v1.80 is Here: More Community Features

v1.80 is late, but it’s finally here.

As usual, the features:

• Pongs vs Reads
  The new Ping.sg has new metrics, pong and read. Yes, pong is the old one, but the way it is counted is now different. As all of us know, pong is the key factor in determining the popularity of a ping (post). Pong is now only counted for registered Pingsters. While unregistered users can still continue to enjoy Ping.sg without registering, do note that their visits/clicks will not be counted towards pongs but will only be registered as reads. Registered users will be contributing to both the pongs and reads count.

  Tired of accidental ponging? Now you can revoke your pongs at http://ping.sg/mypongs

• Poof – you’re gone
  Poof, also known as flag, is a feature for the Pingsters to flag offensive pings. Currently the flags are,
  • Adult-oriented – Ping.sg should a G-rated and should be a community for all bloggers, there shouldn’t be adult-oriented materials being published on Ping.sg. Of course that’s an ideal case, but now Pingsters who care can help make sure these posts do not get on the ranking board.
  • Advertorial – Ping.sg is a platform for bloggers to share their blog posts, not for companies to advertise their products. I’m sure none of us will not want to see Ping.sg flooded with “$9.99 T-Shirt Just Arrived” or similar titles.
  • Inaccurate titles – You know how bad these pings can get. What is shown at the title isn’t related at all, or only mildly related to what the blogpost is about.
  • No content – There’s no content, only emptiness, or sole link.

  Poofs are not only useful to filter your own customized Ping.sg. More importantly, poofs are being recorded and if sufficient poofs are recorded from Pingsters towards a certain ping, the ping will be deemed as community-flagged and will not be eligible to be on the ranking board. But please be aware that it will be harder to get a ping community-flagged when it has gathered more pongs, so do poof early, before a bad ping gets big.

• New looks
  Yes we said that there will not be much change in the look in Ping.sg, but we did some slight changes. The site should be cleaner now with less borders but with more feature buttons.

  And we know a lot of you are feeling nostalgic about the ping pong balls that are gone. One of the reason that the balls are taken off was mainly because Ping.sg was started as a blogger community – a platform for fellow bloggers to read each others’ posts, comment at each others’ blogs, make friends among bloggers, etc but the emphasis on the pongs has created a greed for popularity among some of the Pingsters and start to write inaccurate-titled posts in order to gain more traffic for their blogs. On top of that, when in beta, Ping.sg’s pong counts wasn’t on the left anyway as it wasn’t meant to work the same way as the other community-news site, like Digg.com, but only a metrics to keep track of the number of readers for a certain posts.

  The reason to move pongs to the new location was mainly to regain the users’ attention on the actual blog entries, rather than on the pong counts. But, we may just put the ping pong ball back if the community really wants it. 🙂

• Brand spanking new server
  Ping.sg was slow when a sex scandal was blown out of proportion a few days ago, flooded with visitors wanting to read more about the scandals and even affected the pong counts of Ping.sg, causing the Top 10 to be flooded with adult-related posts. We have had to migrate our site to a new server, a 2x dual-core opteron (4 cores total) to handle the increasing load. Special thanks to xssist for xssisting in the migration and for setting up our cool new server.

• Advertising/sponsorship
  With the increasing popularity and thus traffic, our bills have also gone up. Please check out our new advertising page for more info on how to advertise with us. We’ve even lowered our rates to make it more affordable for you! 🙂

Thanks to all Pingsters for their support and so far we are pretty happy with the community response (I know, except for the ping pong ball).

We know we promised more for v1.80, but that is so far we could do while U-Zyn was busy rushing his other jobs (that pay his bills) for his Chinese New Year break and also while we battle the server issues a few days ago. Rest assured, more updates will be coming soon to make Ping.sg a better community platform for Singapore bloggers.

Happy Chinese New Year!
And to check out the cool new Ping.sg CNY holiday logo as done by our designer, Veron. Thanks Veron!