Over the last 30 days, Minekey community members rated over 500,000 times by throwing Golden Eggs at the content they liked and Rotten Eggs at the content they disliked. Thank you all for such an overwhelming support for the Minekey Content Rating system. Eggs are fun? Aren’t they?

We have received complaints from a few users about some people targeting certain users and throwing multiple rotten eggs every day. We are monitoring such behavior closely to minimize the abuse of the content rating system. We have also received requests from several users to extend the Golden Eggs system to reward people’s activity and contribution to the Minekey community.

We are glad to share with you that we will soon be launching the Minekey Activity Rewards System to incentivize users’ contribution to the community. More eggs for you! How do you like them? Fried, scrambled or boiled …

We have designed the system to ensure fair and equitable rewards for all user activity on Minekey. Further, we thought it is fair to give some credit for the user activity prior to launch to recognize prior contribution, while making sure that this doesn’t give an unfair advantage to some of the early users.

We hope this will make Minekeying a lot more fun and rewarding experience for all of you. Stay tuned for more details. If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to email us at community AT minekey DOT com.

Let’s start the New Year with some fun! If you haven’t had enough of eggnog this holiday season – don’t worry. Here is your opportunity to make up for it.

We have launched the Minekey Content rating system. As mentioned in our earlier posts, Content rating system provides greater control to Minekey users to have a say on what content they would like to promote on Minekey.

Here is how the content rating system works:

Minekey users will be allowed Eggs at opinions and comments on Minekey. If you like an opinion or comment, you can reward it by throwing a Golden Egg. If you dislike something you can throw a Rotten Egg - what can be meaner than that ?

To promote an opinion or comment, you can rate it up by clicking on the Golden Egg icon. To rate down an opinion or comment that you feel doesn’t belong there; you can rate it down by clicking on the Rotten Egg icon. Currently, we have kept the rating system anonymous, so users do not develop biases against the preferences of other users and feel comfortable and secure while rating the content.

In order to prevent abuse of the rating system, such as rating down content of specific users, we have restricted the number of eggs one can throw at the content of any specific user to a maximum of five per day. We will closely monitor the usage of the rating system and may consider allowing a higher number of eggs thrown at the content of any specific user. Further, we have restricted the users you have blocked from rating your content and you won’t be allowed to rate their content either.
We have also introduced “Top rated” tab on the opinion board and people board, to surface top rated opinions as well as people who have created top rated content. Users will be able to view top rated comments on the opinion pages by selecting “Top rated” filter.

We hope you’ll have some with the eggs and help surface quality opinions and comments on Minekey.
Some of you had requested us to increase the size of the explanation, so you can express yourself freely without watching out the character limit. We have increased the size of explanation on the opinion to 1500 characters on the website. We are hopeful this generous limit of 1500 characters would provide more flexibility for users to write articulate and compelling explanations for opinions that could include embedded content and clips from new stories and other media sites. Based on the response and adoption of this feature we may implement it on Minekey application on Facebook too.

This is just a beginning. We have lot more exciting features coming out in the next few months. Stay tuned!

We are glad to announce that we will be launching the much awaited “Content Filter” and “Block User” features on Minekey shortly. We are hopeful that this will provide greater freedom and choice to the users to control what they would like to see and who they would like to interact with on Minekey.

Content Filter blocks content that has profanities and sexually explicit material that may not be suitable for general viewing. Users who do not have any objections viewing such content may turn off the Content Filter from settings page. We made sure that the experience remains close to the current experience for users who turn off the Content Filter. Our general suggestion to users is to refrain from posting profanities and sexually explicit material to the extent possible. We do understand that some users strongly feel that profanities should be allowed, as they help express thoughts more naturally and freely and do not have substitutes, and we respect their view point. However, we wanted to ensure that users who do not like to see such content should have their choice taken care as well. As a first implementation, we have chosen the filter words specified by content safety organizations. However, we would like to monitor the usage and feedback over the coming weeks to iteratively add or remove words to the initial list. Please send us your feedback and suggestions to us at community AT minekey DOT com.

In a large and diverse community like Minekey, people are bound to have differences of opinions. We advise our users to be tolerant and respectful of other people’s opinions, but we have found that this difference of opinions can sometimes lead to trolling, personal attacks, harassment and cyber bullying. We strongly advise our users to refrain from any form of personal attacks and cyber bullying since the laws in most countries around the world have started to deal with it strictly. As some of you may be aware, in the recent MySpace cyber-bullying episode the person charged guilty was sentence.

We are introducing Block User feature to provide you the power to prevent specific users from trolling on your opinions. Block User feature allows you to restrict certain users you choose from viewing your profile, commenting on your opinions or writing notes on your profile. These users may only be able to vote on your opinion if they see it on the recent, most discussed or most voted tabs on the opinion board or if such opinion is shared with them by their friends. When such users visit your profile, they will only be able to view your limited profile and will not be able to view any of your content from your profile. Further, blocking a user will immediately remove you and the user from each other’s followers list until you unblock.

We would also like to inform you that we are also working on Content Rating which would enable users to rate content on Minekey and hence provide greater control to collectively determine the type of content they would like to see more often. We are also working on implementing a User Reputation management system which will take into consideration the user’s reputation, abuse history, content rating on Minekey and will restrict certain privileges. We hope that these features will help collectively determine what’s good content and good user behavior on Minekey and reduce the moderator involvement in deleting content and disabling user accounts. We hope to be able to roll out these features later this month.

We believe these features provide adequate controls to users to feel safe and comfortable in expressing themselves freely on Minekey. We would like to seek support and cooperation from all users to make Minekey more fun and friendly. If you have any suggestions or questions, please email us at community AT minekey DOT com.