SwampBubbles

I am working on a mobile version of SwampBubbles for the smart phone audience in the Web site. Please post your thoughts on what you want to see here.

One user on the test mobile site I had up for the last few days had to say:

Soon I will have some time to work on the Web site and I want to know what are your comments suggestions ideas. How is the speed of the site? New ideas? What do you like and not like (I don't care if you repeat some outstanding issues). Your comments or suggestions will help determine what I do the end of the month. Is there too much going on? Too little?

In an effort to cut down on the early morning spam on this site, I have tweaked the server to prevent access from those who are causing me a pain. This is mostly on a country basis but some of these tweaks could cause some problems with local access. If you experience any problems accessing the site please e-mail me at admin at swampbubbles.com .

I am so thrilled to receive this honor. Thank you for all that you do to make the site the best. Click here to read the full announcement.

There may be some downtime later this afternoon going into the evening as I do some site updates and possibly switch hosts.

I apologize for the site problems recently. I am working hard to get everything running smooth. It will be rough over the next couple of days. Please have patience. This should be the last rough spot. Where I will be moving it should allow for unlimited growth.

Ok everyone, I have asked several times to help me make the profanity filter work better for you by asking you to send me problems you have with the filter. I have not received one suggestion/issue. The filtering service is provided by http://webpurify.com. They are the service for PBS sites so you can see why they are a little extreme. But I can exempt words by adding them to a whitelist. I personally have been caught up with it two times but a quick reword got me around it. But we can make the list more palatable for our site by creating the custom whitelist.

I have created a new group for trusted users so that if I add you to it, you no longer have to deal with the captcha. The disturbing trend is that users in India are registering on the site and posting spam comments. Since they can read English, they can get around the spam filters quite easily. The spam filters have blocked the bot spam quite well but the human spam is still there and I don't want to remove the ability to block spam for registered users. But you should not be collateral damage to the spam wars. Since I manually make you a trusted user, it may take a while to do so.

So I have a legal question for all of you. A particular user has been in the penalty box and is told not to post or comment on the site for at least 2 months. Now it is up to 7 months, but this user keeps coming here and posting. So imagine you have a house and you tell someone they are no longer welcome, but yet they keep trying to get in. There is legal cause to file a police report if someone does that to your physical property. Do any of you know of a situation where this has happened on a virtual property? Where someone files a report to keep this person out?

As part of the updates I am implementing, I have decided to give everyone the ability to edit their own stories, events, and blog posts. It will work the same way with comments, you won't be able to delete any of your submissions but you can go back and reword, correct and edit items that you wish. It is retroactive meaning it applies to anything you submitted from the beginning of the site.

For those SB members unaware of the change, our esteemed webmaster has just recently instituted a language policy that restricts words he evidently finds offensive regarding posts and comments. The thread where it was discovered:

http://swampbubbles.com/20090616/carty-youtube#comment-43259

Let opinions and comments be addressed here:

Have you noticed any issues since moving to the new server? Please let me know.

So, after a rough few days, most everything is back to normal for this site and the other sites attached to it. I had to move from a semi-shared host to a dedicated server and there was some confusion and miscommunication about DNS settings which made two sites run at the same time for a period of 1.5 days. I have consolidated the comments and content from the old site over here, so everything should be back.

*I thank you for your patience and it should have been smoother than what it was.*

Site currently in Read Only mode. Will be put back to normal once upgrade is done. 5/28 status: just a few more things before it can be put back to normal. Hopefully before 8am EST.

Due to capacity issues I will have to make some temporary changes to make the Web host happy. There may be brief periods of outages today which may extend to an hour or two. The other sites SwampFeeds, SwampStation and Great Open Swamp will be suspended until these changes are made. Please be patient over the next 24 hrs.

Today is a good day to give you an update on some site updates.
1. A new notification system has been installed on the site. If you like to get the latest posting updates by e-mail, the service has been greatly improved. You can now subscribe to individual content types, like stories and polls and it also gives you a comment update too. Basically it is the old system on steroids. The old system has been turned off, so if you are interested in getting e-mail updates or to have them re-established, please do so on the "my account" option on the right then choose notifications.

Right behind Glass City Jungle, SwampBubbles was voted by Toledo City Paper readers as runner up for Best Blog of 2008.

I have implemented a new anti-spam measure given that the site is now attracting more spammers. This is a natural symptom of the site getting many more incoming links and more traffic so it is bittersweet. There may be some hiccups along the way, so please be patient. Some of the hiccups could be your post not being allowed. If you run into a problem, let me know asap and send me what you wanted to post or comment on. I will fine tune the settings as I go.

At the risk of attracting the wrong crowd through a google search, we need to come up with some new slogans and sayings for potential development into a T-shirt. If we get some Osamas or other odd names creating accounts, we may have to pull a plug on this. Being this is a not-for-profit site, I will not make any money off of them, but it may be worth the effort to add to the cafe press area.

Stop by this post and say hi. I am wondering if something is wrong with the comments. Comment here to prove me wrong.

but that would not be true. The access denied error was a result of popularity, not a well planned conspiracy. The reason the site was down was because you have made it so popular the Web host noticed (which is not a good thing). You may notice some things turned off because I had to be a good neighbor and I will slowly re-implement features as the site is fine tuned.