in time. All votes beyond that number coming from a single individual will be erased.

As always, I don't blame the receivers of unnaturally high levels of votes. It happens, and for the most part, it's out of the person's control. But I will request that for those of you who are determined to manipulate the helpful rankings, without taking into consideration the quality of the post..... please stop. It sort of breaks the game for everybody else.

I don't have a timetable on when this is going to happen.... but it is going to happen.

Who knew there were so many Dingo related advertisements?

Watchmouse: RateItAll Trounces Facebook in Terms of Performance

There was an interesting study recently published by a company called Watchmouse that looked at some of the biggest social networks and how they did in terms of site speed and staying up.

I'm happy to say that RateItAll trounced Facebook in terms of overall performance.

I'm less happy to say that of the 104 major social networks profiled, RateItAll is one of the slowest and one of the worst performing.

When RateItAll is sluggish, it's something that literally makes me sick to my stomach. If you ask RateItAll's developers, or RateItAll's host, or my wife - they'll all tell you.... I turn into a monster when the site is down, or when pages aren't loading as fast as they should, or when things lock up. It's such a basic thing - a slow loading site can ruin even the best features and content.

Over the past year or so, we've tried everything. We've brought in database experts. We bought a massive, state of the art, quad database. We've added load balancing across three web servers. We've removed features and functionality.

I think we're making progress, but we're still not there yet.

But trust me... making RateItAll faster is something that is almost always on my mind and we're going to keep plugging away at it.

Kids - Please Learn How to Program

There is nothing more frustrating in my job than not being able to help with hard core technical issues that arise. This morning, we had an issue with a table in our database. It cost us about three hours of uptime.

My role in getting this fixed? Firing off emails and texts to our lead developer and host saying stuff like "it's still timing out." Why? Because I didn't know how to go in and fix it myself.

It was an incredibly frustrating and helpless feeling.

Anyway, my personal motto is "don't be a victim." So, I'm checking out some programming classes at the local community college.

Our Database has Locked Up

.... rebooting now.

Argh.

New Item Suggestions Cleaned Out

I'm happy to report that due to the efforts of Jose the Super Intern, we are caught up on new item suggestions for the first time...... well, let's just say for the first time in a long time.

Here's a little refresher as to how we handle new item suggestions for lists:

For the RateItAll and Local lists, we respond to them as quickly as we can get to them.

For Weblists, we try and wait seven days to give the list maker a chance to make a go or no go decision on the suggestion. What this means is that if you suggest a new item for a Weblist - even if the Weblist's owner is not active on the site - it will get responded to in about 7-10 days.

And remember - if you suggest a new item for a list (RateItAll, Weblist, or Local) by clicking the link that says "add a new item to this list" one any list page, you get credit for that page in terms of revenue sharing. This is an extremely powerful way to "claim" important pages of the site that also helps us out a lot as well. For example, if there is a hot new cell phone coming out, why not submit a listing? When everybody wants one of these phones next Christmas, you might have some real earning potential.

Couple O' Tweaks

We made a couple of small tweaks last night:

- Based on repeated pestering from Genghis The Hun and others, we've darkened the orange link font a bit more. This is as dark as we're going to go dammit, so don't bug me anymore :)

- We've added a new RIA for Facebook icon in the top right corner of every page. Thanks Dan.

- We've added a bit more padding to the text column on the information pages like this one, to make them a bit easier to read

- We've added item descriptions to the right column of the SpeedRate /Rate-o-Matic pages to make it easier to identify the item that is being rated

Server Maintenance tonight at 1AM EST

Guys, we're going offline for about half an hour tonight. We've added more memory to the database and have to reboot with the new settings. Hopefully we'll see some nice performance bounce.

Closing out 2007

I hope that everyone is having a safe and joyful holiday season. I've been more or less unplugged for a few days, eating too much and spending time with family. It's been great.

But now it's time to get back to work.

You may have noticed that we've been featuring some 2007 lists on the home page - I think that we're just scratching the surface on what can be done here. If you have some ideas as to some themes that might make good lists capturing aspects of the year that was 2007, now's the time to push them out into the world. If they're good enough, we'll put them on the home page.

Name this movie

We get tons of feedback messages at RateItAll. TONS. Occasionally, we get requests like this:

You may help me with my search. I am now 63 years old and I saw a movie (drama?) in the second half of the 50´s or all along the 60´s but I do not remenber the name of the movie, the actors etc. The only thing I remember is part of the story. At a certain time of the movie one man is given as dead by a train accident. However the autorities were wrong because this man himself saw in a newspaper his name as the one who died. He did not say anything to the autorities and his family which thought he realy was dead. He never show up again to his family and start being a beggar. Afterwords the christmas season is coming and at the christmas eve he came to his house but did not knock at the door. One of the sons saw him through the window and came out asking to the beggar if he had no family and if he wants to join them inside, without recognize him as his father. This is what I remember from the movie. I understand it is very dificult to help me with only this description but could you try? It is a very emotional movie. I appreciate a lot.

Thank you

Can anybody help this person out? MA Duron?

Widgets and Apps

Most of the RIA regulars know by now that I'm pretty obsessed with widgets and the fragmentation of the web. I even write a blog devoted to widgets. In the world of RIA, this widget obsession means doing whatever I can to make sure that RIA content and functionality can be enjoyed not just on RateItAll.com, but all over the web - on social networking sites like Facebook, on blogs, and on any other site with a social component.

Over the past year or so, we've started putting together the tools to make this happen. I've taken a shot at summarizing all of the different tools available on RateItAll that allow you to enjoy RateItAll on other websites. Check out this summary of RateItAll widgets.

Wrapping Up the Redesign

We're just about done tightening up the redesign. The Google ads have been added back to the profile pages (for all of you participating in the RateItAll Economy), and we've made it through our entire list of tweaks.

The always politically correct GoinDownSlow has nicknamed this redesign the "Queer Eye Makeover" - and I'd have to agree. The Fab 5 themselves couldn't have done a better job.

If anybody else sees anything that's broken, now is the time to bring it up. We're just about to move on to the next big project.

Darker Font, TIghter Design - So Fresh and So Clean

Based on your feedback, we darkened the font, fixed some typos, and generally tightened up the design. I'm pretty happy with it.

Real Time Reviewer Rankings in Three Hour Blocks

One of the things I REALLY like about the new home page is the ability to see which reviewers are hot at any given moment. If you look at the reviewers module, you are seeing a real time ranking during the last three hours of which reviewers have posted the most ratings, scored the most helpful votes, and notched the most funny votes.

The order goes like this:

1 2
3 4
5 6

So in the current snapshot, new user SecondRoad11 is leading the last three hours activity rate. Clicking through to his / her profile shows that they have posted 141 ratings. Want the top spot in real time? Rate more than 141 things.

SecondRoad11 is leading GTH (#2 for this time block), Twansalem, and AngryJed.

And that's just for rating activity. You can also check out helpful and funny leaders for the current time block. Refresh the page and the rankings may be different - again, this module updates in real time.
























A little competition never hurt anybody. The obvious next step here is to blow out everybody's personal stats so that they can get a day by day breakdown of new votes for their reviews.

Font Color Update

I'm hearing your feedback on the link color being a little painful on the eyes. We are going to moving to this shortly:

Tighten Up - Tweaking the New Design

Guys,

Here's our tweak list for today. If you see anything else on the site that needs to be fixed and isn't already on the list, please post it in the comments:

Most Urgent

• Fix the search box - it's not working on any page except for the home page (FIXED)
• We're going to make the orange links a bit darker site wide (the designer will provide us with the RGB code for the style sheet)
• Caching on Browse Tags isn't working. The page consistently times out. Let's just hardcode this page as for now
  

Home Page

• We need to align the right side of the testimonial exactly with the right side of the gray nav bar.
• Home Page Typo: News and Tips: should be "Adding Background Images to Display Widgets" (we're missing the "g")

Sub-Home Pages

• get rid of "trusted recommendations box (and text)" on sub-home pages
• left align category names (e.g. Computers and Internet) with subject names (e.g. Web Site Directory) (do this for the whole index on this page)
• "Topic Categories" needs to be height aligned with the top of the first module in the left sidebar

Category Pages

• left align subject names with topic names (again, do this for the whole page)
• "Browse Category Name" needs to be height aligned with the top of the first module in the left sidebar and left aligned with the Category intro / description (if there is one)

Subject Pages

• Let's get rid of the yellow alert box and text that says "get trusted recommendations"
• Let's height align the top of the Subject Tilte with the top of the first module in the left sidebar

Topic Page

• Align Topic Titles with Topic Descriptions
• On the topic page, let's get rid of the yellow box around the "Add this list to your MySpace page" and "Speed Rate" - but let's keep the links. Just get rid of the box.
• on the topic page, get rid of the space between the bottom of the line of google links (belwo the description), and the line of text where the yellow box was)
• The icons disappeared in the "actions" box
• We need to reduce the width of the musestorm widget on the topic page below the list, so that it right aligns with the list

Item Page

• Yahoo Maps are misaligned (local items)
• Align Item titles with Item descriptions
• On the item page, let's right align the review box with the gray description box
• We need to left align the "reviews of item name" (on the item page) text above the reviews, with the rest of the column's content
• The ratings breakdown graph is not showing up on the item pages

Multiple Pages

subhome / cat / sub / topic / item: Top Left Google ad module needs another line or two of whitespace after breadcrumb (for logged in users only - not logged in see the RIA intro box)

Recent Comments Page

align content to width of header on recent comments page

Breadcrumb Navigation

I'd like to make the breadcrumb navigation at the top of every page, black

we need a line of whitespace above the breadcrumb navigation below the nav bar

New additions page: right aligment of boxes need to match header

about us: let's get rid of Hottest Topics / Hottest Weblists (i assume this is why the about us page is so slow)

Search is Broken - Except on Home Page

Jose the super intern just noticed that the search box isn't working on pages other than the home pages. This will be our first fix Monday AM.

Rolling in the new design at about 4PM PST

Guys, in the next 15 minutes or so we're going to be dropping in the new home page and adjusting the style sheet for the rest of the pages. Things could be a tad ugly over the weekend. Please send all feedback and things you see that are screwed up to me.

A Sneak Peek at the New Home Page

This page has been a real bear to get to load fast, because it's crunching a lot of data. It tells what lists people are rating, what items people are rating, who is rating the most, who is getting the most helpful and funny votes are... and more. And all in three hour increments, so it's fresh data all the time. It's a real snapshot of what - and who - is hot in the world of RIA at any one time. It's like the recent comments page on steroids (no, not THOSE steroids).

Here's the new home page. We're going to make a few final tweaks tomorrow and hopefully roll it out.

Performance might be a little dicey this morning

Trying to battle through getting the site ready for the new home page.

New Home Page Coming

So we're finally getting close to implementing the new home page we've been working on for a while. The current home page is OK, but it's too stale. That whole big yellow bar at the top never changes.

With RateItAll cranking out so much useful data in terms of what's hot at any one moment, it seemed a shame not to build this sort of info into a fresh, constantly updated home page.

So here goes - I'm going to share the various components of the new page, and take a shot at explaining what everthing does.






This is the new nav bar. As you can see, we have pretty much all of the key links (recent reviews, tags, topics, local) all spread across the nav. There's no shortcuts on the new nav bar, but pretty much all of the shortcut links are built into the nav itself.






















And here's my favorite part of the new page. Here we have raw data being crunched, with plenty of tabs to take different views. In the "Hot Lists" section, you can check out which RIA and member lists are being rated in real time. The Featured Lists are set by admins, but now allow you to see ten instead of five by toggling the "older." And finally, the Hottest Items section shows which items are getting rated the most at any given time. The tabs let you filter by a couple of categories.

























On the right hand side of the new home page, we've added an ad block (we may replace this with a testimonial - revenue shmevenue). We've also added a local directory module as well. The best part about this feature is that you can customize it to your city by clicking the "not your city?" link.


























And this is my other favorite part of the new page. In this reviewers tab, you can see which reviewers are most active, most helpful, and funniest TODAY. Fresh data. So if you write a bunch of quality reviews and get some helpful votes, this is a way for you to show up on the home page. This module also lets you see the newest reviewers (who have added a pic).




















Finally, at the bottom of the home page, we have a new section called News & Tips. This section feeds headlines in right from the blog so you'll always know if there are new posts without having to go to the blog. There's also a Tips & Resources which display static links to useful sections for newbies.

I'm hoping we're going to be able to push this live by the end of the week. For a little while at least, we'll leave the old home page accessible so people can get used to the new look gradually.

For the moment, none of the other pages will change, except for the new nav bar which will apply to all pages.

More on Making Money with RateItAll

Some of us are starting to make some decent money on RateItAll via the RateItAll Economy Program, just for doing what we were doing anyway - making lists, adding items to other people's lists, and writing reviews. My personal account is now getting a check every couple of months from Google for more than $100.

Yesterday, I posted a series of reviews sharing my tips for how to maximize earnings. These reviews can be found within the Maximizing Revenue list.

From my experience, the two best ways to make money on RateItAll are by 1) Building quality lists; and 2) Adding high profile items to existing lists.

Both in these activities result in a 50% ad rotation share on the pages you contribute.

In terms of lists, it's all about getting Google to notice the list, and send it traffic. Here are the important things in making this happen:

1) Link to your lists from other sites. If you have a blog or MySpace page, make sure to link directly to your lists using the proper keywords in the link itself. For example, if I was promoting the list Dog Food Brands on my blog, I'd want to make sure to link to the list using the appropriate words: in this case: Dog Food Ratings

I wouldn't want to link like this: check out my list about dog food. The words "my list" doesn't describe the page, and make it harder for Google to know when to display your list as a search result.

2) Use the list widgets on your blogs or profile pages. These list widgets send both traffic, and give you links.

3) Write unique content for your list descriptions, and individual item descriptions (with generous use of the list / item's keywords). If you don't write your descriptions, your list will appear to Google to be too similar to every other list page, and not worthy of sending search traffic to.

4) Title your lists and items appropriately. If your list is about country music songs, call it "Best Country Songs of All Time" - don't call it "Stuff You'd Hear at the Farm." If you use colloquial language, Google will have no way to figure out what the page is really about. Try and title your lists and items with words that people are actually searching for.

5) Seed your lists with reviews. This gets to the unique content mentioned in item 3. Also, items with reviews are much more likely to attract more reviews - making it that much more likely that Google will send you traffic.

6) Target niches. The serious web publishers try and target verticals for which there is an ad market.

Remember, lists that duplicate other lists will often be put on "invisible" mode. Be creative, create unique resources, write unique content, and send your pages external links when possible.

This Makes me Happy

I noticed today that our list of current actors has two listings for Christian Bale. The amazing thing? They both have the exact rating of 3.47. There's something to this whole wisdom of the crowd thing.

Adding Music to Weblists

I'd been hearing about this music site called Imeem for a while. It's a site that lets you upload your music and share it with others. They have a massive user base, and by association, a massive library of music.

My understanding is that they have almost as much music as iTunes. While you can't download the tracks, you can stream them (play them). Furthermore, the record labels are on board, so it's totally legal.

Even better, they offer widgets for any of the songs in their database. Just like how YouTube lets you post videos onto your sites, Imeem lets you paste songs - on your RateItAll profile and in your Weblists.

So for all of those Weblists about songs, there is now a reliable way to build songs into Weblists. I've set up a list of some of my favorite songs here.

Of course, on RateItAll, you can also add songs to other people's Weblists by clicking the "add description" link on any item that doesn't already have a description. So we can help each other to build out our lists.

To add Imeem tracks to any weblist, item page, or profile page, here's what you do:

1) Join Imeem.com
2) Search for the band or track you want (filter by "music")
3) Copy the embed code
4) Paste it into 1) a field on your profile page; 2) an item page on your weblist, or 3) an item page on somebody else's list.

Awesome.

So now we have people building cool lists with photos (here and here), cool lists with video (here and here), and cool lists with music.

I love the Internet.
Here's a cool old song called Take a Picture from a band called Filter.

Planetary Gear's Weblists

If you want to see some fantastic weblists, check out Planetary Gear's recent lists: optical illusions, the Works of Rene Magritte, and his Life Cubed list on the paintings of Pablo Picasso.

PG uses HTML to add full sized photos to his pages - talking about making full use of the tool.

Back in Business

Site is back up and functioning normally. All data through 1AM today has been preserved and backed up.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Database Update

.... site will be down for a few minutes.

- OK, step one of two is done. We're still going to have a little more downtime though. Please don't post any reviews until we've finished the last step.

Urgent: Database Backup - Action Required

We are going to be reverting to the RateItAll database that existed as of 1AM this morning. This means that anything posted to the site since 1AM will be permanently deleted.

Please back up anything that you've posted since 1AM that you would like to post.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Couple of Updates on the Spam Front

Our Russian script kiddie friend has spurred us into adding a few tools we should have had a while ago. We've added a Captcha for new registrations in order to filter out some of the non-humans who have been joining (and spamming) recently, and we've also added a lightweight IP banning tool to our admin site that allows admins to block troublemaker IP addresses from hitting the site (before we had to go directly through our firewall software, which was a pain).

As annoying as our bored little friend was, at least he/she spurred us to build some useful tools.

Under a mild (Russian) spam attack

Someone in Russia has been attacking us the last few nights with a rating script from various IP addresses. We're aware of the issue and are working on it.

Can't we all just be friends?

FB Filter

Guys, the FB filter is live on the recent reviews page. The default is "RateItAll.com" which shows you only reviews posted to RateItAll. Clicking RateItAll network will show you reviews from everywhere - which for now, means RateItAll AND Facebook. We'll be adding other sites over time as well.

Invasion of the FB'ers

The RateItAll Facebook application is starting to get a little traction. The swarm of new members with nicknames starting with "FB" are all using RateItAll for Facebook.

I think what we're seeing is a glimpse of what RateItAll would be like if it were a mainstream site with hundreds of new reviews posted per minute.

If you play this out, it would seem that the ability to filter the recent reviews page by your trusted network would be an important feature.

Time Stamps

It seems that one of hour servers thought the time was an hour ahead of the others, and another was off by 3 minutes or so.

This resulted in the order of reviews on the recent reviews page to be all screwed up, with newer reviews sometimes appearing under older reviews.

This should be fixed now.

(we'll put this one in the "only if you're REALLY paying attention category.)

Behind the Scenes Stuff

Over the last ten days we've made a couple of important changes to the backend of the site. The result is that RIA pages are loading as fast as I've ever seen them load.

I hired the best database guy I knew to come in and optimize our 1) topic pages; 2) profile pages; 3) item pages; and 4) recent comment pages.

Previously, large user profile pages (no offense GTH) and long topic pages were taking a long time to load. Now they're popping up in under three seconds (and much faster than that on the server side).

Also, we've finally fixed our mail server so that submitting a review doesn't hang while it waits to send out any related alerts.

The site is humming right now - I hope you guys notice :)

Our Facebook Promo

Back up to 4 DB Processors

OK, our fan fix went smoothly. We're back up and running, and things should be humming again.

Downtime at 11AM PST

We're dropping in the new DB fans at 11AM California time. We should be back up no later than 11:30.

Running on Half Power

Last night, two of the cooling fans on our quad DB crapped out. The overheated CPUs caused the database server to shut down.

As a short term fix, we disabled the two processors that correlated to the broken fans until we could find some replacement fans.

Currently, RIA's DB is running on only 2 of its 4 processors. This could result in some slowness, especially during peak hours.

The good news is that we've found some replacement fans and will be dropping them into the DB later today, which will allow us to bring all four processors back up. There will be about 20 minutes of scheduled downtime while we make this happen.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Having DB issues

We're working on it...

Any Facebook Members out There?

Hey all, any of you on Facebook? We're testing out the new RateItAll reviews app for Facebook. It's basically a stripped down version of RIA that lets you share your reviews with your network of Facebook friends.

Here's a couple of key things you should know:

- Helpful, Funny, Agree votes accumulated on Facebook count towards your RIA totals
- On Facebook, you get a notification when somebody else on Facebook votes your review helpful. This means you can know WHO your helpfuls are coming from.
- Stuff you post on Facebook RIA will also post on RIA. Write once, post many.
- Make sure to merge your accounts once you add the app - this will ensure that all helpful votes you get on Facebook go towards your RIA tally

Want to try it out? Click here (if you're not a Facebook member, you'll have to join first.) Also, stay tuned for a RateItAll group on FB - I'll set one up shortly.

I'm actually doing most of my RIA posting on Facebook now. I've found it's faster and easier to post, and I can better response in terms of votes and feedback.

This Facebook version of RIA also explains the recent search of posts coming from people with names starting with "FB" (these are Facebook members who don't yet have a RateItAll Account)

Profile Pages

Guys, we fixed a bottleneck in how the profile pages were loading. I think you'll find that some of the heavier profile pages of folks with lots of data are now loading much faster.

A Sneak Peek

The recent helpful, funny, agree changes to reviews also have corresponding display implications.

I haven't been crazy about the home page for a while. There's too much static content, and too much of an emphasis on telling people what the site does. I want a page that shows what the site does.

Here's a sneak peek of a portion of a revised home page we're working on. Note the reviewer module on the bottom right that highlights the daily most active, most helpful, most agreed with, and funniest reviewer. I think it's going to be cool.

Helpful, Funny, Agree is Now Live

We've added helpful, funny, and agree buttons for every review on the site. Each person's profile page is now tabulating votes in each of these categories.

The way it's set up, you can only choose one vote per review - for example, you can't vote a review helpful AND funny.

Please be on the lookout for things that aren't working properly with this new feature.

Deleting Weblists

I've been getting a ton of feedback that when a reviewer leaves, they shouldn't be able to delete their Weblists. Why? Because deleting a list means deleting all of the reviews that were posted under that list.

Folks (so far) have universally felt that this is unfair. That if a Weblist is pushed out to the public domain, it's creator shouldn't have the power to delete it.

I can see the arguments on both sides of this one. Anyone care to comment?

We're Working on a Couple of Things

Here are the projects that we are currently working on:

Helfpul Vote Changes

Based on a lot of excellent feedback, we are making some important, structural changes to how we manage helpful votes.

One of the issues that I currently see with the helpful vote system is that there is only one tool to acknowledge a review. A review is posted by your friend, and your only option to indicate that you appreciate the review is to mark it "helpful."

In the world of RateItAll, "helpful" has come to mean all sorts of things. It has come to mean "I agree," it has come to mean "lol," it has come to mean "I love you man," and it has come to be a simple acknowledgement of "I read your review."

In other words, "helpful" has lost its meaning.

So, one of the things that are we are working on is to make it so there are three acknowledgement options for any review:

Helpful
Funny
Agree

This will give vote givers a way to be more precise in what their review acknowledgement means, and will give vote receivers a way to get more specific feedback. It should also start to put meaning back in the word "helpful."

Of course, the lack of tools has not been the only issue involved in the abuse of the helpful button. Some folks have flat out abused it - giving helpfuls to their friends, regardless of the content of the review, and not giving helpfuls to folks that aren't their friends, regardless of the content of the review.

So, unfortunately, we are also working on adding a tool that will let us remove vote giving priviliges for those that abuse the tool. This tool will be used sparingly, and only with the goal of ensuring that folks act in good faith in awarding helpful votes.

Finally, we are getting rid of the not helpful votes. I have long resisted getting rid of the not helpful button, as I felt that it was necessary to retain a why to indicate disapproval of a review. I know that there are some of you that still feel this way now.

However, there IS a tool to express disapproval - the commenting tool. If a review rubs you the wrong way enough to make you want to take action, you are more than welcome to comment on the review and indicate exactly why. No longer will there be anonymous "trolls" dropping unhelfpuls with no explanation or reason given. We're going to try it this way and see how it goes.

Home Page

The second major project that we're working on is a revamping of the home page. I don't know about you guys, but the big yellow block of real estate on the home page sort of bugs me. We're making too much of an effort to explain what the site is about, as opposed to SHOW what the site is about.

In the coming weeks, you're going to see some changes to the home page with an emphasis on providing all sorts of fresh content that shows what's hot on the site at any given time - most active raters, hottest lists by category, hottest items, etc. I think it's going to be pretty cool.

Stay tuned.

Debrief

It’s been an awful week for our site.

In the past week alone, RateItAll has lost four excellent reviewers: IJR, StarkTruth, Ridgewalker, and Wiseguy. Each has chosen to leave the site, and exercised their rights as RateItAll members to permanently delete their accounts.

As I’ve seen a lot of rumors floating around as to the circumstances regarding their departures, I thought it was important that I clear the air and present the facts as I understand them.

As a rule, I try not to discuss site disciplinary matters publicly – these have historically been left between the admin and the member. But as these are extraordinary circumstances, I’m going to be as transparent as possible in order to present the most accurate picture of what transpired.

Those involved are welcome to comment on this blog if they feel that I got anything wrong.


IJR

As we all know, IJR was a longtime reviewer who was very popular. He was prolific, he was funny, and he was pretty unique. At the time of his departure, he was third ranked in the list of Most Helpful Reviewers.

About four weeks ago, I noticed a series of very odd sounding reviews from him. They were not written in his style, and had an oddly formal tone to them. I ran one of the reviews through Google, and found it be copied directly from another site. There was no citation given to the author of the review.

I messaged IJR, pointed him to the site rule about plagiarism, and asked him not do it again.

The following day it happened again, so I warned him again.

The following day it happened again, so I warned him again, and said that if this continued to happen, I’d have no choice but to suspend his account for two weeks.

Note: it’s almost unheard of for me to give three separate warnings, in rapid succession, for the same, fairly serious, violation. IJR was given this courtesy only because of his standing with the site.

A day or two later, it predictably happened again, so I suspended his account.

When the two week suspension was up, I reactivated his account. Within 24 hours or so, IJR had sent messages to a few folks (myself included), complaining of an old boys’ network, and deleted his account.

I feel that my hands were tied in this particular situation. The violations were so blatant and so defiant, that my choices were either to say, “screw it, the rules don’t apply to IJR.” Or to take action. I guess I could have asked him if there was something else that was bothering him.

Looking back, I wish I had.

My personal opinion is that IJR was intent, bordering on obsessed, with becoming the reviewer with the most helpful votes. When he started to feel like it wasn’t going to happen, he prepared himself to self destruct by flaunting the rules. I wouldn’t be surprised if he felt that the odds were unfairly stacked against him, hence the “old boys network” (which I take to mean cronyism) accusations.


StarkTruth and Ridgewalker

As most of you probably know, StarkTruth and Ridgewalker are a couple. Whip smart, Stark is an excellent writer who made a pretty significant impact on the site with both her reviews and her lists. From an admin perspective, I considered Stark to be very much a “tough cookie.” While she didn’t start fights, she had a history of coming in pretty hard when she felt that she was slighted. I had a bit of an admin run in with her shortly after she joined, when she began messaging a number of regular reviewers with the false information that I was planning on selling the site. A heads up was given to me by several regulars. I’m not sure why she thought this (I’ve never actively tried to sell the site), or why she felt the need to try and start a panic.

Despite her impressive contributions, I never got the feeling she particularly liked (or trusted) the site (or me).

And then there’s Ridge. In the history of RateItAll, I can’t remember anybody who has been more universally liked and admired than Ridgewalker. Besides writing the best reviews and making the best lists (and helping others with their lists), he was also the first to welcome new users and the first to try and talk overheated reviewers down. He was a giant on RateItAll, and somebody who I personally admire a great deal. When he fell ill, I sent him a care package – in the site’s nearly 8 years online, this is the only time I’ve done this.

About two months ago, Ridgewalker brought it to my attention that a certain RateItAll reviewer was accumulating helpfuls at an unnatural rate – something like 2,000 in a 24 hour period. I investigated the matter and found this to indeed be the case.

What was strange is that the helpfuls were coming from a user that was not logged in, who was at the same IP address of reviewer in question. In other words, somebody seemed to be logging out, and giving helpfuls to themself.

As far as I knew, this was an impossible scenario. You can’t give helpful votes if you’re not logged in, and you certainly can’t give helpful votes to yourself while logged in.

This was happening at around the same time that RateItAll was going to a multi server configuration. A known bug at this time is that folks were getting logged out in mid browse, as they bounced back and forth between servers. In other words, some members found themselves in a weird limbo status where they were logged in at one moment, and logged out the next. Then logged in again.

In this weird limbo status, it was apparently possible to give your own reviews helpful votes.

This is important, because it gets to intent. This was not a situation in which the member had gone out of their way to set up a duplicate account with the sole purpose of giving themselves helpful votes. My understanding is that this was a situation when a member was browsing the site, and suddenly realized that they had the ability to give themselves helpful votes.

So, I suspended the user’s account for 3-4 days while I sorted out the technical glitch that enabled this, and deleted the bogus helpful votes.

Amazingly, we discovered that at that moment, it was not possible to subtract helpful votes in our system, as explained here. I felt that it was important enough to get this particular user’s bogus helpfuls off the books, that I commissioned the development work to fix this. When this was fixed, not only did the offending user lose their bogus helpful votes, but everybody’s tallies were recalibrated to reflect subtracted helpful votes (primarily from folks who had left the site).

I also formally warned the user, and expressed my disappointment at the bad judgment.

So why didn’t I ban this person? For a couple of reasons. First, the person is a regular, and regulars nearly always get the benefit of the doubt. Secondly, there have been at least 7 other cases of members in the top 100 who have been discovered showing bad judgment in regards to manipulating the system (specifically, setting up dupe accounts) in order to pad their own tallies. All of these reviewers were warned, and given a second chance. None of them have broken the rules again in regards to dupe accounts.

Finally, given that the vote getting was enabled by a technical glitch, and not premeditated, I don’t see how it would have been appropriate to jump the warning and suspension stages of discipline, and go right to ban. Just as there’s a difference between “stealing” a bag of money that falls out of the back of a truck and robbing a bank, there’s a difference between creating a false ID to give yourself helpfuls, and suddenly realizing that you have the power to give yourself helpfuls.

There was bad judgment displayed here, but it simply was not a ban worthy violation. If anything, it was less severe than stuff that I had let go with a warning previously. Banning this user would have been utterly inconsistent with how I’ve managed similar situations in the past.

So here’s where things get murky.

At exactly the same time as this helpful vote situation, Ridge told me that he and the member described above, had been emailing with each other. Allegedly, there was some inappropriate stuff emailed (not messaged through RIA) to Ridge. This allegedly inappropriate stuff came to Stark’s attention, who understandably, was not happy about the situation.

Stark posted an angry personal attack against the reviewer who had been emailing with Ridge on RateItAll (though without actually naming the person), and the reviewer responded with a threatening message. Unfortunately, both of these posts were not immediately noticed, and stayed on the site for longer than I would have liked.

Eventually, the two posts were deleted, and both reviewers were warned. No disciplinary action was taken against Stark (as it was an extenuating circumstance) or the other reviewer (as it was a response to an attack.)

And of course, it is not within RateItAll’s domain to discipline RIA members for what (allegedly) happens on their own time, via their own personal email servers. From the perspective of site discipline, any email or real world correspondence that happens between RIA members is simply not relevant.

I did make at least one critical mistake in my handling of this situation – I discussed some of the details of the bogus vote getting with Ridge. Over the years, I discussed A LOT of site issues with Ridge. Both strategic, and tactical. In a lot of ways, Ridge was one of my most trusted advisors on things related to RIA. He was probably the most respected member of the RIA community, he had the site’s best interest in mind, and he is an incredibly smart, mature, and insightful guy. Of course I’d want to tap his wisdom.

So why was it a mistake to discuss the bogus helpfuls with Ridge? Because of the timing, and his relationship with Stark.

I can imagine Stark’s outrage when she found out that not only was a RateItAll member emailing inappropriate stuff to her man, but that same member was accumulating bogus helpful votes.

Flash forward to last Friday. Stark again posted a personal attack on the reviewer (without specifically naming the person). I removed it. Stark immediately posted it again. I removed it and suspended her account to try and talk things with Stark via Ridge.

There was no way that I was going to allow a public, nasty, personal shootout on the site.

In messaging with Ridge, it became pretty clear that Stark (and probably Ridge) expected the reviewer to be banned, and saw my decision not to ban the user as a slap in the face. I responded that it was not within my domain to ban somebody for something that happened away from RateItAll. Ridge responded that he understood that, but what about the bogus helpfuls? I responded that the user had already gone through a suspension, and based on how I’ve moderated the site in the past, I could not justify going right to a ban for that particular violation.

So we were stuck. Stark was furious that an RIA member could get away with inflating their helpfuls and crossing the line with her boyfriend, and she wasn’t even given the opportunity to respond on the site. Ridge, already concerned about what he perceived as a growing problem with RIA’s culture (more on this to follow), was also in the awkward situation in which his continued participation on RIA might be seen as disrespectful to Stark (my speculation).

What a mess, what a mess, what a mess.

Soon after, I received a note from Ridge requesting that I reactivate Stark’s account so that she could self delete. I complied. Stark deleted her account. Soon after, Ridge deleted his account. This was a devastating surprise, though looking back, he probably felt himself with no other options.

At a micro level, I feel that my only mistake was discussing the details of the bogus votes with Ridge – you don’t tell something to one half of a couple, and expect it not to get to the other half. That’s not fair. This information, which was incomplete and should have been confidential, only inflamed the situation even more.

I stand by my decision not to ban the other reviewer, and not to let my respect and admiration for Ridge make me moderate the site in an unfair manner.

But at a macro level, I failed miserably. The site lost its best reviewer and list maker and friend in Ridge. Worse, I don’t really think he wanted to leave (I could be wrong about that).

My gut tells me that Stark was going to take off regardless, but perhaps more skilled diplomacy by me could have salvaged her RIA career as well.

Wiseguy

This brings us to Saturday.

Wiseguy was a respected and passionate member of RateItAll. His main interest was politics, which meant that he got into it from time to time with folks (including me), but I think that there was a lot of respect for him on both sides of the political aisle. He’s a guy that I know cared deeply about the site, and when he said something regarding site management issues, I listened.

Saturday morning, Wiseguy posted the following video to YouTube expressing concern about the recent loss of talent from RateItAll. He also suggested that “if it had been him, he’d be gone” (I’m assuming that he meant the bogus helpfuls) and that I needed to get a handle on some of the shenanigans that certain reviewers were getting away with. Finally, he suggested that I work harder to keep the talent from leaving.



His departure came as a shock to me. I had sensed some growing frustration from him over recent months – specifically, that he felt that liberals were treated better on RIA than conservatives. But still, I didn’t expect him to leave, and am pretty bummed out about it.

Two things in particular make me sad about Guy’s departure; 1) that it wasn’t his fight; and 2) he was given bad / incomplete information. The rumor that was floating around was that a reviewer had hacked into RateItAll and given themselves thousands of helpful votes, and was allowed to stay. This is very different scenario than what really happened – a technical glitch on RateItAll allowed a reviewer to give themself helpful votes.

So no Guy. You would not have been banned if it were you. Nobody would have, except perhaps somebody on final warning status. And you’re more than welcome to come back – we’d be thrilled to have you.


Moving Forward

So where are we at? Well, we’re bending, but hopefully not breaking. I’m heartened by some of the level headed things that folks are saying here. There’s a lot of talent, and humor, and class left on RateItAll, and although we’ve taken a terrible hit this week and lost some great, great people, I’m hopeful that we can get things moving in the right direction again.

One of the things that I’d like to address in the next few days is this issue of “culture.” I’m prioritizing community things over all else for now – step one is going to be getting rid of that damn not helpful button. No need for the negativity. I also have some other ideas for some tools with which we can recognize our friends, but without over dependence on the helpful button. Finally, given that helpful votes have become the de facto currency of the site, I believe that we are in need of better regulation around abusing the helpful button, so that we can make excessive cronyism unprofitable so to speak. Stay tuned.

RateItAll Has An Intern!

I'd like everyone to extend a warm welcome to Jose. Jose is a grad student at UC Hayward focused on e-business. He's an exchange student from Granada, Spain.

His primary role with RIA is going to be making sure that we have coverage on the site for things that are hot in the news. He's also going to be helping with responding to user feedback, and rolling out our new feedback widget. He may also blog occasionally.

I met Jose on the basketball court - he's the best European player that I've ever played with / against, and was at one point, getting paid to play hoops.

So please be nice to our new intern, and if you get a chance, shoot him a note to say hi.

New Mail Server Online

Wow. So far, it seems like the new mail server is having a substantial impact on overall site performance, specifically in terms of:

- Leaving a review (page is no longer hanging as email alerts are sent out)
- Sending a personal message
- Inviting others to rate / join

I knew our old mail server was crappy, but I didn't know it was THAT crappy.

Search Engine Just Got A Lot Better

We just made a small but important tweak to our search engine.

As you know, the site is partitioned into three primary channels: RIA, Weblists, and Local. Until just a few minutes ago, our general search results were prioritized in that order. So if you did a search for George W. Bush, you would see results from RIA before you saw results from Weblists - we did this because we could vouch for the quality of the listing on RIA, whereas the quality of the listings on Weblists run the gamut from excellent to weak.

The problem with the way things were set up, is that we didn't have control over the weighting involved in driving the results. So the search engine would display ALL results from RIA regarding George W. Bush, even if it was just a casual mention of the word "Bush" in passing in a review, ahead of any listing from Weblists - even ahead of a listing that was specifically about George W. Bush. This was really annoying, and it made it really hard to find, say, where Barry Bonds ranked in the Biggest Jerks in Sports list.

This is no longer the case. We now have control over the weighting for the three partitions for the site. Currently, a search for George W. Bush will still show results from RIA first, but a Weblist listing for George W. Bush will now outrank a passing reference of "Bush" in a review in the RIA channel.

This is a small tweak, but I think you'll find it improves the quality of the search engine dramatically.

I Love Rate-O-Matic

Rate-O-Matic is one of my favorite RIA features to come down the pipe in a long time. I especially like the "speed rate" option for specific lists.

There's a few things I really like about this feature:

- It helps you find stuff that you wouldn't have otherwise rated
- Your rating is not biased by what other people have said
- It's a quick and easy way to blast through a list
- It's a quick and easy way to blast through your own new weblist, to announce its presence to the site

According to our stats package, in just a few short days, the Rate-O-Matic page has become the second most popular page on the site (after Recent Comments).

It seems that I'm not the only person enjoying this feature, and over the next few days you'll see more integration points where you can hook into this service.

Email Alerts Turned Off

RateItAll's mail server is a piece of garbage. It's always crapping out on us, and worse, it slows down the reviewing process on the site - here's why:

When somebody sets up an email alert on an item or for a reviewer, when a review is posted, the site waits for the email alert to be generated before loading the page. Because the mail server is so crappy, this sometimes takes a few seconds (sometimes more than a few), meaning the page hangs until that connection is made with the mail server.

Well the server has been getting progressively worse. Today, it was taking so long to post a review, that I've decided to just turn email alerts off until we can get a new mail server in place.

So, we're shelling out the $600 for a new server, which should be up sometime tomorrow. Until then, there will be no email alerts (new messages, new ratings, etc.) sent from RateItAll.

The good news is that the reviewing process is super fast now.