Article moderation popup

Now after you've read an article, you will see a popup waiting for you. In this popup you will be able to submit your moderation for the article. This should make it easier for everyone to moderate a bunch of articles.

Thanks,
Nick

New notification features and ads

I hope everyone enjoyed the Civil War. It was definitely great to see it in person in Autzen!

Notifications
I've been busily working on some new features. The most exciting new feature is notifications.

You can now sign up to receive notifications when certain things happen at OSUBeaverSports.com.
You can get notifications when someone replies to

1. A message you posted
2. An article you submitted
3. An event you submitted
4. A thread you started
   

If you sign up to be notified when any of these events occur, you will receive an email. In the near future we will be adding RSS feeds as well as a way to get notifications in a profile page. We will also be expanding the number of things for which you can receive notifications. For example, if you just want to watch one particular thread or be notified every time there is a new article in one particular subject, we will have that soon.

Speaking of profiles - we will have a more fully featured profile system in the future. If you are familiar with FaceBook or MySpace, the profile page will be familiar to you. It is basically a place where you can see everything that applies to you. Right now we have a lot of that stuff in the account settings area. We will be breaking out the profile as its own distinct page. You will be able to upload an avatar (picture) and we will have user-to-user private messages.


How do I get notifications?
It's a simple two step process: confirm your email and select your notifications.
First you will need to confirm your email address with the system. You can do that by going to http://www.osubeaversports.com/requestEmailConfirmation.do
You can also get there by going to the account settings page and clicking on the "confirm" link near your email address. New users to the site will automatically receive an email confirmation when they sign up. Since you all already have accounts, you will need to just do this confirmation step now.

Next you just go to the notifications page and choose which notifications you wish to have. You can get there by going through the account settings page or here: http://www.osubeaversports.com/notificationSettings.do
By default all of the notifications are turned off. I didn't want to spam you. You can turn on all of them or none of them.

Under the covers
Under the covers I've added some new security features. I was hesitant to publicize the site too much before, because I knew that it was vulnerable to being overrun with spam. I now have some stuff in place that, should it become necessary, will make it very annoying for someone to post much spam. I will be getting the word out more aggressively now to get more people to join in. Please keep inviting your friends and family to the site.

Ads
One final update - we will have ads soon. The ads will be provided by Google. The way it works is that Google checks the content of each page and places an ad that is appropriate for the page. Ideally, we will get ads for things like OSU merchandise, football tickets, etc. Hopefully we won't get ads for Duck gear or stuff that just comes out of left field. I have the ability to filter out certain ads based on the site that they come from. Please let me know if you see anything inappropriate. You can either email me, or post to the "bad ads" thread in the feedback forum. See http://www.osubeaversports.com/viewThread.do?threadId=524
Make sure to include the URL (address) of the ad. That is what I use to filter them out.


Keep posting, keep rating
Thanks to everyone for your participation. All of your posts and ratings have really added up. Last month we had 214 articles submitted, 322 article moderations and 250 messages posted. Our collective efforts are creating the best OSU sports site on the web and we're just getting started!

Thanks,
Nick

New look and a few new features

We've been busy for the past few weeks!

The first thing that you'll probably notice is the nice new look. Thanks to everyone for your suggestions. I think the new look is much cleaner, easier to read and just looks better. I'm going to continue to refine the look of other things on the site, so our work here isn't done.

You Internet Explorer users out there will probably notice that it looks much better for you too. I've been focusing on Firefox up until now, but now things should be much better in IE.

I've also added a few features.

• The dates that are shown are much friendlier now too. Instead of something like "Posted Tue Oct 30 09:10:21 EDT 2007" you'll now see "Posted 3 days, 5 hours ago".
• Double submits - now if you submit a link that has already been submitted, you will be warned before submitting it. That way we can avoid double posting an article, which has happened a couple of times before.
• Links open in new windows. Links to new articles now open in a new window. You can change it back to opening in the same window by changing the setting in your account settings page.
  

There will be more new features coming soon...

Welcome

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