Q8Ba7th Official Blog

To make it more live and news updated, we are testing automatic news importing from popular news sources. Yesterday we added local, economy, sport, , and worldwide news from Al-Jarida newspaper. We have are also adding the famous TechCrunch posts to the Technology section, so expect to find interesting things there. While the automatic news import might bring an overwhelming amount of unwanted news, all these news will be queued in the Upcoming News section. News that gets enough votes only will make it to the published popular section. What’s even better is, all those news are categorized accordingly. So if you have a taste for Sport, browse to the Sport section from the top navigational header and you will only get what you need.

We hope you like the new feature, and wish to hear your feedback on it.

Popularity: 24% [?]

Following the successful raid on spammers last night, we are happy to release the new design for Q8igg, which we hope you will find much more user friendly, and easier to navigate and utilize. The new design comes with the following advantages:

1- New Featured Gallery News
2- Easier navigation to different news and categories
3- 3 column view – you get more options at same page in one simple layout
4- RSS Feeds for your preferred category. For example, you can chose to subscribe to Kuwait Sites feed rather than News, or say Sports only.

The design has just been released, fresh out, so it may have bits of glitches here and there. Please bare with us, and do no hesitate to report any problems or suggestions you have.

Hopefully, we still have more cool things to come. So keep looking. Until then, start sharing and casting your vote to your favorite piece of news, article, or sites you find in Kuwait or worldwide.

Hope you like it.

Regards,
Bashar

Popularity: 24% [?]

Due to the high amount of spam attacks it got, the Q8igg project has been put a side for quite long time. However the project for me was everything but doomed. I was waiting for the right time and tool to fix this, and during that time, the site’s been literally unusable.

Last night was the diet and health gaining night. All new members are required to do email authentication now, and we are monitoring closely for spammers. Also, a counter-attack has been launched on all the happily living spammers over the course of previous months. As a result, the following actions has been executed:

1- Over 13,500 spammers have been deleted.
2- Over 8,500 spam posts were deleted
3- Over 7,500 spam votes removed
4- All spammer comments were deleted

I’m sure there are still bits and pieces of spammers here and there, but as far as news goes, the site is clean now, and we are back with a reasonable amount of users (47 as of now). I have also worked very hard to filter our legitimate users from spammers, I hope none was removed by mistake. If you have been positively contributing in the past, did not have your stories removed, or if you just keep silent but I know you from the blogs, it is very unlikely you have been deleted.

Still however, if your account has been deleted by mistake, I strongly apologize for this unintended action. With my apology again, you are kindly welcome to register again, and start using the site as before. It’s really difficult to filter out one individual amongst thousands of spammers, so I hope you understand.

Also, story submission time has been optimized as it was taking long time for spam filtering.

These are first steps of things we have in mind to bring the community back live again.

Popularity: 23% [?]

OK, so Al-Qabas is definitely not a new site, and I haven’t been there for a while, but I noticed only today their new design. The design is not really a breakthrough or anything, but compared to the old one, it’s much more compelling, easy to use and browse, helps you find what you are looking for. I can tell some thought has been put into the layout. The usability of the site as I see now is better than any other local news site. I liked the new dynamic tab browsing for subcategory. No page refresh needed. For example, you can click on Worldwide Sport under Sport category. Latest news will show up in that area without refreshing the current page.

The Bad:

1- RSS Feeds: First, RSS Feeds are not embedded in the headers. Something which could make it easier for browsers to identify and subscribe to the feed. Also, the feed titles are pointing to some urls like http://www.alqabas-kw.comarticle.aspx/?id=409408, which takes you to a 404 Page Not Found.

2- Cross Browser Support: At least on my Firefox @ Linux, which relatively often fails proper rendering to be honest, this site minorly fails with some text exceeding it’s box area, and top menu items are broken:

3- Continuous loading: For some reason, I see the page trying to load some content every few seconds. I doubt there is such instant news update on the site, so I wonder what’s that loading for. Sometimes its trying to load from Alqabas.com.kw, and others from doubleclick. So I’m assuming it’s some ad block trying to load.

Popularity: 23% [?]