The Fluther Blog

In Erik’s last entry in the series, robmandu asked how we implemented the real-time chat. So, ask and ye shall receive! There are a lot of moving parts in the chat system, so I’m going to focus mostly on the back-end for this article — which allows me to show you one of my favorite […]

Today, Fluther is proud to announce a major strategic shift toward becoming an answer-questioning site. “Question answering sites are a dime a dozen,” said Fluther CEO and co-founder Ben Finkel.  “We wanted to do something really different—and this was the first idea that popped into my head.” “So many of our users have answers that […]

Here at Fluther, we love our Macs.  Now, if you have a Mac, you can add Fluther to your Dock using a nice little application developed by Todd Ditchendorf called Fluid. Fluid allows you to install Fluther as a separate Mac OS X application. This gives you faster access to Fluther and separates it from […]

The most common feature request is we get is the ability to see when some some has given you a “Great Answer!” We thought this was a “Great Idea!” (+5) and decided to create a page showing all the lurve you’ve received from the community. What is lurve, you ask? As Woody Allen put it: […]

You might have wondered why you’re required to enter topics when you ask a question. One reason is that we use them to form a weighted list, highlighting the most popular topics of Fluther.

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, […]