One week later

Published by Vlasta yesterday.

As expected, there were numerous problems with the new web and I have been fixing them every day. Let's talk about some of the solved problems and about some of the new features.

Emails

During most of the week, emails were not being sent by the web server, because the mail server was not set up. At this time, outgoing emails should work fine, there is still problems with incoming emails, so if you need to contact me via email, use my gmail account.

The old server was unable to send secure emails, but the new one should be able to. This means that those of you with email account on servers that required to use secure communication and were not receiving any email alerts should now be able to receive them. But...

In order to receive email alerts, you email address must first be verified. So, if you were able to receive them before and now they stopped coming, you need to verify your email. To do that, go to your account page and near the top, you should find a button called "Resend verification email", press that and then click the link in the received email (check your spam folder too). If the verification email does not arrive, let me know.

Account creation & anonymous users

The problem with anonymous users does not have and easy solution. Either creating an account and interacting with the web is difficult and some good people would choose not to join and participate due to the obstacles or it is too easy and many trolls just leave a nasty comment and never come back to face the consequences.

Things on the new web are slightly different than they were before. Newly arriving users can instantly post comment just like before, but they must now choose a nickname while writing the first comment. Once they do that, an account is created for them and they stay logged in. This way, they lose some of their anonymity, because all comments made by them will be connected. Furthermore, the voting system will help with marking offensive comments and limit the damage.

As described in the above paragraph, the account creation workflow is now very different from what it was and from how it usually is on other web sites. On rw-designer, account creation starts with an interaction with the web (posting a comment and choosing a nick) and then you can at later time set up a password and a contact email. Both of these are optional, but having at least one of them is recommended, otherwise you may lose access to your account.

I expect a good percentage of accounts will be these "temporary" accounts of people who visit a couple of times and then don't come back. Or they do not set up a password and then are not able to access the old account and they create a new one. This could be a problem. And so, it will have to be solved somehow. Right now, there is one mechanism in place. If you visit one of these abandoned profiles while not being logged on, you can claim that account if none interacted with it for 2 days. In the future, trustworthy people (with lots of karma) would be able to delete such accounts if those account were created by a troll (accumulated negative karma).

One side note. In the past, there was a substantial amount of accounts that were created, but that never posted anything. A small portion of those were true spammers, but majority was from real people. I did never really understand why those people created an account and then never used it. This should stop now.

Also, another side note. The true spammers will also have a harder time, because if you just go to the new account page and fill in your basic info (including your web site address and contacts), it does not actually create an account for you. The account is created later, when you either post a comment, or choose a password. You can even subscribe to news sources while not having a real account. I am quite curious how will this change affect the amount of spam accounts created. I certainly hope that lazy spammers will be satisfied with this fake profile and just leave with a good feeling. I am not afraid to talk about this mechanism, because lazy spammers don't actually read things and the smart ones know spamming on rw-designer will not bring them anything valuable anyway.

OK, that's it for today, more updates later.