Email Notifications and other updates

Just a quick update on a few things today:

Email Notifications

We had a couple reports from members about email notifications still coming to them, even though they had switched all notifications off. For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, you can set your email notification preferences in your Profile, under Settings. On looking into this, we found that there were settings to turn off all the notifications except for when you get a new note on your entries – that one had not been included in the original setup.

Engineering has added that today, so now if you go to Profile and Settings and then Email Notifications – you will see that there is a new option to turn of notifications for a comment on your entry. If you switch this off (along with switching all the others off), you should receive no email notifications from us.

Spam Diaries

We are well aware that there have been a number of spam diaries showing up on the site in the last couple weeks, especially during the overnight hours. We have been working on a number of measures to keep spammers out (like adding a captcha mechanism on the registration page) – but many of the spammers are actually humans that are paid to post on sites like ours, so it can be very difficult to block them completely. So far, the best approach has been for us to monitor the site and remove them as they show up, and block the credentials they are using.

We are looking into ways to make it easier to report any spam to us, but will also continue to evolve any automated ways we have of blocking them. In the meantime, if you see entries about free game downloads or wart removers (no, really) just try to ignore them 🙂

Contacting Support

Please keep in mind that if you have a problem or have a question about Open Diary, the best thing to do is to click the link at the bottom of any page to Contact Support. With this many people here, it takes a team to be able to handle all the questions every day – so doing this is much better than leaving a note on this diary. Thanks!

Hooray!

A couple days ago, we passed 2,500 members who have signed up or reclaimed their diaries since the site relaunched a couple weeks ago. I couldn’t be more thrilled with the response, and I want to thank each and every one of you for being here, it is just awesome!