Another Monday, another release. Today’s release was really to fix some annoying issues out there, so let’s dive straight in.
The Flagging System
We’ve updated the flagging system. Previously when you flagged someone or something, an email got generated behind the scenes which then got fired off to customer support. Well, Customer Support now have a whizzy new support ticket system built right into PayPerPost.com and we decided it made sense to integrate flagging with that.
What does this mean for you? Well, now your flags and questionable content queries will get queued up in the ticketing system and not accidentally overlooked in someone’s mailbox.
Dates
Ted had been complaining for a while that he was having problems with his dates. No that kind of date silly; the January, February, March kind. What was happening, and this was most visible on the blog of the day feature, is that a bijou bugette within Ruby on Rails was inappropriately calculating the previous month as 30 days ago. So, when we hit March 1st and had to update the blog of the day months tags to show the months of archives, we had January, January and March, since 30 days ago from March 1st was still January.
That’s now been fixed.
Deposits
Way back in the depths of PayPerPost history, when men were men, bloggers had no good way of making money, and no-one really knew who Jason Calacanis was, we required Advertisers to select an amount from a drop down when depositing funds. It was annoying and tedious. If they wanted to deposit an amount that wasn’t in the drop down they’d have to waste their precious time making multiple deposits that added up to the right amount, and inevtiably there were problems with people depositing the wrong amounts.
At the time it all made perfect sense. We wanted to let advertisers quickly deposit money into the system with a flamboyant wave of their mouse. We’ve changed all that with the introduction of a simple little text box. If you’re an advertiser you can now just type in the amount you want to deposit and off you go.
Creating and editing opportunities
There were a couple of nasty bugs that advertisers would encounter when creating opportunities. Nasty, dirty green bugs that had a satisfying crunch and splat to them when we squished them.
First up, if you created an opportunity that required links but didn’t add any links, you’d encounter an error and find yourself staring at a picture of Daniel in a chicken hat. That’s fixed (you’ll still see Daniel in a chicken hat if we encounter an error, but you shouldn’t see it on creating opportunities).
Second segmentations editing would occasionally cause a crash when editing a previously submitted opportunity. That’s been fixed as well.
Finally, we found an issue where we were only validating the end date of an opportunity when it was created, not when it was subsequently edited.
Bubble-Ads
Our Bubble-Ads have proved quite popular with advertisers but there were some areas that they could be made to look much prettier. So pretty them we did.
Bans
There’s been a lot of feedback on the bans for posties and how they affect the tack rating. We’ve made a change today such that a ban will only reduce your tack rating by 0.25. At one time it reduced your tack rating by 5, so that’s a fairly big improvement.
We’re also working on a bunch of other things to make the bans more self explanatory for posties, and generally a lot less intimidating. Hang in there.
Behind the scenes
Out of sight but not out of mind, we’ve added a number of bug fixes to our internal management reports and investor dashboards, and also shored up the features that our customer love people use. The idea behind the latter of course is to speed up reviewing and generally free them up, over time, to be even more responsive to all the postie and advertiser queries that pop up from time to time.
