I thought we could start an ongoing post letting people know about some of the things we are working on, discussing, technical developments with the site etc. We want to be as transparent as possible with what's going on so I'm thinking a small weekly or so comment would be good? Not sure if people will find this interesting but we are constantly working on and discussing things. To put it in perspective we have 1012 threads in the moderator forum with almost 10,000 comments. Given there is only a handful of us it's a lot of discussion!
Recent Technical Developments (last 2 weeks):
Exclude expired deals from newsletters. A member contacted us asking why we are including expired deals in the newsletter. A lot of deals on OzBargain expire quite quickly especially if you are setup to receive the 7am newsletter. Did you know you can change what time you receive your newsletter? Go to Account-Edit-Newsletters and you can pick to receive it in the morning, mid-day, or in the evening.
A couple of related issues. A user can't edit a post if the store is banned. Why would this happen you ask? Well, from time to time, we get a flood of people posting the same deal more than likley because people receive an email from a retailer. The other day it was JB Hi-Fi. So we banned JB for a short time to stem the duplicates. So now users can edit their posts when the store is ban. We also added shorter ban times so we can ban a site for 24 hours with a link to the more than likely duplicate post. Trying to prevent duplicates before people post is a never ending task but little by little we are getting there.
We often get new users sockpuppeting. The reason always is I didn't know I couldn't do that (blame Facebook liking). Well, now first time voters will receive a short confirmation confirming it's the first deal they are voting for and that they shouldn't vote if they are affiliated (friend, family, etc.) otherwise the store will be banned. This will hopefully make things clearer.
Did you know we have a Facebook page? OzBargain has been posting frontpage deals that reach 50 votes automatically (we also manually write posts). Well the guy who wrote the RSS Facebook plugin decided to fix something but has broken other things, so for the past week it looked like we are writing the posts instead of users. Well, we're still trying to get a permanent fix but we've added poster name and deal title to the posts now.
Lots of bug fixes and internal stuff that's too hard to explain.
Promotional activities (last 2 weeks):
- We recently asked users to pick a charity that OzBargain can donate money to. Read the thread here. We ended up donating money to both Orange Pigeon and Swags for Homeless.
- There will be some upcoming competitions for small denomination gift cards. It should be fun and simple. Won't even require you moving from your computer. Hopefully, that will happen starting next week.
- We also have plans to have a big competition with a bigger prize. That will be later in the year and will involve people moving from their computer.
- Meetup. The Brisbane Meetup seemed to go well. I'm in Melbourne and Scott/Moocher are in Sydney. It's likely that the next meetup will be in one of those cities. If anyone has suggestions for places in Melbourne (possibly with a group buy deal), we'd love to do one. Of course, any of you can organize one and OzBargain will be happy to help out.
Moderator discussion (last 2 weeks):
There are lots of things discussed here but probably can only discuss non user specific issues and nothing revealing our internal secret sauce of catching spammers and sockpuppeters.
- IRC. People have asked for live chat function a couple of times. We trialed it out and it works quite well other than the fact that I can't remember any of the commands. We need to find the best way to integrate this into the site (or not).
- Discussion of blocking overseas voters from voting. Overseas users are where a lot of our time is spent. There are some issues with this that need to be sorted.
- Voting and reporting changes. This is an ongoing issue with many different proposals. Some users like the neg vote as is, some want to get rid of it, some just want to vote without commenting, some want voting with a list of reasons, etc.
- Inappropriate or confusing usernames. Yes, some people have some creative yet profane ideas when it comes to usernames.
- Competitions within deals. We have been allowing deals that additionally add a competition within their deals (some trivia question, guess the vote count at a certain time). The latter was banned as it involved people artificially voting and also people voting for the deal to get to the number. It's cleaner if any competitions go in the competition forum where a rep if they want can mention it in their post. Deals should be about the deal.
- Referral links in deal body. See post here. Another tough one. We want members to benefit if it doesn't cost the rest of the members anything. On the other hand, we don't want people posting "deals" just to get referral credit. As it stands, new users or those with a P in front of their name can't post referral links in deal bodies. Everyone else can but are limited to 2 a week.
- Selling and swapping forum. Improving it. Well, I still don't know why people would list things on there as OzBargainers are quite knowledgeable with prices. To each his own.
- Duplicates. Another difficult subject and #1 moderation activity that gets people mad at us. See here. There will some changes with this as for example, a users posts a huge listing of deals from a retailer. Later on someone else posts 1 item from the huge listing. By the letter of the law, it's a duplicate. On the other hand, it's not always easy to see an individual deal in a huge listing of products. The trial we've had with allowing weekly and individual listings for supermarket deals has been very successful. Maybe this should be applied to other categories?
I could probably go on and on but that's a small taste of just the last 2 weeks. Check out the OzBargainBuzz twitter account for some more occasional behind the scenes stuff. Also check out the blog on Monday as we've put together an OzBargain Zeitgeist showing top store, deals by country, etc. If you like stats (who doesn't) then you hopefully will find that interesting.
Well if we get feedback from this thread, we'll continue the updates. Remember most of the discussion and technical changes are set off by feedback from the community. If you have a comment or suggestion, drop us a link in this forum.
Definitely continue the updates, this was a good read. I'm interested in how ozbargain is improving over time, just not interested enough to trawl thru the forums ;)