Current.com Blog 380 items | updated Aug 6 2010

Chanelle found Brett wandering the halls of Current LA in his vacation clothes, looking & smelling a lot like an extra from LOST.

Here's what Chanelle sent me along with the photo:

This dude was caught hiding out in our offices, getting orange Baked Cheetos fingers, not wearing shoes, and smelling like piña colada.

Note: Accruals for our new badges began today at 9:45 am PST. Only activity from that point on is credited towards new badges. Old school "levels" badges are retroactive and retired. They can no longer be earned in the system. If you reached a swag-worthy level by 9:45am this morning, you will get your swag pack in due time.

Literally one month ago we announced that achievements are coming to Current TV, and well, today is the day! We're in the process of rolling out badges and achievements to the site, along with a whole bunch of other goodies like new profile pages, activity streams, and Twitter integration. You can read all about those updates on this post.

This post is dedicated to badges. What are badges? They are used to mark achievements that you unlock by participating on our site.

For example:

Some ways to unlock badges are:

1. Posting and voting on comments.
2. Connecting your Current profile to your Facebook and Twitter.
3. Earning positive votes from others in the community.
4. Posting stories and comments on Twitter and Facebook.
5. And many more!

Each badge is worth points, and some badges are worth more points than others. To earn the most points, you'll need to unlock the badges that are most valuable on the site.

When you unlock a badge you'll be notified with an alert at the bottom of the page. Don't worry if you missed the notification, you can always head over to your profile page and find a list of the badges you've unlocked under the "Badges" sort found in the "My Activity" tab.

We also display the total points you've earned below your username on your profile page. Read our announcement on the blog to learn more about the all-new profile page and activity feeds.

Here's a list of the first round of badges we're launching with. Check out the full list, then visit your profile to see which ones you've unlocked. Or better yet, click on any of the badges to see a list of other community members savvy enough to unlock some of the badges in the system.

For example, the Ye Olde-Tymer badge is a retired achievement given only to community members who registered before 10/16/2007. Wanna see who has been around since we first broke ground on the site? Take a look at the Ye Olde-Tymer page.

Don't care about the Olde-Tymers? More concerned with more recent happenings? Visit the Crazy Esteem badge page to see who has unlocked this achievement by receiving positive votes on their comments.

The full list of badges is nowhere near complete. We plan to update the site with new badges and achievements from time to time, so keep an eye on the "Badges" page and the blog for future updates.

Happy hunting!

P.S. We've released some updates to profile pages, activity streams, and introduced Twitter integration to boot! You can read all about those updates on this post.

P.P.S. This is a boatload of new functionality, so if you bump into any bugs or general wonkiness, or just want to offer some feedback, please send us a note via our support and feedback page.

As far as releases go, this one is stuffed to the gills. There's a lot to cover here, so let's not waste any time.

New Profiles With Activity Streams

Ever since I began working at Current we've fielded requests for improved profile pages, and feed based activity streams. Well, prepare yourself because here comes feed overload. Today we launch a totally revamped profile page experience, and here's everything you need to know about the changes in place.

Note: Activity streams will only display the most recent 200 events to help reduce load on the system.

 

Viewing Other Peoples' Profiles

In the old system, a visit to someones profile gave you a few options to view their activity, but some of the details were missing. For example, what are they choosing to follow on the site? Did they recently connect with someone new, or choose to follow infoMania? This wasn't immediately clear.

Our new profile page layout offers a feed of activity that can either be viewed in one catch all stream, or filtered with the following options:

Viewing Your Own Profile

You might be thinking, "OK, the design update is nice, but this seems pretty similar to the old profile options." And you're right...sort of. The real difference with profile updates comes in the way your own profile works when you visit it.

Before, a visit to your own profile would show you the exact same thing everyone else saw -- a list of recent activity. Starting today, your profile will default to an all-new view when you visit it while logged in -- Latest Updates.

The Latest Updates is a sortable feed of everything the people you are choosing to follow are doing on the site, which means your profile page is now a pretty useful place to visit on a more regular basis. Don't worry, you can still see what your profile looks like to everyone else by clicking on the "My Activity" tab. Go ahead, try out the new stream of activity on your profile and let us know what you think.

Twitter Integration

We realize that many of you are active on Twitter as well as Facebook, and since you're already a fan of Current TV what better way to share your insider knowledge with your friends than by connecting your profile to your Facebook and Twitter?

We've had Facebook up and running for some time now, but today we add Twitter to the list of services you can authenticate on Current. What does this do? It makes it easy to share your activity on Current with your followers, and when you earn badges and achievements we'll even let them know about it. In addition, once you've authenticated your accounts you can use Facebook or Twitter to log into Current.

Well, what are you waiting for? Head over to your account preferences and connect your accounts!

Badges and Achievements

There is so much crammed into this release that I've decided to devote an entire thread to Badges and Achievements alone. Head over here to learn more.

This is a boatload of new functionality, so if you bump into any bugs or general wonkiness, or just want to offer some feedback, please send us a note via our support and feedback page.

When I started working here at Current TV, one of the first projects I took on was an achievements platform. We designed a rudimentary set of levels for the launch of Current:News with the intent to eventually replace them with achievements, but we never got around to releasing the achievements platform as planned.

There was a lot to be done in preparation of launching achievements, so the concept never went away 100%. Now we are just a few weeks away from unleashing our first batch of achievements.

How will they work?

Various activities, like commenting, voting, and sharing, will count towards earning achievements. When you complete certain numbers of those activities, or perform them in combination with other activities on the site, you could end up unlocking an achievement.

For example, if you comment a certain number of times on the site you may unlock an achievement based on total number of comments. If your comments rack up a certain number positive votes from others in the community, you might unlock a different type of achievement.

Each achievement you unlock will come with a badge that is worth points. Some badges will be worth more than others, and you’ll be able to find a summary of points and badges earned on a shiny new profile page. From time to time we’ll unleash new batches of achievements to unlock. Some will be time-sensitive, and others will require some hunting in order to unlock. But I’ll have more on all of that in a future post.

What does this mean for our existing levels? Better yet, “what about my swag?”

When we launch achievements, we will simultaneously discontinue levels. Yes, we’re sad to see them go. But in many ways this overhaul is long overdue.

Those of you who have worked hard to achieve levels in the system will be rewarded with badges indicating your accomplishments. The coolest part is, these old-school level badges will not be available to anyone joining the site after the new achievements platform launches.

If you're still waiting on a swag pack in the mail, don't fret. You will receive your swag in due time, but we’re a little backed up right now.

Consider this post fair warning if you still hope to achieve level 3 in our old school levels. There will be more swag opportunities via achievements in the future, but those of you who have not reached level 3 when achievements launches in a few weeks will be out of luck as far as swag is concerned.

So get cracking! If you have questions, feel free to hit me up in the comments. I’ll have more to post about this release when launch day comes around.

Despite our recent DDoS attacks, we managed to squeak out a feature release for the site last Tuesday. Unfortunately, the DDoS attack resumed shortly after.

“For the love of Pete, tell me what was in the release!!”

While this wasn’t a huge release (those are being reserved for later this month), we were able to sneak a few improvements in that you may have already noticed. Here’s the rundown:

Facebook “Like”

Those of you with Facebook accounts will find that sharing Current TV with your friends just got easier. Have you met the Like button yet? Chances are, you’re already familiar with it on Facebook, and now we’ve implemented Like buttons on all of our content, too. Have you told your friends about Mariana Van Zeller’s recent Vanguard documentary “Missionaries of Hate” yet?

Make sure your Facebook account is connected to your Current profile, then visit the “Missionaries of Hate” page and click the “Like” button to share it with your friends and family on Facebook. Go ahead. Try it out. I’ll wait for you here.

Popularity and Voting Updates

A few weeks ago, we discovered a few kinks in our popularity-scoring algorithm thanks to a few cases where stories were pushed onto the homepage to prove a point. Your message was heard loud and clear, and I’m happy to report that we’ve deployed a couple of notable tweaks to the system that should vastly improve things going forward.

First, your red votes will factor in more prominently going forward. For those of you familiar with gaming mechanics, our voting system needed to be re-balanced to better account for red votes. No longer!

So, fire up your voting fingers. Vote up. Vote down. Vote often. Your votes help determine what belongs in the popular stories feed, so if something looks old, out of place, or you just don’t think it’s as important as other stories out there, you know what to do.

But wait, there’s more. We’ve received a plenty of feedback from our community about the ability to push stories into popularity based upon multiple comments from a very few people on a thread. It goes something like this:

Person 1: I think this is great.

Person 2: @Person 1 -- I disagree!

Person 1: @Person 2 – Well, I disagree with your disagreement!

Person 2: @Person 1 – OK, but your disagreement with my disagreement is disagreeable to me!

Person 1: @Person 2 – Sir or Madam, PLEASE validate my disagreement with you!

This exchange continues on for 40-50 comments, and the next thing you know the story is ranked in the top 10 popular stories on the homepage. Not cool, right?

Well, we’ve now implemented a new addition to comment scoring that will factor for this sort of thing. We would like to see stories containing a wide spanning discussion, with input from a variety of people via comments and votes, not just the back-and-forth between a select few.

So there you have it! We are already working on the next couple releases which plan to include revamped profile pages, new activity streams, and Twitter integration.

Stay tuned!

Some of you may be experiencing trouble accessing our site. I wanted to post an update.

Tuesday night Current TV experienced an attack that brought down Current.com at around 8:30pm Pacific. This type of attack is called a distributed denial-of-service attack (a.k.a DDoS). We isolated the focus of the attack to a religious-based discussion thread. After isolation the attack escalated considerably, and brought the site down for a second time.

This is the first time we’ve received an attack like this in our network’s history.

DDoS attacks are fairly uncommon, and are intended to render a service completely inoperable. These are quite different from attacks used by griefers or trolls, who often hijack a site for purposes of amusement, attention, or to shame someone.

A DDoS attack is intended to silence a site, or a member of a site, for a very specific reason.

So why attack Current TV?

We cannot be certain. We are working to keep the site up, and are looking into ways to prevent future attacks. We are continuing to get hit, and anticipate that connecting to our site may still be a little unstable throughout the day. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

We’ve just completed a major revamp of our site and wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to. Over the past several months, we’ve set out to improve upon the features that we know you love and also to introduce you to some of our amazing content that was previously hard to find – we think you’ll love it too.

To accomplish this, we've made some pretty significant changes, added new functionality, and even brought some old friends back to the party. Without further ado, here are some of the major changes:

Simplified Layout

We’ve made it easier to navigate your way to your favorite places on the site. Are you looking to catch up on infoMania? Maybe you’re curious about what our Vanguard correspondents are up to? Each show has its own page, and all the show pages are easy to find from anywhere on the site – just roll over the TV SHOWS tab and you’ll see them all.

If you’re interested in the popular news stories submitted to Current TV by members of our community, roll your mouse over the NEWS tab, and select the category that catches your fancy.

Some people prefer to just kick back and watch a good session of original video from Current TV. If that sounds like your cup of tea, click on the VIDEO tab, choose a TV show or channel, and soak in a feed of your favorite videos from Current TV.

As on the old site, you can still click on the SCHEDULE tab to see what’s airing on Current TV in your time zone, and take a look at what is coming up a full week in advance.

A new addition to our site is the Participate section, which will always have the latest opportunities to submit content to Current TV for use online and on air. Whether you want to participate in the latest BFD (Big Featured Discussion), upload your entry for the latest VCAM (Viewer Created Ad Message) assignment, submit webcams in response to a recent Current TV show, or submit news stories to discuss with your fellow community members, the PARTICIPATE tab is the one to click to get involved with all things Current TV.

Home Page Marquee

The new home page marquee has a more cinematic feel – now we’re using the full width of the site to present top-shelf content: not-to-be-missed broadcasts, great web extras from our TV shows, and must-read popular news stories.

Find Us on Your TV

Now it’s easier than ever to find Current TV in your living room. We’re often asked, “Hey Current TV person, where can I find your shows on my TV?” So now our most common channels and our handy channel finder are front and center on the home page.

Popular Stories

We heard your feedback loud and clear, so we've re-introduced the popular feed to the home page! The Popular Stories area lists stories posted to Current.com by you, in order of popularity as determined by our community. It's powered by an all-new scoring system that takes your votes, views and comments into account when programming items into the feed. What are you waiting for? Participate in making a story popular enough to hit our home page and rise through the ranks to number one!

Big Featured Discussions (BFD)

This is a brand new way to participate on Current TV, and we’re excited to see what you think of it. Big Featured Discussions are, as the title implies, interesting topics we’re serving up for the community to tackle on a daily basis. Discussions could come from a hot topic in the news, a TV show host with a bone to pick, or from who knows where – your guess is as good as ours to see where this ends up!

To make things more interesting, you can vote each response posted on a BFD into popularity, and we will feature the best-of-the-best on our home page. We have a lot of ideas for this new addition to the site, so we hope you’ll dive into our BFDs, participate, and vote, vote, vote!

Popular Comments

Our new home page now features popular comments from all the discussions around the Current TV site based on votes from our community. Help others discover the best conversations brewing on the site by voting up comments to surface on our home page.


Your Feedback

We always love hearing from you, so please take some time to share your thoughts, suggestions or questions on our new feedback page. The work around here never stops – tomorrow it’s onto more improvements, so let us know what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’d like to see next!

Thanks for stopping by, and we hope you enjoy the new experience waiting for you at Current.com.

Photo by: buggolo on flickr // used with permission via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

Last week, we talked about some recent changes regarding the way we handle feedback on Current.com. That's not all we've been working on--one of the things we've heard a lot of feedback about is the amount of spam that can show up on Current.  We hear you--we don't like spam either!

So, we rolled up our sleeves and started working on some improvements to our spam detector. But here's the deal: in order for us to continue to train the system to better detect spam, we need your help. If you see a spammy story or comment on the site, please flag it for review! This will help us better identify and remove spam as quickly as we can.

Important: a few of you have helped us identify spam accounts via flags, and that has been helpful. In addition, please flag individual comments and items on the site as well to help better train our system.

Don't worry, though--if something you added gets caught up in the spam net by mistake, it's not lost forever. As always, the community team will be reviewing the spam and we'll restore any items that get mistakenly identified as spam.

We appreciate hearing your feedback, so please head over to our feedback system and let us know what you think. Thanks for reading!

Steph

Last week we released some new features alongside some bug fixes on the Current TV site, and there are a few important changes I'd like to call out. Apologies in advance for the delay in posting, we had some kinks to work out on our end. We've squared everything away on our end, and we're now ready to go. So, let's dive right in.

New Process for Feedback and Support

photo by: jurvetson on flickr // used with permission via Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

You may have noticed that our header now includes a link to our new feedback page. We're making a move to power our support and feedback initiatives via Get Satisfaction, and getting this page up and running was an important first step.

Get Satisfaction will allow us to publicly answer some of the most common support issues and feedback questions in one place. Believe me, we see the same questions quite frequently on our end. The upside is, every question we answer is available to our community, searchable on Get Satisfaction, and can eventually be used to help freshen up our FAQ page.

As an added bonus, this new feedback system won't require a login to our site to participate. We know that a lot of our TV viewers visit the site, but never actually log in to comment or vote. We wanted an option for those folks to let us know when they experience site issues, or have suggestions for future site releases.

Now that this new option for feedback is in place, we are going to institute a new policy on Current going forward regarding feedback and criticism posted to the site. The ability to submit stories to Current is intended to serve the sharing and promoting of news related stories. Granted, news is pretty open to interpretation, but our definition for Current includes things like entertainment news, otaku news, and celebrity news.

Current TV occasionally turns up in the news, and when this happens, posting these stories certainly applies -- to some extent. As many of you know, these items are not always posted with the focus on reporting news, but rather with underlying questions and criticisms of our company policies, direction, or specific initiatives.

We love that our community is so concerned about the direction of the company, and we want to encourage your continued feedback. Over the course of the next couple months we'll be unleashing some pretty significant updates to the site, and we want our community to play a big role in helping us shape these changes in the months following.

One of the goals we hope to accomplish in the coming months is a revamped homepage that better represents core of our company, a TV network with original programming and content, and a website with a community that rallies around discussing the latest news and content on the web. Having a feedback loop from our community is vital, but having these posts surface on our homepage is discouraging to new visitors and potential members of our community.

We feel that posts and threads such as these are much better suited for our new feedback and support forum on Get Satisfaction. So going forward we will institute this new policy with the following steps:

1. Posts on Current that are support, feedback, criticism, or policy related will no longer be eligible for popularity ranking on the site.


2. These types of posts will be marked by our community team by adding them to the "Community Feedback and Support" group.


3. Posts and threads marked with this group will be ineligible to appear in popular feeds, or in the new or popular lists on groups and channels.

NOTE: These posts will not be removed from the site. Members of the community will still be able to find these posts on Current via search and the original poster's profile page. Commenting will still be enabled, but to get your inquiry heard and/or answered you should consider posting in via our feedback workflow.


4. We will post a comment informing the original poster of this action, and requesting that they re-publish their inquiry via our feedback page instead.


5. We will also send the original poster a message to make certain that they are informed about the action taken on their post.

We realize that this will be a change for many of you, and that it will take some getting used to. However, this solution will offer the best of all scenarios -- the opportunity to provide feedback, get answers to company questions, and still have a homepage focused on our promoting both original content from our TV shows and mix of news stories made popular by our community.

The Bug Report: Updates!

Our release also brought about some important bug fixes. Many of you had already written in about some of these, and Im happy to report that we've released fixes into the wild. Here are the details:

• "How is this banned account still able to comment?" -- Yep, we were frustrated with this one as well. We've released a fix for this, and now accounts that have been suspended or banned for bad behavior will no longer be able to comment or post.


• "Why does the video page skip playlists when I'm watching shows?" -- This was happening for a few of you, our Video page was jumping playlists for some reason. We've released a fix and you should be good to go. Give it a try!


• "Why is every comment vote showing up in my Activity Stream?" -- We're planning an overhaul of activity streams later this year, but for now this unfortunate side effect from our comment voting release was causing some frustrations. We've streamlined things, so now multiple votes will no longer appear in the Activity Stream.


• "What happened to my Picked for TV points?" -- Last release brought us shiny new URLs for our show pages, but unfortunately it also broke our "Picked for TV" level counts. Many of you noticed this pretty quickly, and we set to work on a fix. You should see the correct counts reflecting on your profiles.


• "Facebook email notifications = no go." -- Have you ever sent a Current.com message to someone who never responded back? Don't fret, it may not be you. Chances are, that community member might have been logged in via Facebook and never received the "You've got a message" notification. We've re-wired things via Facebook Connect, so notifications should be going out according to plan. If you don't get a response now, well then it might be you after all. :)


• "Logging in gives me an error page." -- This one makes us sad. Apparently, if you happened to take a break from Current.com and then attempted to login for the first time in a while, you might have received an error page. No more! We've resolved the issue so try logging in again and let us know if you have any trouble. You can connect via Facebook, too!

We're still hard at work on the big releases we have planned for the coming months. We'll have more news as we get closer to our next release, and you'll be the first to hear about it.

We appreciate hearing your feedback, so please try out the new feedback system and let us know what you think. Thanks for reading!

The nominees for the 14^th Annual Webby Awards were announced yesterday, and lo-and-behold, we scored three nominations! Just in case you're wondering what The Webby Awards are, here's the scoop straight from the academy:

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet. Established in 1996 during the Web's infancy, the Webbys are presented by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, which includes an Executive 750-member body of leading Web experts, business figures, luminaries, visionaries and creative celebrities, and Associate Members who are former Webby Award Winners and Nominees and other Internet professionals.

As I mentioned, Current TV has been nominated for three Webby Awards this year. Here are the details:

Websites

Current.com has been nominated in the Television category. We’re thrilled to be nominated amongst some truly impressive sites like Colbert Nation, Discovery.com, Project Runway Designer Portfolio, and Sundance Channel. We think it's extremely important that Current.com reflect our original shows like infoMania, Vanguard, The Rotten Tomatoes Show, SuperNews!, and more. To be recognized in this category really means a lot to our team. 

Online Film & Video: Technology

In the Technology category, infoMania’s Ben Hoffman was nominated for Tech Report. Ben’s take on tech is pretty unique, so if you haven’t checked these videos out, now is the time to catch up!

Here’s his coverage of the iPad announcement:

Online Film & Video: How-To and DIY 

As you know, Brett Erlich has an infoMania segment called Viral Video Film School where he breaks down viral videos into hilarious lesson plans for students of the Internet. One of Brett’s lessons, a meta focus on how to make a how-to video, landed him a nomination in the How-To and DIY category. Hopefully there’s a “How-To Win a Webby” lesson in Viral Video Film School’s future.

Take a look:

We’d like to thank the Webby Awards for the nominations, but more importantly we’d like to thank all of you for tuning in, watching our shows, and visiting our site.

People's Choice

And now that we've buttered you up, consider taking a moment to vote for us in the People's Choice Award. One of the cool aspects of the Webby Awards is that all of the nominees are automatically entered into running for the People's Choice Awards -- an award picked solely on votes from the Internet.

You hear that, Internet? We need your votes! You can vote for us in the following categories:

Websites > Television: Vote for Current! - Current.com is nominated Television website here, so head on over and vote!

To vote for infoMania's Tech Report and Viral Video Film School, head on over to the Webby Awards' Online Film & Video voting and check out the Technology and How-To & DIY sections.

You can only vote once per category, so choose wisely!

Last week on infoMania, Ben Hoffman sat down with Todd Bridges to discuss his new autobiography, "Killing Willis." The other day, we noticed what is possibly the singlehandedly best example of ad placement, ever:

Well played!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rightee/36319234/

Greetings community!

I'm sure many of you have already seen Mario's post on Community Guidelines and methods of mass distraction (and if you haven't, it's well worth a read) but it's come to our attention that this post has raised a few questions.

So, you may be asking yourself, what do I do if I run across an account that I think was created by a banned user?

The best thing you can do if you think you may have come across a sock puppet that we might not have found yet is to flag the account for review.

Wait a minute--what if someone flags me by mistake?

Just because an account is flagged, that doesn't guarantee it will be removed. A flag is just a way to bring something to our attention; once this happens, we'll start taking a look at the account to deterine if a weapon of mass distraction has indeed been uncovered.

I know many of you are already doing these things, and thank your for keeping an eye out. For those of you that were wondering what flagging is all about, I hope this helps address some of the questions.

If you have any other questions, please post them below. Fair warning: We will not answer questions about the status of specific profiles.

Best,
Steph

This month, we're highlighting the final selection by HP from their VCAM assignment featuring the new Photosmart Premium All-In-One printer, with Touchsmart Web. If you've missed previous selections, be sure to check out our posts featuring "Meet the Photosmart Premium,"  “Ready, Steady, Print," and "No Excuses."

This month's selection, "Pepper the Dog,"  is brought to you by VCAM producers John Pizza and Kandeetee. Check it out:

What’s a VCAM? Here’s the details from our previous blogs:

For those unfamiliar with the concept VCAMs are Viewer Created Ad Messages, and the concept is pretty simple. We partner with sponsors to post assignments for our producer community. Our producers take the guidelines of the assignment, make a commercial, and potentially earn thousands of dollars if their ad gets picked by our sponsor.

In this case, the VCAM assignment was sponsored by HP. They provided our VCAM producer community with assets to use when creating commercials for their new printer, and our producers created advertisements for HP to choose from.

This time around we had a total of 87 submissions. HP narrowed the field to 10 videos, and four of these were selected by HP, earning them each $5000.

Want to find out more about VCAM assignments? Check out the VCAM page and see what's happening.

Steph

The other morning as I was scrolling through my blog reader, I came across this post from Etsy, about the film Mardi Gras: Made in China, and as I was reading it, I remembered that Current had aired an except from the film a while back. I'd seen it then, or at least started watching, but couldn't remember if I'd had a chance to actually sit down and watch the whole thing. So, this morning I did.

I was totally blown away.  The contast between the excess of Mardi Gras and the factory in China is astonishing. I consider myself a maker and a conscious consumer, for reasons both political and personal  (I'm kind of picky) but really, how often do we consider where our stuff comes from? Especially in a time of recession, when tales of American jobs disappearing are a regulkar occurance, the flow of stuff continues. So, why don't we think more about where it comes from? Or are people thinking about it--do films like this make you rethink your consumer habits? If so, what are you doing to change?

It's something to think about.
(For the complete version of Made in China, head over to Carnivalesque Films.)

Steph

Hello Currenteers!

In case you haven't noticed, today's feature release is serving up some major upgrades to our commenting system. Discussions on Current.com are extremely important to us, and we've come up with a few updates to existing functionality as well as some new enhancements that will help pave the way for the months to come.

Let's take a quick tour:

Comment Voting: That's right, comment voting is now officially implemented on Current.com.



Each comment will have an individual score based on the aggregate count of votes, so for example: If a comment has 51 votes up, and 52 votes down, a "-1" will display. So, what are you waiting for? Reward discussion-driving folks by giving them a coveted vote up. Find someone detracting from the discussion at hand? Give 'em a vote down.

Sorting Options: Why not offer some alternative ways to sort comments?



We're changing the default sort on all threads to "Newest" first, this way you'll always see the latest discussions on the main landing page. But, for those of you who prefer to read threads in the order in which they developed, you can always sort by "Oldest" as well. And since we implemented comment voting, it would be a travesty not to offer a sort by "Popular" option. We think this will be an interesting way to find new and insightful commentary on Current.com threads as our discussions develop. Try it out!

Replies and Pagination: We've made a couple important changes to the way replies and pagination work on Current.com.



All reply threads are now "open" as a default, you are no longer restricted to replying only to the original commenter, and we've changed some of the design aspects for replies as well. In our older system, any time you reply to someone on a thread you were automatically replying to the first comment on the thread. Now you can elect a person to reply to, and their name will appear at the beginning of your comment. You'll also notice that replies longer indent on discussion threads -- instead the avatars in reply comments are slightly smaller in size.

These decisions were largely made to help facilitate the ability to sort by popular. For example, a reply to a thread could be more popular than all of the comments on the entire thread. This allows us to display each comment ranked on popularity, while still retaining it's reply status.

Additionally, we've done away with pagination. That's right, each comment now loads by default, which means your scrolling finger will now be ready for a workout.

Like the changes? Have some feedback? Please be sure to share your reactions in the comments below, and if you notice any bugs or have any recommendations visit our Get Satisfaction support page and leave us some feedback.

Thanks!
mario

Recently there have been a number of issues raised around Current's Community Guidelines, and while we've written several blog posts on these in the past, it seemed like a good time to go ahead and revisit some of this.

Why have guidelines at all?

The Community Guidelines weren't just pulled out of thin air--they're things we've thought long and hard about, and things that we'll continue thinking about and discussing. I've been at Current for close to three years now, and I can tell you that I don't think a day has gone by that I haven't been involved in a discussion that grew out of one of these guidelines. (Well, maybe the days when everyone else was on vacation, but that's just because I try not to talk to myself.)

But here's the thing--these guidelines are here for a reason. Of course, there are the obvious reasons--to keep spam and porn out, for one. But that's not all. Debate and discussion doesn't happen in a void, and Community Guidelines are meant to create an environment where people can disagree respectfully--where the arena isn't ruled by a handful of bullies who sling insults and intimidate others into silence. It would be nice if everyone behaved respectfully without some sort of guideline or rule structure, but so far, that hasn't worked anywhere in pretty much the history of humanity that I'm aware of.

What about free speech?

It's still there. Current is a private website, and you agree to our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines when you register an account.  Failure to abide by these Terms and Guidelines may result in the removal of your account.  You are, however, free to avail yourself of the communities or sites that revel in unmoderated, no holds barred discussion or to start your own site should you so choose.

But the internet should be the wild west.

Well, that's certainly one opinion. Of course, even the Wild West had pockets of civilization, so perhaps the best analogy would be that Current is the rare town with more schools and churches than saloons.  A refuge for those looking for an island of civilization. Of course, there's nothing tying anyone down; you can always hop on your horse and mosey on over to the next town--the one with four saloons on one block and a bar brawl every half hour.

So, people aren't allowed to disagree?

Of course people are allowed to disagree--comments or accounts are not removed because they don't fall in line within any particular ideology or view. It's not about your views--it's about the way you're expressing them. If there's not a way to make a point without engaging in racism or bigotry, or without beating your opponents round the head and shoulders with a virtual two-by-four, that's a problem. A quick look through the site will reveal plenty of debate and disagreement. There have been plenty of occasions where comments have had to be removed on all sides of an issue.

So you just get rid of people? Just like that?

No. If a comment or post is out of line, providing it isn't overt spam or porn, we'll remove or hide it and let the poster know. If it's hidden, you'll have an opportunity to edit.  If someone continues to behave in ways that violate our Community Guidelines, then more severe action will be taken. This can include a temporary suspension, to give everyone a chance to cool down, but can include removal of an  account. This won't come out of the blue;  if someone is getting close to this, we'll let them know that choosing not to change their behavior will result in a suspension or removal.

It's not fair. People abuse the flagging system.

Flags are just one way we have of finding inappropriate content; they aren't the only method. Additionally, all flags are reviewed by the Community Team; if a flag is sent in for something that's not out of line it's not removed. We've talked about this before, so I'm not going to belabor the point, but flagging is not about retaliation or ratting people out. It's simply a way of letting us know there's something we might want to take a look at. Check out Mario's post for a great look at flagging.

I hope this helps address the issues that people have brought up--and we'll be continuing to post more blogs on this subject in the future, so stay tuned.

Steph

*This post is a day late due to lack of electricity caused by some funky weather in SF (winter? rain?! Ew.) However, I think we can all agree to happily celebrate this holiday a day late (hell, I celebrate this one every day).

If you couldn't tell from my title, I freaking love cheese. And since today is National Cheese Lover's Day (eeeee!), what better topic to discuss! Seriously though, aged, smelly, soft, hard, goat's, sheep's, cow's, you name it and it's a cheese I'd like to eat, right now please. All the best meals have cheese in them, and that's the God's honest truth: mac 'n cheese, pizza, grilled cheese, quesadillas, bagels and cream cheese, cheesecake (yes, it counts), eggs and cheese. OK, you get the idea, the point is that cheese is what makes all these things awesome and delicious and this world would be a sad place without it.

I could get all geeky on you guys and go into the history and fun facts of cheese, but I will restrain myself and instead leave you with this wonderful Cheese Chasers pod.

Cheese, I would chase you any day of the week. Te quiero.

Also, here's a little background on my title. You gotta do the hand thing too when you say it this way. I don't make the rules, I just follow 'em.

-Danielle

If you've been following our posts about the HP Photosmart VCAM winners and wondering how you can get involved and make a VCAM, you should head over and check out our new VCAM assignment for Lexus Hybrid Innovation.

The assignment:

Help us brand the Lexus ‘h’ by shedding light on great achievements. There are two ways to approach your VCAM:

a. Find a creative way to visualize Lexus’ “action speaks louder” philosophy behind the commitment to developing hybrids (‘h’) as outlined above.

b. Profile a person or organization that, just like Lexus, put creative thinking and innovative technology into action, breaking through barriers to achieve something great and unexpected. Demonstrate the alignment between Lexus’ philosophy and your subject.

The deadline to upload your VCAM is February 1st a 12pm (noon) Pacific, so don't delay! Our VCAM team has put together a list of tips to help you get started on your VCAM.

1. Join the assignment


2. Don't sell something else


3. Use humor carefully


4. This isn't about hybrid in general


5. This is not a normal car ad


6. This is not about advertising product features


7. Give meaning to the 'h'


8. Keep it snappy

Still have questions? Get more detail on these tips and fire up your cameras!

Steph