Update your Twitter and Facebook through Status Fairy

For someone who’s just a round, orange ball, Snippy’s been pretty busy lately.

Aside from fixing the comments and “New” feed in Communitites on eSnips (a lot has happened in the last couple of days); Snippy has also been helping his girlfriend in fulfilling her dream of a creating a  Windows Live Messenger add-on that automatically updates your status line to Facebook and Twitter!

That’s right, thanks to The Status Fairy, real name Gertrude, now you can tell your friends across all your favorite social networks exactly what your thinking, with one click of a button! You can even turn chats from Messenger into Tweets and Facebook status messages!

You can download the Status Fairy here or become a Facebook fan of Gertrude here.

The application is totally free but tell them Snippy sent you and you’ll still get a 10% discount!

Comments return to eSnips!

Everything that has been disabled on eSnips officially works again! That includes comments on profiles, the item page, and all public and private messages.

The big change since the last time you’ve used comments is we’ve installed a Captcha program. As long as you’re a human, it’s really no big deal. You can easily click for a new set of letters if your having trouble reading it, and either capital or lowercase letters will work. We’ve also thrown in some secret, additional measures to help protect you against spam.

We’re sorry about the inconvenience that was the comments being down, but I hope you’ll agree that eSnips is now a much safer site!

(The only exception is folder comments will still be disabled until Sunday. Everything else works 100% now.)

UPDATE: All comments, including folder comments are now working.

Scheduled downtime for 10/31/09

Between 3:00am and 7:00am Eastern Standard Time on Saturday 10/31/09 eSnips may be down. This is because of routine maintenance being conducted by our bandwidth provider Cogent.

According to Cogent, things will be town 20 minutes from their end but we might continue to see (or not see, in this case) the effects for as long as a four hour period.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience this might cause, and assure you that any problems experienced on the 31st will be extremely short term.

New eSnips upload page now online

We uploaded a brand new version of the eSnips Upload Page over the weekend and I just wanted to give you guys the quickie tour of the revised UI flow.

First off, as you can see from the picture above, you can now change the folder you’re uploading to directly from the Upload Page.  Up until now,  that was only possible from a previous page.

Next up, let’s take a closer look at the uploading tags. Because every file uploaded needs at least one tag, we’re now guessing what Community tag to give it, based on what type of files your uploading. For instance, all picture files now have the default tag of “Photography”.  Obviously, that’s not always going to be correct, so please just take an extra second before you click “Upload” to just double check your copacetic with everything written.

The biggest change though, is that descriptions are no longer entered from the main upload page. Now there’s a carousel on the following screen that lets you scroll through images of your recent files photos and edit what you want to say.

Other than that, we also debuted new versions of the Sign In/ Sign Up pages over the weekend, but with no major new components. Since new features often lead to short term bugs, please let us know if your having any problems, though about half of all such issues can usually be resolved by just refreshing the cache on your browser. Thanks!

Update on deleting post spam

It’s time for some more housekeeping here at eSnips.

Effective immediately we’re disabling the ability to publish posts in all public, private, and group folders. This temporary measure will give us a chance to retroactively delete all the post spam that have been accumulating; giving eSnips users a cleaner, safer site when the ability to publish posts and comments returns in mid November.

Additionally, the “About You” section will likely be  temporary disabled in a few more days, the last section of the site that will be affected by our anti-spamming efforts.

We hate taking features away from you, and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but for the long term good of the site we needed to address these problems now.

Why comments are currently disabled

If you’ve tried to send a comment today on eSnips, you probably noticed it didn’t work. This is not a bug.

We’ve been experiencing an increasingly serious spam problem of late, and rather than put you the user in the unfair position of having to spend all your time on eSnips deleting advertisements for magic pills and ringtones, we’ve decided to temporarily disable the ability to post comments until we’ve properly installed a more permanent solution.

The areas of the site affected by this decision is profile comments, any comments on media files, and personal messages. eSnips users can continue conversing with each other via the eSnips Forums.

Once our new Item Page is completed, there will be several addition layers of spam protection added and commenting will resume as normal. In the meantime, just enjoy logging into your account without even the possiblity of having to deal with the dreaded spam.

That’s a breath of fresh air I think all of us needed.

Explaining the new forum ranking

If you’ve even been on the eSnips Forum, our old ranking system was pretty much if you left 500 posts you’d be labeled a “High Roller”… and that was literally it. Well we’ve finally got back and filled in some of the blanks.

The new system is designed to give you a more informed perspective on who it is giving you advice. Which is not to say, that a “New Contributor” can’t turn you on to something really cool, just that if a “High Roller!” or “eSnips Expert!” answers a question about something on eSnips, chances are they really know what they’re talking about.

Anyway, you can check out your own new ranking here!

eSnips Search 3.0 gets it right

Okay, the first version of eSnips Search was good but outdated, the less said about the second version the better, but in the third version of eSnips Search finally gets it right! We’ve just finished uploading a brand new version of Search today,  and  I want to run you through some of the highlights:

1. You can search for users again and unlike the original version of Search you don’t need a different entry field to do it.

2. Unobtrusively from the header, you can specify if you want to search for video, audio, images, users, folder, others, or the default everything.

Downtime scheduled for eSnips – July 23rd

For anyone who’s noticed a rash of new bugs infecting eSnips today, don’t fret – we’re taking the site offline for a few hours Thursday morning to deal with the problem.

Which means you probably won’t be able to access eSnips from  about midnight until about 2-3 in the morning New York time.

We apologize for the inconvience both with the bugs and the downtime, but hopefully by the time most of you wake up tomorrow – the problems will already be fixed.

What new applications do you want on eSnips?

We’re getting ready to developing some exciting new applications here at eSnips, but we need your help deciding which ones!

Here’s how it will work: we’re looking to develop some applications that will not only appeal to our existing users, but will entice first time visitors to download. So please share with us in the comments an application idea that you’d  download and we’ll fast track the best 3-5 ideas.

One quick note – while we welcome applications ideas that address problems on eSnips, just keep in mind issues with spam, the lack of a download counter, and the current Search page are all going to be resolved in a site refresh going live in about 3 weeks. Thanks!