New Features And Performance Improvements »
Posted By tdrapeau 9 months ago in Science & TechnologyHappy St. Patrick's Day everyone! We at Propeller are celebrating by releasing a few new features and improving the performance of the website. Here is a rundown on the changes:
Drop Upgrade: We have noticed two major uses for the new drop function we released last month. Some use the drop to signal that a story is not news and should not be shown on the site. Others use the drop to tell us that they disagree with the point of view of the story's author. Both uses of the drop are extremely valuable to us, although we want to treat those two situations differently.
A story is a drop candidate if the number of drops as a percentage of the total (props + drops) exceeds our defined "drop threshold." As of today, if a drop candidate has not gained significant participation from the community, we will consider it "grounded" and block it from hitting the homepage. If the story passes the threshold but has significant community involvement, we will flag it "controversial" instead. For those interested in seeing grounded stories, you can click the "show" link to the right of the "Most Popular Stories" header on the homepage.
Member Block: The top member request at the moment is to return the full member block functionality which previously existed in a prior version of Propeller. We are happy to announce that this feature is back! When a member blocks another, they will no longer see the other's comments or messages. In order to unblock a member, go to your messages page and select the "Block/Unblock" option from the Message Center menu on the top left.
Performance: There have been a number of members who sent in feedback urging us to improve Propeller's performance. We have worked hard to improve performance over the past three weeks, and believe that Propeller today is noticeably faster than it was a month ago. For the geekishly inclined, our performance improvements came from aggressive content and data caching, optimized database queries, code optimizations, and image consolidation using spritemaps.
We also brought back the read count display (shown as "Read(#)" next to the "Discuss" link), and restored the ability to access the context menu by right clicking on the "Read Full Story" link.
We hope that these changes improve the overall Propeller experience. Thanks to all of the members who wrote in to tell us how we can improve the site, it is truly appreciated. We will raise a glass of green beer and celebrate the Propeller community tonight, before getting back to work on the next set of features. As always, feedback is welcomed here.
May Your Propeller Continue To Spin,
Tom (tdrapeau)
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tdrapeau
Tom Drapeau is the Director of Propeller social news. He enjoys all manner of geekery and internet foolishness. He has seen every episode of Battlestar ...
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Beau78909 months ago
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Everything you mentioned improves the experience here. Thanks! And I'm also thrilled to see we can now use line breaks in replies to PMs!
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So far, I've noticed only one flaw with the enhancements, which I'm sure you're working on. It seems the aggressive caching keeps some features from updating.
For instance, I'm told that I have 6 new messages, though I checked those a couple of hours ago--and when I go to my sitemail, those old messages are still flagged as new. And vote and comment totals at the top of stories seem to be inaccurate--I'm not sure whether that's related. -
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WikiMap9 months ago
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Thanks for the continuous performance improvement to the site, but still we need one very important feature that is duplicate story filter at the time of submitting story.
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I hope this feature will be available soon. Once again thanks for the performance improvement. -
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tdrapeau9 months ago
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If a story is shared using the "Share Story" button on the story detail page, it will show up in the new format. Some folks are still going to their message page and handwriting a message linking to the story they are sharing...which does not benefit from the new shared story look.
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FunnyBoyz9 months ago
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Could you please bring a feature to kick out spammers? Who spam our profiles with Viagra and other dirty links?
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Most of my friends profile are being bombarded by such things..
like engineer, stoners and technologexpert people spam their profiles please make it so that we have to approve what is written on our profile..
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Spadecaller9 months ago
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Thanks Tom for the opportunity to celebrate the improvements that Propeller has implemented. I think the new features and improved performance makes Propeller a great place to share ideas and to exchange views; it should benefit us all.
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In addition to attracting new blood, I imagine it will result in retaining existing members. Thanks again for showing us that you care about the members and their input. -
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altnrg9 months ago
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I like all the latest new features. Great job.
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There is one additional feature that I would like to see. In the 'Share story' - is it possible to have in additional to the friends check box option a 'To' option to specify friends manually? -
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TimALoftis9 months ago
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I am glad that the performance or speed has improved over the last few days. Makes it so much smoother to navigate the site.
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As a future enhancement, I would like to see a 'Check Your Friends Submissions' button as part of the front page instead of having to go into our profiles to access.
Thanks, guys for job well done.
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