The BlogShares Blog

Index Changes: We've had a hard look at the current Places and Meta location hierarchies and decided to go with a much simpler organization. We'll be reordering cities under their countries, eliminating the -Meta tag on the Industries which have them, and redefining the current Industries under Places. The end result will be a streamlined, simplified location hierarchy. Blogs will be voted into a location industry based on content and/or the location of the blog/blogger.

You'll also notice that the Weblogs industry will be changing. All current blogs in that industry will be voted out, and the category will become "Blog Services", the location for housing listings such as Persian Blog, 20.six.uk and other similar non-blogs currently in our index. Corporate will become Company Blogs, and new cities, countries, and languages will be added very soon. Other changes will also occur, and we'll keep you updated in the Index Announcements Board.

Technical Issues: We are aware that some of you are having a problem with a loss of 1000 shares in your claimed blogs. This is a widespread issue. We're working on a fix to correct this, so please bear with us.

Some blogs are also being added to the game, but not listing for trading. We are aware of this, and are working to fix this issue as well.

Posted by Island Dave at 01:36 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (9)

Many of you will have noticed the changes taking place on blogs in the system. Currently, Suburban Wolf is running an extensive script to convert URLs in the game without a trailing slash to an entry with that slash. This is also merging tens of thousands of duplicate listings in the system in the process. The end result will be a vastly reduced number of duplicate listings for the same blogs.

Many of you are concerned about your blog claims, which appear to be lost, and many additional blog listings appear to be inaccessible as a result. Don't lose heart. During this hours-long process, some blogs.php pages are inaccessible until the script has run completely. Your blogs and claims to them are still in the system, and you will see them reappear once this process is complete. Claims will move with merged entries in order to retain blog ownership during and after the transition.

The indexing spiders are currently not running in order to reduce the load on the database and BlogShares resources. Once the URL-slash activity has completed and the results verified, the spiders will resume their regular operations.

Thanks for your patience in this massive operation. You can check into the forum for updates from SubWolf as he has time. So far, progress has been substantial, and again, the end result will be a much cleaner, less redundant index of blogs. As of now, SW estimates another 1-2 hours of activity, with additional time as needed to verify and validate that the script performed as expected.

Update #1 You may notice that some blog statistics, such as valuation and share holdings, will revert back to their levels of last night. SubWolf is rolling back to last night's update to ensure that everything has gone as expected. The site may be down from time to time as fixes take place.

Update #2 SubWolf's scripts are still running. It is a massive project, affecting hundreds of thousands of listings. So far, it appears to be exceptionally successful. Also: Transaction fees for ideas transactions on the Ideas Market are now in effect. See this thread for more info.

Posted by Island Dave at 02:53 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (14)

We'd like to officially welcome, sprimal, Serise Carrashen, and Mad Trollie to their new posts on the BSEC. The new Index Managers include Kiran FG, Anodyne Holdings, ibebruce, Island Tiffiney, sara bear, and Sage Enterprises.

You've likely also noticed a new look to the forums. Thanks to a great deal of effort from Raymond and MrPilot, we've got a much more flexible, easier-to-browse board structure.

The Alt-URL backlog from a couple of months ago of close to 4000 suggestions has finally been cleared. Suburban Wolf will be working on a fix for duplicate entries, but in the meantime, please continue to suggest valid alternative URLs and listings to be merged with the "Suggest Alt-URL" form on each blog's page.

Posted by Island Dave at 05:59 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (1)

Please welcome Dave, Ray and el Piloto to the newly-revived Admin role. They have already powered through the backlog of support requests and pending BSEC actions - I personally apologize to anyone I ignored in email in some of these busy periods. The crew is now empowered to keep me from acting as a bottleneck in the future.

We've all also been busy with a slew of bug fixes, and we pared a couple gigabytes out of the database for the new year. If something's still broken for you, please let us know. One of our next game priorities is bringing the search function back online with its new functionality. The game math is getting dusted off, too, toward destinations unknown. In the interim, here are some new features: Blogs have settable public descriptions now, with UBB markup support, so you can customize your claimed blog's BlogShares profile with your logo and whatever strikes your fancy. UBB tags themselves have been enhanced and documented. More RSS and conversation links have been scattered about to aid communication.

You'll notice new experimental ads in the left sidebar. The 'punch the monkey' ads are going away, I promise. The less freakish ones will probably remain as we work toward making BlogShares self-sustaining.

Folks percolating up the roles list, and a couple resignations due to other obligations, have left some open seats in some groups. The BSEC investigates player fraud, and the Index Managers cultivate the industry categories and the blogs within them. If you're interested in participating, see the appropriate forums.

Posted by jay at 12:25 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (8)

We're pleased to announce several additions to the site. December was a busy month.

If you're a fan of blogchips, you can now earn them by advertising other blogs on your site. As the ad system grows over the next few weeks, we will add bonus chips to the pot for any ad we find especially interesting - free exposure!

You'll notice a slew of new 'Start a conversation' or '8 comments' links throughout the site. This is a new commenting system we're rolling out, and it supports a flavor of UBB - in english, it lets you make your text bold or italics with included links and images and more. You can use 'BSUBB' in BlogShares email, Missions, and other places. More help will be available on this feature shortly.

We added several RSS feeds to the Missions and Ads systems. Visit those pages for more info. Thanks to everyone who is helping us debug. We've also switched from the defunct weblogs.com feed to the new-fangled feedmesh ping stream, so the BlogShares spiders will be much smarter about keeping up with your blog.

Posted by jay at 10:08 PM | FrontPage | Permalink | Comments (3)