Why do I keep going back to digg?

Today mixx announced a new feature called “Breaking News” where if your a “Super Mixxer” you can move a story thats news breaking to the front page so everyone can see it before it gets old. Then when it hits a certain amount of votes it gets moved to the Popular Category.

Well a user submitted the story on digg and it got about “61 diggs”. I made a comment on the digg submission saying the following:

” Congrats to the Mixx guys on this! Another reason why Mixx is 10x better then digg.

Friendlier Community, A staff that cares and responds to it’s users, Suggestions taken Seriously, Open mindedness, First to have a photo section before digg, working comment system w/ nested comments coming soon, more interesting and new content that usually hits mixx first, related categories, tagable submissions, Super Mixxers, no autoburies, no bury brigades, no hidden moderators and now another great feature that no one including digg has ever done.

So explain to me why digg is so great. Oh you say cause krose runs it? Yeah umm nice try…. “

I was originally voted up at least 4 times but then the bury brigade came around and voted me down. I then got a comment response from a user saying the following:

“then why the fuck are you still here?”

I’ve been told by Honest_Ape to leave digg behind but for some reason, I find the need to always go back to see what submissions are worthy of Mixx, see how bad the flaming has gotten over there, and make a response to some ones comment if I find it necessary. You can read the rest of the comments here that were made on the article, which proves that the diggers feel threatened by mixx, don’t want a friendly community, etc. It probably didn’t help with me taking a stab at the guy and calling him an “ass hat” and that made me look like a hypocrite but hey what can I say I’m only human and I make mistakes.

I really should just let digg go as Honest_Ape suggested and just keep my eye on teamxbox, gamespot, engadget, etc. This community is hard to get respect in and hopefully people will start taking Mixx more seriously. Let’s see what next year brings, I’m sure things will be much different and maybe just maybe the users that are trash talking Mixx will swallow theirs words.

I also hope that these “diggers” will understand that the staff behind Mixx does not hate digg! Chris McGill has even stated that he doesn’t hate the site. Hopefully I can move away from that site 100% and focus on Mixx as I have a good rep there anyways and a very good following of people who think I submit quality content which I’m grateful for.

Well tomorrows another day and hopefully my next submission will be a brighter and happier one. Mixx on everyone!

Why so close minded?

Hello all I hope the last week and this past weekend was a great one for all of you. Before I dive right in I want to take a  moment to thank two of my friends. They are Julie aka calinazaret and Honest_Ape.

Thank You Julie for your honesty  and the advice you provided. I will be speaking to my friend about it today and figured that honesty is best as well. If I’m upet with her lieing to me, how am I being any better pretending it never happened and waiting for her to say something? If my other friend gets mad, then so be it. I’d be a complete hypocrite if I was to lie as well.

And Honest_Ape, thank you for your comments on all of my submissions and your advice has helped me in words I cannot describe. Thank You for taking your time to read each entry. It’s good to know that there are people out there, who are interested in what you have to say and who care enough to read it.

So I wanted to write about this whole Good Friday and Easter thing. But now this sort of a rant I guess about the differences I’m noticing in our views about God and what not.

Many people don’t know that I’m a follower of Jesus or as it was called back in those times “A Disciple”. I’m not very outspoken about it but more and more so I’m starting to and not in a negative way or in the ways the media depicts it to be.

As usual the first thing I do when I get to work is I check my corporate email, personal email, mixx and then digg (to see if there is stuff worthy of being over at mixx). I came across a submission titled “Lying for Jesus?” by Richard Dawkins”, now I didn’t actually read the article as I first was checking out the comments as I like to hear what people have to say first and to avoid the “NSFW”sites (However I will be reading it after posting this). It honestly amazed me how many negative comments there were about God, I didn’t know there was such a big and strong following of Atheist’s on this site. Every comment that had to dowhere some one admitted being a Christian they were dugg down. Has it really reached a point where the users over at digg don’t want to be open minded? Have these users been hurt so badly by people who call themself a Christian? In all honesty I don’t have the slightest clue because I’m not them.

But the ironic thing is that there is a user over there who was saying to investigate and read through the Bible yourself and see if this is for you or not. Now this is where the ironic part comes in, when I was at Liquid Church the other day our lead pastor was even saying that it’s ok to question what is said in the Bible, and to investigate it yourself and that if it’s not for you it’s ok! Crazy huh?!

I’m not here trying to say your wrong for not believing in God or anything of that sort. That wasn’t the point of this entry by any means necessary.  I’m just trying to figure out the hatred others have towards Christianity and Christians in general.

I personally had a bad encounter with my Senior Lounge teacher in highschool. My friend and I were talking to him about Christianity why we believed in it, etc. We weren’t making a goal try to convert him or anything and nor’ should that be a goal for any Christian at all, shoving your beliefs down some ones throat is a terrible thing to do. Anyways as I was saying we were talking to him and he would ask us why this and why that and we would answer it as honestly as we could. The next day he apologized to us for getting so upset about it and for snapping on us which apparently resulted in him drinking the night away.

It’s encounters like these I wish we could avoid but alas I don’t think that will ever happen. And by no means am I saying that I’m perfect and didn’t do anything wrong with what happened on that day. Hell there’s so much junk I have in my life I sometimes even question calling myself a follower. But what I was doing was pointing out a typical conversation about Christianity that just goes sour. Can’t we just have peaceful conversations with out the bashing?

I wish the video for the Easter Sunday message was online but unfortunately it is not and wont be until at least tomorrow or Wednesday. When it is however I will post it so those of you who want to can watch it and get an understanding about this whole being open and investigating thing I was talking about.

I’m so glad I’m part of the community over at mixx where I can have a discussion with other users such as this where they are willing to have a discussion with out being close minded. If only digg were the same.

It’s Spring Break!

It is now Spring Break for me all this week. This down time is greatly needed for me as it will allow me to start blogging a bit more, will allow me to make some changes to my card game (more on that later…maybe…), and will also allow me to catch up on my readings for my Programming class and Game Design class.

So what have I been up to the past two months?

Mainly College and Work but also continuing to support and promote mixx. I’ve been tweaking the forum layout for “The Mixxing Bowl” and everyone has been patiently waiting for it over there. I’m no longer going to give a time frame as it keeps getting pushed back. So I’ll just leave it at that it’s coming very shortly!

I’ve also been working on my card game for my Game Design class and as I mentioned I have some tweaking to do. Tonight might be the actual first play test outside of class. It’s a turn based attacking game and your goal is to beat your other opponents from collecting some thing. I’ll leave it at that as I don’t want anyone to steal my mechanics, the overall look and feel of the game and more. One day if it ever get’s published and a date is set for release I’ll post an announcement about what the game is about.

I just recently started getting back into twitter so expect some more updates from me there.

Dealing With Spam on Mixx: Spam is a no no

Spam is something we all love to hate and we all have a good reason to do so. Almost daily like many of you I myself get the person looking to steal my identity claiming they are from some country and want me to have the money that belongs to a deceased person or the oh so lovely Enlarge yourself emails.

The same thing goes for the social media world. Some of the top dog sites such as digg for example has fallen victim to spam submissions and shouts. The same thing is now starting to occur on mixx. With the introduction of Mixx Mail it appears that the spammers have come out and decided to start sending links to they’re submissions or even other websites with this new feature. This has also increased the submission of blog spam from what I can see on my end.

Promoting what is obviously spam, blog spam, etc should not be done. This prevents articles worthy of the Popular Stories section including Photo’s and Video’s from getting there. On top of that it tells spammers that the community permits spam which is 100% entirely false. You can also blame blind voting on this as well. I’m guilty of doing this in the past and I don’t do this that much anymore and I try not to.

So I’d like to go over how we can combat this problem, keep it to the minimum and give some quick tips, suggestions, whatever you personally would like to call them.

Mixx has a way of keeping things clean on the site, but it does require the community to do they’re part. There are “Report This” links on every submission, and on every comment that has been made to a story. Simply click the link of what you want to report, the page will then fade and a dialog box will appear. Select the appropriate reason of what your reporting for by clicking the drop down menu. Your choices are “The link is broken”, “Content violates terms of use”, “Spam!”, “Someone is not being nice”, and “Other”. After that make sure you type a small but detailed description of what’s wrong with the article, what the user did, etc. This will help the people over at mixx in deciding if it should be removed, if the user should be contacted, if they should be banned etc.

That’s the best way in dealing with spam, blog spam, etc. Chris McGill said it best on the Mixxing Bowl:

“Our experience here to date is that if you ignore this stuff, it just gets 1 to 5 votes and the submitters really go nowhere. We have also found, however, that if we rile them- with comments or otherwise, then they make it a mission to come back and screw thigns up. so - in sum- my advice (and you do not have to take it since everyone is allowed to act of their free will) is to just ignore it. If a voting rings forms… then do NOT ignore it and please report it.”

Unfortunately Mixx Mail does not have a “Report This” system built in. The only thing it does have is a block user link. I personally think that something such as this is needed to be put in place now before it is too late. It’s important to remember that Mixx Mail is to be used to contact other members. This feature should never be used for promoting articles or promoting websites. Use the “Share This” feature to promote an article you think is worthy of the front page. But remember everything I mentioned here applies to that as well.

Also please remember that sending out a message to hundreds of members shouldn’t be done as well, this can get annoying and could also cause you to end up being blocked. If any of you users do, don’t get your panties in a twist if you got your ass blocked as Greg Davies put it. You have no one to blame but yourself. Many of the messages I have received could have done with out all of the hundreds of people it was sent to. Maybe 50 or even maybe a 100 max would be ok but past that it’s pushing it.

So on that note I’d like to bring this post to a close and just remind all of you to keep the community in mind and feel free to comment and post your own suggestions and input.

Mixx Messaging

Now that the messaging system from Mixx has officially launched. I figured that some of you might need help on how to use this new feature. But not only that I also figured that some guidelines/suggestions for using the system needed to be put in place. So here we go.

Purpose

 I’ll start with going over what the purpose of the messaging system is for. Mixx for a while had no way for the users to contact each other except through comments and sharing. Many mixxers for a while asked for this from what I could tell on The Mixxing Bowl (including myself). The release of this now means the community now can contact each other privately if they let’s say want to ask a question, put some one in they’re place if they were out of line, discuss something, etc. The main purpose though I personally feel is to prevent the comment section from being cluttered with off topic discussions. Many of you may disagree but that is just my opinion.

What not to do

Now that the purpose of it has been covered. I want to quickly go over what is not to be used for.  The messaging system should never ever be used to spam anyone, share mixx stories (there’s a reason the share feature exists), start fights, flame one another, etc. I think everyone get’s what I’m trying to say. Just don’t be stupid and be responsible with it. I’ll cover more of this in my next post.

How to use mixx messaging

The Mixx Messaging is pretty straight forward and simple. To access it simply click the mail icon located next to the “Your Account” along the top. The icon will be yellow when you have a new message, and will display the amount of new messages you have. If you don’t have any new messages it will default to a grey looking envelope.

 To send a new message click send new message, this will bring up the compose new message. Here you can choose either individual mixxers from your list to send a message to, or you can choose to send a message to all of your friends by choosing select all. If there isn’t some one on your friends list that you’d like to send a message to, you can fill in they’re name in top field. After choosing who you want to send a message, give your message a title, enter your message, and send it away!