(Note: Some of this info was posted as a comment previously)
New Moderator
After Pete stepped down as a moderator we needed someone else to fill the moderation gap. We are pleased to announce our newest moderator a a a. Yep, another Melburnian adding to the moderation team. a a a went from being a user to a power user to a moderator. Having an extra hand will help us run the community smoothly. Last month we had 1616 reports from users!
Say Hi, a a a
Power Users
We have been slowly adding more power users which gives users the power to edit and mark deals as expired. For those power users, you should now have access to a new forum where you can discuss whatever with other power users.
Media Uploader
New media uploader. There is more work to be done on this one but please use the announcement thread to discuss it.
Mild Suprise Price Tracker
MildSurprise integration — we are adding MildSurprise links to JB Hi-Fi, Officeworks and Harvey Norman deals for you to quickly look up the historical price. MildSurprise is developed by our community member Gecko to track prices on Australian retailer websites. This is now live on OzBargain.
Comment Voting on Mobile Site
Comment Voting on mobile devices is now a 2 step process. Scott's attempt to fix the issue mentioned here when people accidentally voted down comments on smart phones. You now need to click on a Menu button and then choose whether to +1 or -1 the comment.
Productreview
Scott just checked in an initial integration with ProductReview. We are using their widgets to link products to their review pages. For example Nexus 4 product page here. Unfortunately the "linking" is pretty much a manual process at the moment.
Visual Changes
Quite a few visual changes in this update. We have been using Silk icons when we first developed OzBargain. However bitmap icons don't look good on devices with different DPI — for example high res smart phones, tablets and laptops. They are also a bit distractingly too colourful. We have now migrated some icons to use Font Awesome which gives you a vector icon.
Competitions
This week you can win yourself tickets to the Taste of Sydney. After that we will be having a video based contest for a bigger prize. (No Harlem shuffles allowed!)
Report Statistics
As mentioned before, our reports are up to the highest level yet at 1616. We definitely want to continually encourage people to report issues, so part of our discussion this week was ways to reduce the number through automation or other ideas. As an example, we've received a higher amount of Sold Out/Expired reports. This is something that a power user can do. So in that respect we are increasing the number of power users. For those who may wonder, how come they haven't been made a power user, it isn't personal. We are just trying to get it right the first time. We are also looking into having the ability to mark as expired automated.
New Duplicate Rule
See discussion. So if an individual item is posted that was previously listed in a big list of items post, then it's not a duplicate UNLESS it was specifically mentioned in the title or first line of the post.
Comment Voting Guidelines
Developing some guidelines on comment voting.
Stay Smart Online Initiative
National Cyber Security Awareness Week is an Australian Government initiative, held annually in partnership with industry, community and consumer groups and state and territory governments.
The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy (nice short name) tries to make Australians more aware of scams, dodgy website, and things to watch out for. As we run into much of that here, it would be a good initiative to be on board with them (and vice-versa). More to come later.
You can follow the OzBargain crew on Twitter.
Got any questions, comments, or suggestions, let 'em rip.
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