We've made a few changes on the site in the past couple weeks. If you're interested in advertising on SL Reports, get in touch with Cash Yiyuan or use the contact form on the site. He's adjusted the rates and impressions to be more competitive, and I only wish I still had a business in-world so I could take advantage of the new rates, myself.

On my end, I've made some more changes to a couple different areas of the site. One of the changes that I'm hoping won't be too noticable is some changes to the URL for the pages on the site. I'll be watching the 404 logs pretty close, to make sure that we're not getting a whole lot (or hoefully "any") errors. I've already noticed a few and have fixed them. I know that this can cause some problems with RSS readers when I change things like this, but this should be the last time. The changes I made will actually make the URLs even shorter than they were, before. This is a good thing, and was actually done for a very important reason, which I'm choosing to not explain in this post.

Something else that was added within the past week is our very own SL Reports Chat Room. Between crashes, downtime, rolling restarts, upgrades gone wrong, I thought that there might be a use for it, here. I've had the link to it buried in the site map for the past week, but hopefully we can throw a link up on the front page, depending on what Cash and Arbitrage think about it.

The web based chat room is actually IRC based, so if you're familliar with registering a username in IRC, you're all set. You don't "need" to have a registered username, but if you want to register, there's instructions for how to do it, just below the room. There's usually always a bot named "Webfeed2" in the room, just to keep things alive and to run certain commands.

As usual, this post was not posted to the front page of the web site, since it really doesn't have anything to do with Second Life news, but rather news about this site. Until next time...

As you might have seen, we've updated the comments component for SL Reports, once again. After it was upgraded, yesterday, I tested it to make sure it was working. I then changed something (removed the "Title" entry) and didn't test it, afterwards.Something I should have done, obviously, since removing it caused the "send" button not to work.

I'm very sorry about not verifying that it was working, and I'm sure that quite a few of you had probably seen that there was a problem before I did.

Now that it's working, again, the good news! The new comments component gives us the ability to give each comment a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down", depending on how you feel about the individual comments. It also gives us the ability to search within all comments from each article. You can also now subscribe to a comment thread via RSS and/or have new comments sent to your email address. In order to be notified by email, you need to leave a comment, first, and select the "notify" option on the comment form.

I will be trying to figure out a way to remove the "Title" entry on the comment form without breaking things, since titles aren't really needed and should be related to the topic of the post when commenting on a particular post, anyway. I'll test this on a different site, to make sure it's right, before making any changes, here.

Due to the lack of involvement and participation at the MetaSnort web site, we will be closing the site after December 31, 2007. At that time, all (or any) traffic that tries to go to MetaSnort will be taken directly to SL Reports. We had hoped that the site would "take off" and become "the" social news reporting site for all things in the metaverse, but after the last couple months, that doesn't seem to be something that users are interested in.

We actually don't "blame" this on any particular reason, other than the fact that there just really isn't any interest for something like this, at this time. SL Reports will continue to do a fine job of pointing to and reporting on interesting stories in Second Life. Although it will not cover every single blog post and news site that reports on SL which could be linked from a site like MetaSnort, I'm sure that users of SL Reports will continue to return to the site for stories that they're interested in.

The MetaSnort site will remain active through the month of December. Ater that, all traffic will be directed to the SL Reports web site, at http://sl-virtual-world-news.com

It came to my attention a few days ago that the newly upgraded comment system wasn't working quite the was that it was supposed to. After a few tests of my own and talking to a couple other people, I realized that the problem wasn't limited to me or the browser that I use. I put a notice right before the submit button, letting commenters know that they should copy their text to the clipboard before posting, as it might take several tries to actually get comments to post.

I contacted the comment component designer to let him know about the problem. He did a few things and got the same results. The next day, a new version of the comment component was delivered and has just been upgraded. After running it through a few tests, it looks like everything is working the way it should.

I'll be watching this over the next few days, very closely (something I didn't do when I first upgraded the component) to make sure that it continues to work right.  Even though this is a minor announcement and not posted on the front page, please let me know if you have any problems.

Updates to the SL Reports website, this morning, includes a new "captcha" verification that will make sure that people commenting are actually human, and not spam robots. Since the comments system was installed on the site, about 50% of the total comments have been spam. In the past, all of them were manually deleted by site administration and only remained visible for just a few minutes.

The captcha question is only asked if you are not logged in to the site and are an anonymous user. You'll still have the ability to post anonymous comments but you'll need to answer the captcha question before submitting.

The upgraded comments also gives the site administrators the ability to block specific IP addresses (or rage of IP addresses) from leaving comments. This is done for known spammers, but may interfere in ways we're unaware of, at this time. If you are blocked from leaving comments on the site and you feel that this is an error, please use the "contact us " page to let the site administration know. We'll do our best to explain why or fix things, if there's an error.

In an effort to reduce some of the workload for new administrators while remaining an "open forum" for your comments and opinions, this change will be benefitial for everybody.