IndianPad Blog

We have always given more power to users who have a high karma as they spend a lot of their time interacting with this site. A new user can quickly gain karma but sustaining it at a high level requires a lot of effort.

We recognise this fact and all users who have a karma value over 14.00 can now act as admins on the site. This means that they can temporarily disable users and remove stories. All admin level activities are sent to us for final validation but this should help alleviate the spam problem on the site.

We would like to involve the IndianPad community to increase visibility and support for NGO and charity organizations that are doing some great work in India.

We are planning the following for a start but are open to any suggestions to improve this program…

• We will advertise organizations that are recommended by our members. We encourage you to discuss the organizations in separate stories so that it increases visibility for these organizations and also allows us to choose the best candidates.
• Every month, the ‘IPadder of the Month’ may sponsor a charity to receive donations from IndianPad. This is in addition to the prize money offered to Monthly IPadders.

We have been under a pretty determined DOS attack over the last couple of days. We made some temporary adjustments but that did not do the trick. So today we made some significant changes to our security model and updated a lot of components on our server.

If you see any anomalies or weird behavior on the site please add a comment to this and we will look into it right away.

Thanks!

We are making some changes based on this and other posts.

First, anonymous voting is not a big problem as you need a large number of them to come on the first page and too many of them will certainly attract scrutiny from our bot. The bigger problem from our perspective is fake accounts!

Changes

• Users found forming groups or fake accounts to vote up their stories will be ‘banned’ without warning.
• Users posting adult stories in general sections will be ‘banned’ without warning.
• Anonymous votes now only carry 0.2 of karma. This means that you need over 350 anonymous votes for a story to be published.

The spam situation on IndianPad is slowly coming under control as our filters learn from experience.

However, we have started noticing that some users are now creating duplicate accounts and posting links from forums that require registration before viewing content. From now on, all stories from such hosts will be disabled and marked as spam.

Also, starting immediately, all posts marked as spam will lose their outgoing links. This is thwart efforts by SEO pundits to use IndianPad for increasing their page rank, etc.

There may be some false positives who get caught in this and we encourage them to contact us. We go through each case individually before marking the sites as spam and will try to answer any questions that you may have.