Welcome! We have a bunch of new features that will hopefully interest you as we begin our new year. I’ll go ahead and jump right into the list…
- Advanced Search
This is a feature that I’m sure many of you will appreciate. Next to the search box above the right sidebar you’ll notice a button that says “Advanced“. Clicking on that will bring up an advanced search screen where you can choose custom categories to search, or even have it scour the comments for text! The other key thing is that you can have it sort the results by relevance instead of just by date.
- Updated CyberMarks
There are a lot of changes to how CyberMarks are used. For those of you not familiar with CyberMarks it is our bookmarking system here at CyberNet. Underneath each article’s title you’ll notice a link that says “CyberMark,” and clicking on that link will store the article for you to retrieve later on (assuming that you’re a registered user who is logged in). The whole system utilizes AJAX so that bookmarking an article keeps you on the page you’re currently viewing.
The first thing that we added is a sidebar module on the homepage that gives you access to your last 5 CyberMarked articles along with a quick link to get to the CyberMark Management screen. This makes it easy to store articles that you may not have time to read right now and come back to them later on.
On the Management screen you’ll also notice a section that lists the number of articles that have been CyberMarked by all of the users and the top-5 most CyberMarked articles. Hopefully as the system begins to grow these statistics will closely reflect some of the most popular articles.
- Tip System
This feature has been requested for quite some time. We have been putting it off because there was a decent amount of backend work that we wanted to do on it. Most of you won’t really notice the work that has been put into this feature but believe me, it’s there. Now All-Stars are not solely based on the number of comments that they have left, because registered users can earn stars for tips that they send to us. Anyone who is already an All-Star cannot have that status taken away but they can continue to earn more and more stars.Here’s how it works. If you send us a tip and we end up writing about it we will give you some “stars” (as we like to call them). Depending on how unique the tip is you can receive anywhere from 1 star to 10 stars which will quickly help you become a CyberNet All-Star. Don’t worry, you’ll still receive one star for each comment. The Management screen will tell you how many stars you have from leaving comments and how many you have from sending us tips. That way you always know where you stand.
For those of you that have already sent us tips you can still get credit for them if you send us an email with links to the articles that we give you credit for. We would go through and do this ourselves but it would take a long time to find out who is registered and who isn’t as well as assign each of those people stars. When thanking someone for a tip we typically use the name that shows up on the blog in comments, so you can probably just use our search feature to find the articles that we credited you on.
- CyberNotes Sidebar
We’ve made it even easier for you to keep up with our CyberNotes articles. There is now a sidebar module that lists the last 7 CyberNotes articles along with their corresponding days. Remember, you can always collapse the sidebar module should you decide that you don’t want to see it.
- Updated Comment Tracking
As more and more users comment on articles it becomes increasingly difficult to keep tabs on the new comments. We previously added a comment system that keeps track of the last time you viewed an article in order to calculate whether there has been any new comments. There is now one small feature that makes the system even better…a tilde (~) is added in front of any article that you have commented on:
Now you’ll easily be able to tell whether you should check the article for a response to one of your own comments!
- New Spam Notification
Our last feature deals with spam notification. Every now and then a good comment (even one posted by a register user) may get filtered as spam and won’t get removed until I go and do so manually(which is done about 2 to 3 times per day). In the last major update to the site we made it so that registered users would get notified if one of their comments was being held back by our spam filter…but now everyone will get to know. If your comment is filtered as spam you’ll see this notification located above your comment immediately after it is posted:
There we go, that’s everything that we have to introduce to you today! It is the start of a New Year and hopefully you’ll find these new features to be useful when gathering news. Most of these features, actually I think all of them, have been requested by both visitors and users of the site. So if you have anything else you would like to see implemented make sure you let us know because we want to make your experience the best it can be. Happy 2007!
Happy New Year and thanks for the new features!!!
Happy New Year to you to and I’m glad you like the features!
These new features will make CyberNet News even better!
I’ve gotten bit by that spam-filter before so this will be a Good Thing (TM) for your regulars!
CyberNet already climbed into my top-5 must monitor feeds and I don’t think a day could go by without me checking it for the latest breaking developments.
You seem to cover a few specialized topics in great depth and commentary, but provide a wide-net of additional subjects and features that makes it refreshing to read.
I’m learning lots!
Keep up the great work!
i think you became the first site, or among the first, who actually deals with things like web 2.0 (but not just), and then turns the site into a community with web 2 features.
really cool.
happy new year.
Thanks for your comments guys! We’re always open to feedback, so if you can think of anything additional that you’d like to see, let us know
Great new features, I really like the new CyberMarks, I can find my marks way faster now.
About the tip system, I’ve sent [tech.cybernetnews.com] and [tech.cybernetnews.com]
Happy New Year.
Okay tito, just got a couple of stars added to your account! Thanks for the tips.
Great Job Guys!
You’ve really separated yourselves from the pack with CyberNet News.
Keep up the great work!
Why is it you always bump up the requirements for All-Star every time I’m close?
Thanks for the compliment Chris!
Well, we typically bump it up after someone reaches the All-Star status because we can’t have too many people getting it, then it would become pointless? We just gave you some stars for the tips that you emailed us with…so it gave you a little bump into the first upcoming spot.
I’ve been in the first upcoming spot since you started tracking comments! People only pass me when they get All-Star, and then when I’m finally there you move it.
You seem to be encouraging people who just post “good job” or “interesting” on every article, rather than people who actually contribute with every post. I think you should reward insightful posts with more points, and give more points for tips that are useful. Obviously a “good job” comment is not as valuable as an insight that makes your blog very useful for the readers.
One possibility for such a system would be a user-moderation system – so you wouldn’t have to do all the work. Limited points could be given to individuals contributing useful stuff (they are getting modded up more than not). If you want more details into this system, just shoot me an email.
I just don’t bother with the all-star thing. I posted plenty of comments before I subscribed, and i continue to post when i read an interesting article; why bother competing for an “all-star” label?
Thanks a ton for the bookmarks sidebar!
Same here. I had like 90 points, but that’s nothing compared to what I have to earn now. If I had posted ten more comments, I’d have my status now and wouldn’t be able to lose it anymore.
Anyways, I couldn’t find the CyberNet e-mail address, so I’ll post the article link here:
[tech.cybernetnews.com] (look for Four Second Fury: “Thanks for the tip Pieter De Decker!”)
COMMENT TRACKING AT LAST!!! **RUNS AROUND IN EXCITEMENT**
One problem Ryan, its tracking my comments as well as everyone elses. After I left the above comment, I went to the user interface and this post was at the top of the list, saying there was one new comment. That was me. Obviously I dont need to know when I comment!
Look at my score – I’m quite literally one day late.
It’s actually kind of funny. With the bump in the “All Star” requirements only 2 users are qualify as an “All Star”.
If the point of the “All Star” label is to encourage commenting then why double the number of comments required to be an “All Star”?
A user-moderated system would be a good idea but there is a lot of potential for abuse there. That is why sites like Digg are running into trouble because people are unnecessarily burying submissions and flagging sites (such as ours) as spam. So while I would like to think that a user-moderated system would be a lot of fun it could also cause a lot of trouble.
Providing more stars for insightful comments, as you mentioned, is definitely a possibility and is something that I don’t mind doing myself. With how I have the backend setup I can add stars anytime to any account, but I have also received several more tips than usual in the past 24-hours so I think rewarding people for tips will also help the community.
We went ahead and added a few points to your account for the tip and we also realized that the All-Star limit was increased too much so we dropped it back down to 125. I think it should stay like this for a little while because the upcoming All-Stars are a little more spaced out in terms of stars.
It ignores any posts that you make yourself but sometimes the browser has a hard time writing to the necessary cookie to let it know when you have viewed an article. I notice this happening if you open multiple articles in tabs at the same time which would make the browser try and write to the cookie for each of those tabs…and some of them are bound to receive an error. If you continue to see the problem let me know and I’ll look into it more, but I haven’t changed much in the comment tracking code from what it previously was.
We lowered the score back down to 125 so you should be there in no time.
This is true and we have been considering how we should handle this. We don’t want to remove the All-Stars because they have earned it at one point or another, but we might make the list only show “Active” All-Stars where they have commented in the last 2-weeks. If they comment again they will be added back to the list but it helps promote continued participation. Let me know of any feedback you might have on this.
Allrightythen…now y’all do reallize that there is nothing really special about the ‘All-Star’ status other than the lable on the comments?
FWIW my number could be a lot higher if I found all the comments I had made prior to registering (BTW Ryan when DID I register) and if I e-mailed all the article for the tips. But I won’t do that to y’all, because then I would be knon as “the guy who messed up the curve.”
Looks like you registered September 1, 2006 if you really care to know.
Sounds about right as I moved the Blog to Wordpress on September 6th to support your pingback feature (which doesn’t seem to work anymore BTW). So I likely found you guys in August and I think I was searching Firefox 2 info.
If you schedule posts in advance WordPress does not ping the site otherwise a hyperlink to your article would show up on the blog being pinged before your article is even posted. I’m not sure if you are publishing your articles immediately after finishing, but that could be one of the problems. If you post your articles immediately without scheduling let me know so that I can look into it more.
Also, I have changed the “Current All-Stars” on the Management screen to only reflect those that have commented in the last week.
Well, I am not going to be doing any new blog enteries until Sunday, but I’ll let you know if there’s problems.
On digg, anyone can moderate as they please. I am suggesting giving the power only to people who have proven to be good contributors…and they only keep that power if they continue to be good moderators also.
Ahhh…that is a very interesting concept, and I like it. I think I will have to “draw” out some plans on how I can make that work. Kinda like moderators for the site.
Like moderators for a site, but they are chosen via algorithm (automatically) instead of by hand. Although certainly the admin can override any algorithmic choices.
In my idea, the algorithm also determines how much moderation power they have. (Rather than being able to absolutely rate anything, they are given moderator points in certain amounts.)