Comments broadcast becomes a feed/L’envoi groupé de commentaires devient un flux

(En français plus bas)

The ability to reply to all commentators by default has created an increase of alerts that made it difficult for people who leave a lot of comments to read their alerts. So we’ve decided to make this feature more “quiet” by creating a feed of comments instead of sending alerts. The way it works is that ticking the box to follow comments on an entry now makes you subscribed to an entry’s comments. You won’t receive any alerts, but you will be able to follow in one place all new comments happening on all entries you’re interested in. Instead of having to go to every single entry you like, this will allow you to quickly read all the new comments in a less overwhelming way.

As for comments on your own entries, these will still show up in your alerts.

You’ll find the comment feed under “comments” in the new “messaging” menu, which also includes the existing private messaging.

The ability to translate comments and mark them as insightful directly in the comment feed will be available soon.

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La possibilité de répondre à tous ceux qui ont laissé des commentaires par défaut a créé une augmentation du nombre d’alertes qui en rendait la lecture difficile aux personnes qui laissent beaucoup de commentaires. Nous avons donc décidé de rendre cette fonctionnalité “plus calme” en créant un flux de commentaires plutôt que d’envoyer des alertes. Celà fonctionne en cochant une case pour suivre les commentaires sur une participation, ce qui vous fait souscrire aux commentaires de celle-ci. Vous ne recevrez pas d’alertes pour les commentaires laissés par d’autres, mais vous pourrez suivre sur une seule page tous les commentaires qui sont laissés sur les participations qui vous intéressent. Au lieu de devoir aller sur chaque participation, vous pourrez maintenant lire rapidement les nouveaux commentaires d’une façon moins fastidieuse.

En ce qui concerne les commentaires laissés sur vos propres participations, ceux-cis génèrent toujours des alertes.

Vous trouverez le nouveau flux de commentaires sur la page “commentaires” du nouveau menu “messagerie”, qui contient également la messagerie privée.

La possibilité de traduire les commentaires et de les marquer comme pertinents directement dans le nouveau flux sera bientôt disponible.

The Monthly Prize community/La communauté du Prix Mensuel

(Version française plus bas)

Tonight at midnight GMT will be the last random draw we do for the monthly 100 € cash prize. We’re excited to announce that a brand new special community has been created to replace it, for which everyone on inspi.re is automatically a member! It’s going to be very competitive, since there are over 10,000 members.

The Monthly Prize community is language and region-agnostic. All languages are welcome and all competition themes will be translated (since the translation is made by volunteers, there can be a little delay). All themes will be chosen so that it doesn’t make it more difficult to create an artwork for it depending on where you live.

For each competition in the Monthly Prize Community – quite logically – prizes will be given to artworks that reach the top 3 spots. 100 € to be shared among artworks that rank first, 6 months premium membership shared between artworks that rank second and 2 months premium membership shared between artworks that rank third.

The first competition, whose theme is Freedom, is open for entries.

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Ce soir à minuit GMT notre dernier tirage au sort pour le prix mensuel de 100€ aura lieu. Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer qu’une nouvelle communauté spéciale à été créée pour le remplacer, communauté dont tous les utilisateurs d’inspi.re sont automatiquement membres! Les choses vont être très compétitives, car il y a plus de 10,000 personnes.

La communauté du Prix Mensuel est indépendante de langue ou de lieu. Toutes les langues y sont les bienvenues et les thèmes de compétition seront traduits (la traduction étant faite par des volontaires, il peut y avoir un petit délai). Tous les thèmes choisis le sont de telle façon que participer ne soit pas plus ou moins difficile en fonction de l’endroit où vous vivez.

Pour chaque compétition dans la communauté du Prix Mensuel – très logiquement – des prix sont donnés aux œuvres qui atteignent les 3 meilleures places. 100 € à partager entre les œuvres classées premières, 6 mois de compte premium à partager pour les œuvres classées secondes et 2 mois de compte premium pour les œuvres classées troisièmes.

La première compétition, ayant pour thème Liberté, vient de démarrer.

Opt-in/opt-out for comment alerts

We’ve updated yesterday’s new feature with a way to opt in and out of receiving alerts when others comment on a given entry. You’ll find the following checkbox above the comments section of each entry:

It will be off by default and turns on automatically if you post a comment on that entry. Since it’s available on all entries, you can even decide to receive the comment alerts on entries you haven’t commented on.

If you comment on an entry and don’t want to receive alerts for new comments posted on it, just remember to tick the box off once your comment is posted. That option can be turned on and off at any time. For example if a given entry is generating too many alerts after you’ve “subscribed” to its new comments alerts, you can visit the entry’s page and turn the option off.

Commenting alerts broadcast for all

We’ve just rolled out a considerable change in the alerts sent when commenting on artworks.

Replying to comments is a thing of the past:

becomes

And that’s because from now on, for every new comment posted on an entry, the author and everyone who has commented on that entry previously will receive an alert. This solves the problem of authors who want to reply to everyone, which is in fact the new default. It should also keep people engaged in the discussion that can happen about a particular entry without having the memorize which entries they’ve commented on.

Inactive communities

We’re following up on Mariano and other members’ concerns about the inactive communities problem by acting today and changing the rules in this respect on the website.

It’s not the first time we receive this request to intervene and close inactive communities. We always refused up until now because the people who ask us to do it don’t realize how upset the administrators whose communities will be closed are going to be, and don’t have to answer the angry emails that might generate. It’s not our philosophy to directly intervene and tell members what to do because we don’t want to turn into the “right way of using the website” police. However, despite increasing greatly the cost of creating communities, the quantity of communities keeps growing and growing faster than the global active member count does. As a result, the experience is diluted for everyone and only a handful of communities receive healthy activity. Sadly, that’s why we have to intervene.

Having many inactive communities is damaging to the experience on the website and part of the problem is that an administrator who is in charge of only one inactive community doesn’t feel responsible for the situation. Individually administrating an inactive community is not a cause of problems, it’s the fact that many people let their communities go inactive that results in the activity dilution crisis we’re seeing. Creating a community and then just waiting for people to magically flock to it isn’t the way to go, yet it seems to be the belief of many people who create one.

The new safeguards we’re putting in place today will act as a natural selection of communities. It’s a new challenge for community creators, now just opening one won’t be enough, taking care of it and making sure that enough people use it will be the responsibility that comes with it.

How does the new safeguard against inactive communities work?

If a community is under a particular threshold of active members count (see below), it will be required for the administrator to either merge the community with another active one or to spend 2000 points in order to “save” the community for another month. If none of those is done by the administrator, a month after the first warning is issued the community is automatically deleted. Having to pay 2000 points should be a wake-up call which tells the administrator that something should be done about the under-activity of the community. In the situation where the administrator manages to turn things around and find enough active members, it will be the only time the 2000 points have to be spent to save the community. If not, then maybe receiving that warning (and having to spend points) more than once is a sign that the concept of the community was just not good enough to survive on its own.

The thresholds for a community to be considered inactive are:

• no threshold if the community is administrated by a premium member
• no threshold if the community is less than a month old
• 15 active members minimum if the community is between one and two months old
• 30 active members minimum if the community is between two and three months old
• 50 active members minimum if the community is more than three months old

Now, like any limit or cost we put there are going to be people arguing that it’s too high and others who believe it’s not high enough. We chose the limit of 50 active members because by looking at what’s happening currently, the great majority of communities with less than 50 active members were seeing 5 or less entries per competition. That’s doesn’t appear as a healthy amount of entries to us. Then we decided to ramp up that limit according to the community’s age, since it’s obvious that a community can’t instantly have active members. Surely, if most administrators don’t spend the points there are going to be many communities disappearing, but since there’s always the option to merge with an existing one, there doesn’t need to be any past competitions or entries lost in the process.

The definition of “active member” in the context of a community is someone who has voted, commented or entered a competition at least once in the last 30 days. The active member count for communities is recalculated every Sunday and that’s when the alerts regarding inactivity will be issued. You can see the active members count for your communities on the “Your communities” page.

About the new main menu

As everyone who connected to the website in the last hour would have noticed, we’ve just released a new version of the main website menu. There is no longer a bottom menu, everything is at the top and organized in different categories.

It was a necessity for two reasons. First, the learning curve is still too high for people to navigate the website when they register an account. The old menu seemed like it played a good part in that issue. Secondly, we were seriously running out of screen real estate when it came to adding new things. Some languages have very long translations and there simply was no space left for any new major feature/section to be added.

It’s going to take time getting used to, but you’ll see that the new menu makes more sense than the old. Things have been grouped together and ordered by chronological logic for competitions.

We hope that the logical grouping and the fact that it’s no longer needed to scroll down to access half of the menus will outweigh having to click twice instead of once to access some menus. For the most part the pages are the same or have simply been split into separate ones, so if you had bookmarks that you used as shortcuts to specific areas, they should still work.

It’s quite a major change, so if you notice anything not working as it should, please contact us via the bug reporting page.

See how you voted previously in the hall of fame

We’ve just rolled out a simple new feature that displays how many stars you gave to each entry when they’ve reached the hall of fame. There are so many artworks that by the time a competition reaches the HOF, most of us have forgotten how many stars they gave to each entry. This new feature lets you remember what you opinion was and is a good way to see how much you differ from the consensus in terms of opinion.

You can see that information both on the ranked list for the entries that show their rank publicly:

And simply on the entry page where the stars are read-only when you’re browsing a competition in the hall of fame:

Special thanks to Jackie D for this feature suggestion!

Copyright theft can land you in hot water

Thanks to a vigilante among inspi.re’s members who spotted an image that seemed like it didn’t belong to the person who posted it, we’ve investigated. It turned out that the member on inspi.re who posted the artwork and the photographer who took the shot were not the same person. The photographer is a professional and her agency didn’t appreciate the news at all. Their attorney will most likely sue the member, since this is what that agency does in every single case of copyright theft.

On our side we’ve done what we always do with people who we catch posting images that don’t belong to them; we’ve banned that person from the website and deleted all his/her entries. If you’ve entered any competition where that person participated, you’ll probably have received an alert by now telling you that your rank has changed.

May this be a reminder to everyone who would be tempted to post an artwork on inspi.re that doesn’t belong to them. It’s clearly forbidden by our website rules and by doing so you will get into more trouble than you might have thought. Copyright theft is easy to do on a computer and it can just as easily land you in a courtroom… Be truthful, post your own artwork on inspi.re!

On a more positive note, we’re working on a new feature called “Next!”, a new concept that we want to try on inspi.re. All we can say right now is that it will take place outside of competitions but will have nothing to do with portfolios. It will be complimentary to everything we already have and not a replacement of an old feature. We’ll give 500 points to the first person who can guess what it is

Share inspi.re’s great artworks on facebook and twitter

We’ve revamped the entry page over the last few days to reduce clutter. The navigation/stars bar has been moved below the artwork in order to maximize the amount of actual artwork you see on a page when you first open it.

A more important change – and that’s where the new feature kicks in – has been to remove the big links that used to be below the entry and replace them with more subtle icons at the top right of the page:

The shopping cart is used for the canvas printing link, the heart lets you add or remove the artwork from your favorites and the two social network logos let you share the artwork.

These new sharing buttons only appear when the entry has reached the hall of fame. It’s not possible to link directly to entries that are still at the voting stage or before that in order to avoid vote-baiting. So if there’s an entry you like – or one of your own – which you want your friends to see, once the competition is over you can use one of those buttons and share it.

Clicking on the Facebook button redirects you to a page on facebook that looks like the following:

Facebook only hosts a 150×150 pixels thumbnail of the artwork and links to the entry page on inspi.re. It’s our understanding that Facebook only keeps the thumbnail cached for some time and regularly re-fetches it from the page the story links to. Which means that if the author deletes the entry, the thumbnail should disappear from Facebook after some time.

For twitter, we populate the status update with the short link to the entry (like: http://inspi.re/?e=133986). We’ve made the links as short as possible in order to reduce the need for using a URL shortener.

In completely unrelated news, we’ve increased the amount of points required to create a community to 2000 points. That’s 5 times what it used to cost. We want to see if over time it will help increase the average active member count across all communities, particularly small ones that struggle to get enough activity. We also hope that by delaying the time between joining the website and being able to create a community, it will make administrators feel more responsible of their communities and therefore reduce the rate of community abandonment.

Rich text editor for comments

We’ve decided to add a little pizazz to the comment text editor and it’s now possible to play with color, font, define in-text links, etc. The tool we’re using to do this is very modular, the features of the text editor are likely to get even richer over time.

We’ll see how well it does in the comments and if the new text editor proves to be working everywhere (on everyone’s browser, that is), we’ll roll it out on the discussion board and private messaging too.