The Fluther Blog

As you may know, last night we made the decision to ask a few users to leave the collective. This was a culmination of the continuing discussion we’ve been having on the quality and culture of Fluther as we grow. There were also incidents of artificial score inflation, which we viewed as cheating. This decision […]

I have a special treat for all you Flutherers. Two of our members, paulc and klass4, have created really nifty Fluther add-ons. We’re floored by their work — we love seeing our users re-envision the site in new ways.

In my last post, I announced a new feature that automatically corrects the punctuation of questions using “fancy computer logic”. I’d like to reveal some of that computer logic, in the first in a series of blog posts where we explore the technology that drives Fluther.

Members of Fluther’s grammar police will be happy to know that we’re making strides toward proper English. Fluther now applies some fancy computer logic to improve question formatting: The first word will be capitalized ALL CAPS will be converted to sentence-case Repeated punctuation will be unified Questions that omit punctuation will have a question mark appended You’ll be able […]

We’ve been trying to keep it secret for quite a while now, but many of you have already figured it out: Superstar Fluther member sferik (Erik Michaels-Ober) is now part of the Fluther Team! Andrew and I are thrilled to have him on board and we’re looking forward to sharing countless late nights, brainstorming sessions, […]

So, some of you may have noticed some server blips and wonkiness on Fluther today or maybe some slowness over the last few weeks. Our apologies. There are just so many of you using the site (and so few of us) that we weren’t quite prepared for all this traffic. But that’s okay. Please keep […]

First, I want to give thanks to the community. When Ben and I started talking about Fluther in 2006, we never imagined that we’d have such a vibrant community so quickly. So, thank you to our amazing, intelligent, curious, and open-minded users for making Fluther such a wonderful, entertaining place. I also want to apologize […]

We’re still listed as the top webapp on Apple’s social networking site, and the flow of new users doesn’t seem to be slowing. I’ve refined our question removal tools, added more warning text to the iPhone site, and will be updating our guidelines. We’ll be adding search to the iPhone shortly. That said: we’re going […]

Andrew and I are about to embark on our first trip to SXSW! We’re so excited to meet all awesome geeks in the web world… it’s thrilling. As a fun experiment, we decided to make a special version of Fluther just for those of you with questions about SXSW. If you’re going, try doing some […]

As you can see, we’ve quintupled our activity in the span of a few days. As I’ve blogged about before, our signal-to-noise ratio has gone down a bit. We’ve been removing the most inane and childish questions, but many of the “low quality” questions are simply new users who are just trying out the site […]