Three small changes during a quick Friday cleanup:

• New guidelines regarding homework questions.
  Following feedback from the community, we have put forth our “official stance” on homework questions. Read it here.
  The gist: homework questions are allowed, but any direct answers will be removed.
• Lurve celebrations are moving into the ‘meta’ section.
  There’s now a link to the meta section in the lurve achievement notifications in the community feed. Read the discussion about this decision.
• Subtabs on the iPhone.
  At long last, our iPhone friends can view the meta section of the site. Sorry this took a while.

Now, back to work! Whupppahh!

Now I’ll forever be “working out”.

And lest we think this is only about me, check out our very own richardhenry’s NSFW site, cursebird. A brilliant idea, if you ask me.

I made some tweaks to the notify server yesterday, but she’s sending out _way_ too many emails. Sorry about that! I’ll try to get that fixed today.

Also, the avatar hiccup on the iPhone site should be corrected.

Please, let us know if you see anything else out-of-place! We’re excited that everything (for the most part) has gone so smoothly.

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, and server emergencies with him (we’ve already had a few).

Erik is joining us part-time and has been key in making some of the architectural decisions we’ve been facing over the last month or so. And, in celebration, he’s just checked in his first round of changes–iPhone improvements. The highlights:

• Search!
• iPod Touch support
• Disabled annoying zooming into input fields
• URL bar auto-hiding
• Lots of other little fixes and tweaks…

Plus, there’s a brand new icon, so make sure to add Fluther to your home screen!

We run a pretty tight ship around these parts, and we’re very confident that he’ll fit right it and keep moving Fluther towards Jellyfish Heaven, if it really exists.

So I’m sure you’ll join me in congratulating and welcoming sferik to the team. Bravo!

I also want to apologize to everyone, both new and old users. When we made the iPhone app, we imagined it as a satellite to the main Fluther experience; we never expected it to be Apple’s featured social networking app for nearly two weeks. As such, we didn’t flesh out the story of Fluther on the iPhone… we assumed people would already know how to use the site. So, I apologize to our new users for not giving them enough tools to really understand how Fluther works before they ask a question.

While I was at SXSW, I followed the various threads, from how we should accommodate new users to how we should determine what questions are appropriate for Fluther. Throughout the conference, I’ve been in awe of how passionate the discussions were and how many wonderful ideas were being generated.

And my heart broke with how many people were frustrated by the site.

So, in that light, we’ve decided to rework the question and response guidelines and make them more accessible for new (and old) users. We’ve re-opened the Man o’ War campfire chat for discussion about the site (feel free to vent).

As we think about how we can maintain our community as we grow, keep this in mind:

It’s natural to be protective of the culture that we’ve created on Fluther, especially as we go through periods of growth. However, in order to protect the culture of Fluther, we cannot create a culture of exclusion. We can’t cross the line from good-natured snark to being rude, because then we not only alienate new users, but we also alienate existing users who become afraid to post because they’re worried that the community will tear them down for asking a “stupid” question.

I’m excited to hear your responses. Please respond in Man o’ War.

And remember, this community is truly awe-some.

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 to be really raising the bar for new questions.

Draconian? Perhaps. But until our new community features drop, we owe it to the collective to maintain the culture of Fluther.

So, continue to welcome some of the fantastic new users that have come in this last wave, keep flagging questions, and thank you all for your wonderful feedback.

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 with the first thing that pops into their mind.

So, with that in mind, we’ve added this:

As always, we’re trying to look after our existing users while welcoming in the newbies.

Welcome new users! We hope you like our knowledge collective, and abide by our community guidelines. Let us know if you have any feedback.

And to all you venerable Fluther users, thanks for the helping us get here. You all are the best.

[andrew] edit:  To all our existing users, we know there has been an influx of off-the-cuff questions from iPhone users curious about how the site works. We’re doing our best to balance welcoming new users and maintaining quality, so we ask y’all to be patient with the n00bs.

1. Navigate to http://www.fluther.com on your iPhone
2. Tap the plus sign at the bottom of the screen
3. Choose “Add to Home Screen”
4. Fluther with one finger!

We’ve also had a chance to fix a few nagging iPhone bugs. Sorry that took so long.

We still have lots of great stuff on the way (including T-Shirts, eventually), and we always love getting your feedback.