As many of you may have noticed, we have a very popular new member (vanji) in our community who managed to accumulate over 60,000 popularity points in roughly 1.5 days. That comes out to about a visit 1 page load (or refresh) every 2 seconds for 36 hours straight.

Now, is there anything wrong with someone receiving 60,000 hits in 1.5 days? Nothing at all.

Is there anything wrong with someone receiving 60,000 hits in 1.5 from a new member with no real content on their site? Well, no, not really. However, it becomes highly suspicious.

Let's take a close look at the traffic logs, shall we:



Now, the question is: Is there anything wrong with someone receiving 60,000+ hits in 1.5 days from 10 "people?"

Absolutely! Foremost, it is a clear violation of our Terms of Service. The visits are undoubtedly not genuine. (These robotic tendencies tend to be a bit whelming. You can do the math.)

There is a plethora of more reasons why this type of inappropriate member behavior is bad for our community ...

Why This Hurts NuTang

• You are ruining the essense of the Revenue-Sharing program
  The point of this system was to reward members for keeping an active account and developing their own readership base. The point is NOT to figure out ways to break the system. By doing the latter, you are de-valuing the effort and time others have taken to develop their blogs and sites.
  
  
• You are ruining the essences of the Popularity Points and Most Active
  List system
  See above point. Members should be given due recognition.
  
  
• You are slowing the server
  Having more than 10 IPs continuously pinging the server is causing unnecessary load to the system. It is essentially a malicious Denial-of-Service attack. (A DoS attack is, in fact, punishable by law in every country that I know of.) As a result, you make NuTang slower for everyone trying to visit the community and read their friends' blogs.
  
  
• You are endangering NuTang's support from advertisers
  Just like how your actions are meant to deliberately cheat NuTang, our advertisers will see the constant loading of their ads as NuTang's deliberate attempt to cheat them. They may withdraw their ads and that will be the end to the revenue-sharing program. Please don't ruin this for everyone.
  

The moral: Don't try to generate false traffic to your blog. Maintain a blog that people will enjoy reading and the readers will come naturally (maybe a bit faster if you do some legit promoting yourself).

One last reason not to do what Vanji did: It's simply moronic. Your Michael Jackson avatar will be at the top of ever points lists, throwing red flags everywhere. Good luck, my friend. Good luck.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

- dave

P.S. At first, I wanted to keep things discreet. The last I wanted was to bring controversy and stress to the community. And so, I had originally sent the member a private note stating that he or she has violated the TOS. Next thing I know, he or she has shamelessly brought this out into the public's eye.

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In other NuNews

- Thanks to little-b, we now have a facebook group. If you're a facebook member, join here: http://minnesota.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2210483786

- On the homepage Welcome Box, you can now see how many pages you've surfed. Thanks to ikimashokie for that great idea.

- Be out on the look-out for a lot of new items to be added to the NuStore.

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We have added some more smilies to the collection. These were made by little-b, inventor of the mini-smilies.

Additions to the mini smilies family:



The new octagonal family:



Enjoy, and be sure to visit little-b's blog to thank her!

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Oh, and I almost forgot! Two new items have been added to the NuStore: The Power of Username Transformation and Unlimited Customized Questions/Answers.

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Congratulations to le_battement for winning the contest with his design, "IceMelon." Second and third place went to invisible for "If I had wings . . ." and teresa for "Plain Jane," respectively.

To see all winners, check out the official thread:
http://www.nutang.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1108

To thank for all who voted, a series of prizes will be rewarded to those that voted through a competition or game of sorts. These prizes will include:

- 25 pps (10)
- weblog signature (5)
- pixel person (2)
- Ultimate Member Tracker (1)
- secret page (1)

Details to come. They will be posted on the forums; not here.

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Yes, you heard it right. We now have even more smilies, pushing our smilie library to over 400!

We also have increase our collection of pot pourri images.

Comment! (0) | Recommend! | Categories: smilies [t], graemlins [t], emoticons [t]

The gallery system has been greatly improved. You can now create your own photo albums. (Originally, your albums were defined by Flickr's photosets. That seemed to work fine, except for the fact that free accounts only come with 4 measly photosets, as pointed out by Chloefoxx.)

Now, you can create as many photo albums as you need!

Unfortunately, I don't have anything in my gallery to show you. However, if you head over to dave's gallery, you will see that he has many photo albums. You can administer your gallery albums through NuTROL.

Also, a bug of some photos not showing up in NuTROL gallery has been fixed. Thanks to teresa for pointing this out!

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Let's get it on! Check out the wonderful templates competing in the Template Contest. We have a great assortment of really well-designed templates this time. A special thanks to invisible for really getting the ball rolling on this.

Voting will commence this weekend. For full rules and prizes, check out this thread.

Comment! (2) | Recommend! | Categories: template [t], contest [t]