Phirate - Security System

2/23/08 00:47

We don't comment on the particulars of the security system, however there are a few points worth making:

1. You'd have to be inhuman to trigger the speed check. Seriously.
2. Sitehoppin and other browsers are only effective if they keep their database up to date. If they fail to do so you can end up presenting all kinds of triggers to the security system when you use them. I am going to apply an update on sunday or so which should help make it obvious when a browser is failing to keep their database up to date.

Phirate - Involvement Credits

2/20/08 21:21

We are open to ideas representing "involvement", however it is difficult to find something that:

1. Isn't trivial to cheat at
2. Generalizes easily to most blogs
3. Is technically doable

For example, one idea that has been around for a while has been credits for comments, however that fails on pretty much all of the rules above for any sufficient density of blogs.

Phirate - Entrecard vs Project Wonderful

2/21/08 22:03

Actually there are a number of reasons why more people click on Entrecard ads than PW or equivalent. I'm not saying it justifies a significant financial difference tho, just sayin:

1. Users click on an Entrecard ad because they know there will be another Entrecard widget at the other side. We call this group "Trail surfers" and a surprisingly large number of our casual users, and some users who aren't even members, like to do this.
2. Users familiar with the Entrecard widget are visually drawn to it. Since there's only one EC card on any given page, you have a greater opportunity to gain their attention and thus click.

Precisely what difference that makes regarding any other advertising method isn't something we have numbers for at the moment, but the spots are not the same.

Phirate - Feedback

2/19/08 21:58

We don't generally reply via the feedback box, and that is the preferred target for the most part.

Essentially we get a lot of stuff via the feedback box, and it gets read (every bit of it) and then collated into things like modifying our feature priorities, bugs that get forwarded on to me or specific issues that need a particular reply, adding to the feature list etc.

We hope to be able to reach the point where we can start replying to all the feedback stuff but I think we're going to need a few more people to be able to do that.

The forum gets more replies because it's a broadcast, if I answer it for one person on here, I answer it for a lot of others who will read it. But stuff coming via feedback is more likely to end up in the right place on the feature list etc.

Phirate - Forum Stickies

2/17/08 16:20

Essentially, sticky topics in the context you're talking about are a poor attempt at rescuing failure at other levels. It should not be necessary to come to the forum to ask about these things, we should have done a sufficiently good job at communicating on other pages on the site to prevent people from needing to come here and ask.

Many forums use sticky topics as a poor excuse for a knowledge base, which in turn is a poor excuse for communicating correctly in the right place, which is a poor excuse for behaving in an intuitive/correct fashion in the first place. I'd rather focus my time and effort at the top of that chain.

We'll never get everybody, there are people who claim to have read the FAQ and the help stuff etc who are asking a question answered on page one, but I have no faith those people would read sticky topics either :)

Phirate - Reciprocal Drop Rank

2/18/08 00:40

I'd have to write another page long article to explain my reasoning but the essence of it is that while reciprocal drops are good, very high % recips are counter-productive.

Eventually it trends towards a closed group of users all reading each others sites exclusively every day - a dysfunctional extreme.

As a result, while we encourage people to drop back in general, we're not likely to add any additional motivators that might flip it over into the pathological zone.

Phirate - Non-performing Shop Seller

2/17/08 07:11

While we will not, generally, refund credits, we will remove seller tokens from sellers who fail to fulfill orders or communicate with their buyers.

Phirate - Third Party Forum

2/17/08 06:35

We have stated previously that we do not intend, at this time, to switch over to a third-party forum solution. It relates to future plans and the level of integration we want to achieve.

I understand that the existing forum does not offer the full suite of features something like vbulletin does (although I admit in a number of cases this is by design), however we have limited resources at this time.

Regardless, any attempt to integrate a third-party forum would require significant development resource on an unfamiliar platform in order to integrate even to the level that the existing forum is, and then I'd have to go and switch off all the stuff I explicitly designed out of this one anyway..

Basically, at this time I do not foresee any likelihood of us moving to another forum system. I'm still open to argument on this topic, but please take the above into consideration.

Phirate - Multiple Blogs

2/16/08 03:10

While we explicitly permit multiple blogs, this does not extend to attempting to pretend you're multiple people. I'm looking into all those sites. Contact me directly if you have any further questions. I recommend removing the comments.

Phirate - Spam Reports

2/17/08 07:50

Sorry, we don't often reply to spam reports, we get a lot of them so the admins generally simply deal with the problem then move on to the next one. Every single one is read however, I can tell you that because we track them.

I hope to add some kind of resolution reply thing in the future so people can see the results of their reports, but make no mistake we do appreciate the fact that you all let us know when stuff like this happens.