First of all apologies for the downtime today, although hopefully you’ll all think that it was worth it. Today we have launched a brand new platform for Sphinn, moving away from the old open source Pligg-based software and over to a bespoke, all-singing, all-dancing, Sphinn v2. This week is the public beta.

You may notice some great new changes, including:

• Cleaner design, taking aspects from our sister site at Search Engine Land
• The removal of the “Discussion” option for submissions (not many people used it, and most were confused by it)
• My Network – Friend and follow the people you like
• “Show Me” Filters – Only show submissions from My Network, or your favourite categories
• Subscribe/Unsubcribe to stories that you’re interested in, with email notifications
• Save stories that you enjoyed or want to come back to
• My Sphinn – A one-stop dashboard for your network, important topics and an expanding list of blog content

We have also introduced much more sophisticated spam filtering, with greater control for moderators. This should reduce spam submissions and also allow our team to respond to issues much quicker.

A “Members” section will also be launching shortly, with Private Discussions, Live Chat and a Members-Only directory.

There’s so much to mention, although we’ll let you have a snoop around and discover for yourself. Let us know what you like, what you don’t like and if you find any bugs or gremlins in the system. We hope that you’ll love Sphinn v2 and thanks for being patient whilst we perfected some of these much needed features.

PS. We’d appreciate it if you could take a minute to update your profile and make sure that an avatar is uploaded.

Cheers,

Rob Kerry
evilgreenmonkey
Sphinn Editor

This entry was posted on Monday, July 13th, 2009 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.