The BlogShares Blog

We're very pleased to announce that Sage Enterprises has accepted an offer of promotion to become the newest BlogShares Administrator. Over the past 20+ months, Sage has spent countless hours building the index, helping in the forums, and improving the game, and we are overjoyed that she wants more work! :) Seriously, she has done as much behind the scenes for the game as anyone, and will be a excellent Administrator. Congratulations, Sage!

On a personal note, I will be joining the BlogShares Board of Directors. Thank you Jay and Suburban Wolf for the opportunity and the confidence in me. Nothing much will change for me within the game, as I'm not abdicating any responsibilities or projects, only gaining a cooler title and a vested interest in the site. Still, I may be less available for administrative support than previously. As such, it is a great pleasure to announce that MrPilot will step up and assume the Lead Administrator position. MP has been my right-hand man for a long time now, and without his endless support, ideas, and maturity, most of the wonderful things that have been created and improved in BlogShares would never have been possible. Congratulations MP!

Sage will still be managing the index work on the site, but naturally, she's going to need someone to step up and assume the role of Lead Index Manager. Rantz has been to Sage what MrPilot has been to me, so it's only natural that this promotion go to him to reward his hard work, dedication, and follow through on the tedious and time-consuming duties required in the FOI program he stewards. Congratulations Rantz!

On the game side, you may have noticed the graph showing blogs listed in the game currently displays a decided negative growth. Nothing is wrong! This is completely intentional. We temporarily halted automatic adding of new blog listings a couple of weeks ago, and have been working on removing some of the glut in the tables. Dead blogs, spam/splogs, non-blogs, we've delisted almost 500,000 of them over this period. Sigma reporters have accounted for over 50k of this, a massive amount of one-off reports from players.

We will continue this effort for the time being, as we continue to delist 5k-30k listings per day. Although the effect on the game and server performance is minimal, it will buy us some much needed relief on the database box by lightening table sizes, avoiding adding new rows from new listings, and avoiding free space issues on the hard disk. A drive to help BlogShares purchase a new box is in the works and will be released very soon. Until next time, cheers!