Hello once again,
I’ve got a few projects in the works that I hope will make Ubscure a lot better. I’ll be working on these projects over the next few months and hopefully they’ll all be in place by the end of the summer. Here is what I’m working on:
Better Spam Protection
Since lots of people like to treat article directories as their personal spam playgrounds, I’ve decided I need to beef up security and spam protection around here. I’ve already installed several fixes that have allowed me to remove the Captcha from the submission page without any negative side effects (Keeping my fingers crossed on that one). The goal of the whole spam blocker project is to make it easier for real authors to get their articles approved.
TinyMCE Editor Implementation
TinyMCE is an editing script that makes it much easier to format text. If you’re familiar with WordPress at all you know exactly what I’m talking about. The editor that you use to write your posts on WordPress is powered by TinyMCE. This will make it much easier for you guys to insert things like lists, bold elements, italics, etc. You’ll be able to do these things without having to know (or type) any HTML code. This should make it much easier to format your articles.
Article Rating System
The article rating system is designed to help reward those who create useful content at Ubscure that readers will enjoy. It will help weed out the junk articles that might slip through review processes, or spammy articles that might have ended up on the site many months ago. As you can probably guess, it’s very difficult for me to sift through over 100,000 articles to try to find any hidden junk. The rating system will make it much easier for me to spot spam articles.
Commenting System
This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while but haven’t had the time. Actually, I still don’t have the time…but whatever. The goal of the comment system is to allow Ubscure users to post comments on each other’s articles. I mentioned in another post that this will help spread the pagerank around a bit better and hopefully push all of our articles up a bit in the search engines. It will also promote engagement within our community which is something very important to me.
Site Redesign
The site redesign will occur slowly as I finish up different pieces of the site. It will be a bit like putting a puzzle together piece by piece. My ultimate goal is to make Ubscure look more professional while at the same time making it more user-friendly. I’m going to be implementing some HTML5 and CSS3 elements, so I highly recommend you switch over to using Google Chrome as your browser if you’re not already. And by all means, please avoid using Internet Explorer. That browser doesn’t display Ubscure properly and has almost no support for HTML5 or CSS3. Microsoft is determined to stay in the dark ages in terms of web browsing for some reason.
Download Chrome
I can’t really give a solid timeline for all of these upgrades. Running a site as big as Ubscure by myself while at the same time being a full-time student and having a job is tough. I barely have enough time to enjoy my life, let alone teach myself how to code all of these things. So please, be patient! Things will be changing over time and I promise they’ll make your experience at Ubscure much better!
- Patrick