Spam has increasingly become one of the biggest problems on IndianPad. Many of you have complained about this and we have been working hard to fix this.
Today, we are launching a new spam engine that should slow down, if not stop, spam on this site. The new algorithm uses multiple variables to determine whether a user, story or site is spam or not. Also, we have removed all existing bans/blocks placed on users and sites as the new system does not target an individual site or users.
The algorithm should improve over time so there may be an initial period where some stories are blocked or accidentally marked as spam. Please reach out to us if you need any assistance - http://www.indianpad.com/about/contact
We just added a new link on the front page that takes you to the ‘Upcoming Stories’ page.
The Upcoming Stories is a dynamic page that tracks all stories that are close to appearing on the front page and it only displays stories that you have not voted for yet.
We have been working on ways to get fresh stories on the front page and this allows users to push popular stories over the brink so that they move to the front page.
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.
Some of you may have already noticed that the Google Ads have disappeared from IndianPad. We are not sure what caused this as we did not receive any notices. We have opened a case with Google Adsense and will pass the information as soon as we hear back from them. However, its the holiday season so it may be a while before we hear back from them.
I would suggest that you remove your Google ID and run your personal ads while we sort this out.
Happy Holidays and have a Safe New Year!
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.
You can already view the users who have voted for a story. Now, you can also view the country they are from. This is especially useful for votes from anonymous users as it gives you another insight on where the target population for a story is from…
Check this story for example and click on the Country label to see a demo…
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!
This assumes that you have entered your Adsense ID in your profile to make money from Google ads shown under your stories. Check here for more details…
- Have a descriptive title as all ads are targeted to the text that appears there.
- We use section targeting so if your post only contains pictures then you should have a descriptive title or some text along with the images. Otherwise, the ads appearing on your posts may be irrelevant and therefore low CPM.
- Create a separate channel for ads on IndianPad so that you can monitor the revenue that flows through this site.
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.