happybabysent22@yahoo.com
Hello my dear .
How are you getting on today and how was your night .i hope that you are doing very great my dear .am fine too .My name is Happiness i saw your profile at www.indianpad.com and i love it ithink we can click so please i will like you to email me back through my email address thus:(happybabysent22@yahoo.com ). pls i will like you to send me your email address so that i will tell you more about my self and also my picture you to know who i am .hope you understand.thanks.
Awaiting to see your lovely reply soonest.
Happiness.
PLEASE I WILL LIKE YOU TO CONTACT WITH THIS MAIL ADDRESS (happybabysent22@yahoo.com )

And here’s my response to this love-stricken person:

Dear happy00/happybabysent22,

I’m thrilled beyond words at your fantastic offer. In fact, I’m in seventh heaven right now to think that someone finds my humble profile so attractive.

Despite my exhilaration, I must, unfortunately, reject your kind proposal. My mind tells me that it is not fair to take advantage of your foolish attentions since you seem to have sent 13 other copies of the above message (two times to me as well). Besides, it appears that you already have 22 other happy babies to take care of and I am a firm believer in birth control measures – you know, the “Hum Do, Hamarey Do” bit.

So with a heavy heart, I must take your leave but I wish you the very best in your noble mission here on IndianPad.

The bottom line of all this is, there are no short cuts…we cannot say any exceptional story that is going to the bottom can be commented on by the poster cause the definition of exceptional varies from one person to another. So its either all users should be free to indulge in story promotion through commenting or no one will be allowed under any circumstance…just to put the point through, I am talking about the future, not the past…

Do you guys agree with me? Do let me know…and btw, I am open to any result, all I am asking is that all be treated in the same way and a benchmark be set for Indianpad for Admins and users to follow…

Have your say…

• Cleanup and streamline code
• New graphics and updated look
• Ability to rate and even block users to create your own custom IPad
• Recommended stories tab – This uses your voting history as well as how you rate other users to find stories that may interest you.
• Better chat mechanism – The chat will be embedded within the site itself so that its not a stand-alone feature
• Streamline the submit process
• New tutorials, demos and videos to help new users understand how it all works
• Stricter spam control

• Disable Editing of Links once the story is posted (devilsworkshop)
• Personal Message Notification – Users will get an alert when a new private message is posted. (devilsworkshop)
• Fully Loaded Sidebars for New Users – Sidebar widgets (Related, Recent Comments etc) should be active by default. (devilsworkshop)
• Story Views – Displays the number of clicks to the source article. (devilsworkshop)
• User Navigation – A dropdown when one clicks on a username providing various options like user history, sent posts etc. (devilsworkshop)

As always, the best ideas come from our users so please feel free to suggest your own features and we will qualify and add them to this list…

How come most stories submitted by some users always make it even if they’re complete rubbish?

And a newcomer’s stories never make it even if they’re excellent?

STATS:
Mature Front Page – goutami – 7, Spencer_911 – 5, gvk – 4 (could this ever happen on digg?)
Main Front Page: Apparently the entire world’s best stories are only posted by a users like spencer_911, avaksi, tollywoodbollywood, drwiz

Somehow these users (and some I may have missed) seem to have ‘gold’ fingers. Everytime they push submit the story gets to the front page. Their blogs are the best in the world. Or they believe if its the olympics they manipulate the system to get an olympics story to the front page – as if this were a news site.

USERS WHO SUBMIT:
Gradually new users who submit stories are realizing it is completely futile because they will never make it anywhere. This is because the more ‘powerful’ users & groups control which stories make it to the top and not the community.

USERS WHO READ:
Visitors are already realizing that the content is completely controlled and managed – some promoted by bloggers for their own blogs, others promoted to the front page because it seems politically correct stories for that time.

It’s all fake and not really an inclusive mechanism – possibly because no one votes anymore – because no one cares.

MANIPULATION METHODS:
There are obvious and easy ways to manipulate voting on ipad – I wont describe them here because then everyone might start attempting them.

Already readership is falling and soon like other indian bookmarking sites bloggers will come only to the submit page, submit and leave. Sure this keeps Alexa levels high but the purpose of indianpad is already lost.

Admin do something!

We recently made it clear in this comment that we will aggressively monitor and block users and sites engaging in blogspam. However, it seems that a lot of users are confused on what constitutes blogspam.

The definition of blogspam in quite simple and is explained in detail here

1. Find interesting content somewhere on the Internet
2. Post that content on your own website
3. Post the link to your website rather than the original source

So, a story would be blogspam unless you are adding your opinion or insight to a story that you copy/paste from another site.

blogspam – A blog where the author copies from the original article/webpage in an attempt to increase his or her own traffic. This becomes a waste of the reader’s time forcing them to click through the blog to get to the actual article. Often submitted to sites like Digg or Reddit.

The amount of blogspam on IndianPad has hit new limits. Every story I read nowadays leads to a site that has copied the story from another site and most of these don’t even give credit to the original site. I don’t mind users posting their opinion on a news story but just copying the whole text from another site does not make it a linkable story.

Congrats, Avaksi!!

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.

How IndianPad.com looks like right now?

Launch of the site, Dec 23, 2005 (BabyPad)

If you click on the screen shot below you will see that Avaksi, a current leader of IndianPad, was one of the most active users since the get go.

The site did not make any appearance changes until Feb 02, 2006, when it added a “Recent Comment Widget”.

On Apr 02, 2006, IndianPad made many additions and gave almost the current appearance or at least set the tone for today’s appearance of the site. On this date it added Tabs, instead of a yellow box for search, the space writes search now, it also added tags and event widgets. You may click on the picture to zoom and see the changes I have circled red.

On Apr 21, 2006 , it added some colors for each post. Blue for category, green for comments given, yellow for no comments, and pink for email button.

On June 11, 2006, IndianPad became drastically good. It added such unique features it still maintains and represents to this date. It added a music widget, which allows users to listen and make music playlists. Also it added a “Latest News“ widget and updated “Latest Comments” widget.

On Aug 04, 2006 IndianPad added a category for 18 plus content. (No Screen Shots)

On (unknown date), they added 125× 125 ads just above the tags widget, and I am not sure when they added the I-Pad logo, sorry about that but have no screen shots.

Somewhere between May of 2007 and June, they added all the features we can currently view on IndianPad.com and they also removed tags widget.

But the level of IndianPad today needs a makeover

I m not saying tht it should not have cross voting, bad posts , lame posts

I want to emphasize that the layout of the news and front page sucks big time

Sites like Reddit, Digg, have a definitive fanbase around them because of the innovation they have in there structure

I mean look at reddit it looks the same as 4 years ago but few features added to it have made it totally new to the fan base and mind you they are not complaining

Digg has always put user experience ahead of itself even facing sticky situations at times but nonetheless had trust in its users

But sorry to say IndianPad despite a few counter-voting changes and voting weightage has done literally nothing to enhance user experience

The front page is still a dull looking page with same old links from news sites, personal movie blogs, but nothing interesting

Do you really think that votng is the only solution then i believe u are wrong

Use a Fark Like structure to ensure what reaches the front Page and we have like so many moderators now so even 20 stories in a day on front page wud at least make it look reasonable and useful for users

It might sound a bit harsh but i do care where IndianPad is going, It has India in it but to waste such a good idea would be bigger shame

Please give comments or suggest the same to indianpad so that we can have a better IndianPad

At the moment the current system is not quite right, techincally i dont know how possible and right this change would be….but this way surely will say who has submitted a post first!

At the moment whoever clicks the submit story button to start with will get assigned a story number…and will be seen as a being posted first regardless of when they post that story.
Example of the issue: http://www.indianpad.com/story/156804
Although the story number difference on the above case is way tot high….but in general there is a scope for this to happen:

I Hope my post makes some sense….. :)
Any feedback is appreciated.
Thanks.

We have been working on some new features behind the scenes for some time now. Most of the new features are designed to discourage group voting and also to encourage the best stories to come on the front page. Many of these new features are already in play but are invisible as they are within the algorithms that calculate karma for stories. However, the most important of these features is what we are calling ‘affinity’.

We are still struggling with the massive horsepower required to calculate ‘affinity’ on the fly but in essence it calculates the following

• how much you vote for a user,
• how much you vote for a site,
• how much does a user post from a site,
• how many users post from that site

This allows us to extrapolate whether users are just pushing their own sites. Also, we can quickly find users who are forming a group and voting for one site or one user. Bottom line – High affinity is bad and low affinity is good. In our tests this method performs well but it takes a long time to calculate these and we are still working on a way to make this workable.

Don,t know why this happening or this was some server error.

Here are the link which are am trying to post

bollyone.com
Desibabesworld.com

This post draws inspiration from several of our users who post a variety of stories that meet with a variety of opinions. So, the situation begs the following question: What is the right way to vote on a story in IP?

Here are the guidelines I suggest:

Step 1: Read the headline and the description carefully. If there is no relation between the two, put in a comment that says “Bad Description” and then, mark the post as “Bad Description”. Example: http://www.indianpad.com/weird/270415

Step 2: Determine if the story is a duplicate. Beware of stories that contain only pictures, IP is not very good at identifying dupes. A number of times, IP misses dupes on text stories as well. If you are sure that it is a duplicate post, post a comment that says “Duplicate” and mark the story as a duplicate. If you can find the original link, post that in your comment as well.

Step 3: Read the link and determine if it has any relevance for you. If you think the story does not have any relevance for you – mark it Irrelevant. Remember, this is YOUR opinion, not a mass poll vote. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, so someone might really love that same story. Example: http://www.indianpad.com/story/268308

Step 4: If the link to the story takes you to something totally different, mark the story as “Bad Link”. Beware of marking older stories because links sometimes expire. This is not the original poster’s fault and should be left alone. Again, leave a comment and explain why you did so – as a courtesy. Example: http://www.indianpad.com/general_science/269600

Step 5: Spam – I usually use this vote to point out stories that are targeted towards masses and contain nothing of interest. Example: http://www.indianpad.com/sites/265229

Step 6: Lame – Use when the story has no meat in it at all, or if headline + description = contents of link. Example: http://www.indianpad.com/celebrity/259621

Step 7: Provocative/Move to Adult – Used when the poster is being offensive or post contains adult material.

I suggest the avoidance of harsh language and gaalis. These only offend the other party and lead to frayed relations. There’s nothing wrong in marking a story negatively. After all, it’s just one vote, so the poster should not feel offended. However, if a large number of users start marking a story negatively, then something must be wrong.

EDIT: Keeping in mind the comment and pics war currently going on on IP – it is my personal policy to mark ALL pics-only stories as LAME.

Looks like some of the changes that we asked for are in action right now.

As of today, there is no facility to identify who has voted a story or a comment negatively. You could go and vote a story as lame/irrelevant and not need to identify yourself. Most users on IP are considerate and add a comment to clarify their negative vote. I suggest that when a user votes negative, an auto-comment is added to the story comments automatically. So, if I vote “Lame” for a story, it will cast one negative (Lame) vote as well as automatically add a comment “Sorry, but I think this story is lame and voted accordingly” in my name in the comments section.

2. Weighted karma

As a user repeatedly votes for stories submitted by another user, the karma boost for that user’s stories go on reducing. When User A votes for User B’s story repeatedly, with each vote, the karma boost for User B’s stories reduces. Soon, a stage is reached where User A’s votes have no effect on User B’s stories karma. This will be a great deterrent to cross-voting. See here for a detailed discussion on this approach.

3. Diversity-based karma reduction

There is a section of users who keep posting the same genre of story time and again. This can be discouraged by adding a karma dependency on the variety of sites that are used to submit stories. For example, if a user keeps submitting stories from website www.thakeli.com, the karma for her stories submitted will go on reducing. To prevent smart users from copying stories from www.thakeli.com to their blogs and then submitting them, a new kind of negative vote (say) “Repetitive” will be added to the votes – which will allow users to flag such posts easily.

4. Selective Moderators

Today, the moderators of the site are chosen based on karma. Going forward, I propose that moderators be chosen based on a group of weighted factors such as availability of the person, willingness to perform the moderation, karma, quality of past judgement and actions, approvals from other existing mods etc. This will prevent tainted users from becoming mods based on karma alone.

5. Ability to ban users who haven’t submitted a story

This is something that will ease the load on the website as well as on the users. IndianPad has declared his intention of bringing this in, but we need it more than ever.

6. Temporary User Bans

This is like a user ban facility – only it’s temporary. This feature will be a good idea when the user has been naughty (such as voting for a ton of stories in a few seconds without bothering to read them, more than three “move to adult” votes on stories submitted in one day etc). Under this facility, a user will be deactivated for a specific period of time (say a day) and then automatically reactivated.

and yet another:

and more…see how user aksaramanna is voting blindly for user goutami’s stories…

Well, a lazy day,not much to do, browsing IP as usual, exploring various menu options that I’ve never gone to. So I hit the Live->Live Stats page and noticed this for stats today:

So I go …“Wow – 236 votes – that’s more than even three times the next person in the line. Now, where the hell did these 236 votes go?” So, I took a peek and found out…

Wow – this guy really loves user gvk. He seems to vote for every single story by that user. Wish I had a fan like him…

kartz का पंखा, कमाल का पंखा!!

IndianPads Statement…

Over the last couple of months, the amount of spam and irrelevant links have sky-rocketed on IndianPad. One of the primary reasons for this is our high Google PageRank which has attracted a lot of spammers.
In most cases, our most frequent users who saw this spam could do nothing about it and consequently we have been fighting with one arm tied behind our backs. Well, not anymore!
Starting today we are allowing users with karma over 14 to have more granular control over what is on the site. To keeps things transparent, we will start publishing trends and more information about how this power is being utilized by the moderators.
A couple of things that the moderators will notice is the low level of control that they now posses and we are also adding moderation features on comments so that spammers who do not post stories can still be stopped.
Any questions? Please shoot them our way…

I’m sure you have read about how groups of users have formed cross-voting cartels – wherein each user votes blindly for his/her friends’ stories – regardless of whether they have anything within or not. You’ve fumed and fretted but were unable to actually do anything tangible. Relax, you are not alone – read on, you’ve hit the right post.

In the recent past, several seniors have tried to stop this from happening by voicing their anger and frustration against this practice. So far, all that they have is a promise from IndianPad mods that the matter will be looked into and the algorithm will be changed. They also have a whole lot of ill-will from the cartel members too.

While the mods are looking at the change in the algorithm to be made, I felt that maybe we can help by suggesting an approach (see mine below). Feel free to criticize and think outside the box and throw in your ideas into the pot. Hopefully, mods will see the thread and pick out the best ideas for the final solution. Well, enough talk. Let’s see what we’ve got. Let’s get to it now.

Proposed Solution: Let’s assume that there are users with ids u1, u2, u3, u4 and u5 who indulge in cross-voting. They vote for others’ stories also, but they always vote for each others’ posts blindly. For this example, assume that user u1 on average votes for 100 posts from user u2.

Now, I’m not privy to the karma algorithm, but I know that if you have a karma of xxx and vote on a story that has karma yyy, the resulting karma on that post becomes yyy + xxx. I also know that the IP website tracks who has voted for whom how many times and on what posts.

The solution that I am proposing is that the IP website keep track of the number of posts given by a user to another user. In my new approach algorithm, on a given day as you go on voting for a user, the karma boost you give will reduce by 10% each time. Therefore:

1. When u1 votes on the first story of u2, the karma of that story will jump up by: (value of karma of u1 minus 0).
2. When u1 votes on the second story of u2, the karma of the story will jump up by: (value of karma of u1 minus 10%).
3. When u1 votes on the third story of u2, the karma of the story will jump up by: (value of karma of u1 minus 10%) minus 10%)
4. When u1 votes on the fourth story of u2, the karma of the story will jump up by: (value of karma of u1 minus 10%) minus 10%) minus 10%)
5. When u1 votes on the fifth story of u2, the karma of the story will jump up by: (value of karma of u1 minus 10%) minus 10%) minus 10%) minus 10%)

and so on. Finally, a stage will come in when the cross-voting of u1 on u2’s stories will have no effect at all.

Ah – that’s all theory and maths crap. Let’s get some numbers out there.

So, if you are user u1, your karma is 10 and you keep voting from your friend and cartel member u2, then:

1. Your first vote for a story by u2 will add 10 karma points to the story
2. Your next vote for a story by u2 will add 10 – 10% = 9 karma points to the story
3. Your next vote for a story by u2 will add (10 – 10%) – 10% = 9 – 10% = 8.1 karma points to the story
4. Your next vote for a story by u2 will add ((10 – 10%) – 10%) – 10% = 8.1 – 10% = 7.29 karma points to the story
5. Your next vote for a story by u2 will add (((10 – 10%) – 10%) – 10%) – 10% = 7.29 – 10% = 6.561 karma points to the story

and as you go on, your karma contribution to user u2 will go lower and lower till it becomes negligible.

What I liked about this approach is:

1. No one is restricted from voting for stories of their choice
2. Group voting earns you nothing
3. Avoids IP website resource hogging in terms of keeping track of voting patterns

What I did not like about this approach is:

1. There is an additional component of load on the IP website where the site needs to keep track of the number of votes given by a user to other users on a daily basis. But at least this data can be purged at the end of the day.

Let the (constructive) commenting begin.

Last week, I received this strange, tantalizing message as a PM:

moreen_2022@yahoo.ca
Hi happy day to you,i am miss Moreen who viewed your profile today and like it very much,which makes me to write to you to let you know that i am intrested in you,therefore i will like you to write me back through my mail address so that i will tell you futher about myself and send you also my picture for you to know me physically.
Here is my mail address: moreen_2022@yahoo.ca

It is better that we do not count on age,religion,colour even our distance since they don’t matter because what matters most is real love.
Waiting to read from you direct in my mail address.hears from you
Miss Moreen.

Of course, I declined the kind offer from Miss Moreen, but I would be interested to know how many others have received the same.

goutami = 101/146 = 69.18% stories submitted by this user are published
gvk = 62/150 = 41.33% stories submitted by this user are published
spencer911 = 57/70 = 81.42% stories submitted by this user are published – This I can believe
radhikaraj = 30.69% stories submitted by this user are published
ria = 49/72 = 68.06% stories submitted by this user are published

It appears that most of the top users get 1 out of 3 (or in some cases 1 of 2 or 2 of 3) stories published. Isn’t that an impressive record? I wonder how they do it.

I listed spencer as an exception because I already know how he does it – he simply submits high-quality stories. But as for the rest – Sting operation anyone? (I’m too lazy to do it).

Please read this before commenting (credits to devilsworkshop)

http://www.indianpad.com/user/frendz/

http://www.indianpad.com/user/koolshanky/

http://www.indianpad.com/user/pratikbhopal/

http://www.indianpad.com/user/preshitapoddar/

http://www.indianpad.com/user/MIRCHMASALA/

hmm they even dont bother about voting for any other stories, just vote for each other [ probably a same person ].

any other comments? high time we have feature to tackle this..

Sindhis, people from Sindh, celebrate the same day as their New Year day Cheti Chand. Ugadi is celebrated on different day every year because the Hindu calendar is a lunisolar calendar. The Saka calendar begins with the month of Chaitra (March/April) and the Ugadi mark the first day of the new year.

Reason 2 – The Popular News easily gives the mood of net savvy indians like Movie, Movie stills, Music, Cricket, Celebrity, Gossip, Odd news

Reason 3 – We can view and post Adult content and that’s how i first saw masalaguru

Reason 4 – Free Ad Pad : Though i m still busy making an ad pad but this is a better proposition then showing non responsive ads by google/yahoo others coz they are more targetted to users

Reason 5 – Its normally a strict and close knit circle of padders hence gaming ipad is difficult

Reason 6 – High visibility on google( i will not explain tht) and many more

if you have more reasons why Ipad is better than Digg than leave them in comment

Tell me if u agree/disgree with my reasonable reasoning

now dont laugh at this, it’s not just devil, but spencer, tollywoodbollywood, gvk, radhikaraj and sahaj too !!!

ROTFL !!!! i stumbled on this today… what do you think ? interesting enough to get published ?

@devil bhaiyya – chalo yaar.. i saw the lenghty post on “sting op”.. chalo aur ek sting maaro…

spoiler: forget the google cache results.. check the site itself… and try to figure it out… it’s a real nice exercise for those who wanna learn about “cloaking” ;-)

Guys, I have created a Cricket league for IndianPad at Cricinfo for the upcoming India series against South Africa. Its great fun to compete again each other aswell as others as a League. If you wish to join the league and play/compete, Please leave me your email here and I will send an invite to join the IndianPad league

Play and Win a 1 Month Premium RapidShare Account, The Top TWO teams will get an Premium RS Account Each
(I am sure most of you have a RS account, but what the heck, lets play…just for fun)

What is Fantasy Cricket?

As soon as you enter a Fantasy Cricket team, you are testing your selection skills against thousands of Fantasy players around the world. You can also create your own league and compete against your mates.

Points will be updated at the end of each day’s play for Tests and at the end of the match for ODIs and T20s – so be sure to check your score regularly.

Cricinfo Fantasy Cricket is absolutly free to play. Simply register or login above to get started.