We’ve been working on ways to find good content on Xanga for a while now.

Boost was good at finding pretty good content, but not so good with the multiple step nomination process. 
Stars are good cause it’s really easy to vote (already 250,000 votes!), but it’s also easy to game and give ‘fake’ stars. 

Then we thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we could take boost’s ability to find good content and combine it with the ease of voting in Stars?

Starting now, if enough people give a lot of stars to a weblog, photo, or video, it will be automatically submitted to  http://star.xanga.com.  There the academy of xanga users (aka you!) can provide checks and balances by voting on what’s best.  This should make it pretty hard to game Stars.  If the academy of xanga users agrees that the post is really good, it must really be something – so we’ll give it a rare “Star Award”!  

We also built in a system where if people try to game it by giving out fake stars or not honestly voting, the academy will fix it and the person’s star power will go down.  We hope this system will be easy to vote and show the best content on Xanga.

Please check it out and tell us what you think!

 Every site now has the option to allow anonymous comments!  Now you have a choice:

• If you want to allow anonymous comments, no need to do anything – it’s available on your site already.
  
  
• If you use locks (xanga lock and friends lock), no need to do anything.  The locks should work as it always has, and outsiders will not be able to visit or comment, just like before.
  
  
• If you want to disable this option, just go here and change your Anonymous Comments option to “no”:
  http://edit.xanga.com/editaccountprivacy.aspx

So how about spam?  Vikas also added some cool preventive measures to help stop annoying spam.  Before leaving an anonymous comment, it asks for a word code just to make sure a script isn’t being used to automate unwanted spam.

So check it out!  Tell your friends who haven’t got around to making a Xanga yet, to leave you a comment and say hello – anonymous comments are here!

Ever since we’ve started hand-picking weblog posts to Feature on our frontpage, we’ve noticed how hard it is to find quality posts on Xanga. It’s hard to find find if you don’t know where to look.  Eprops and comments don’t do a good job because almost everyone just gives 2 eprops.

So dave and vikas added “Stars” to Photos and Videos – a low key way that allows visitors to rate your post on a scale of 1 to 5.  They’ve been a huge hit!  We’ve gotten thousands of stars, and it really helps in identifying good content.  So we thought we’d add them to Weblogs too – you can see them below each post.

It’s also a good way for people who don’t like to leave comments to give feedback when they think a post is really good.

Some people might not like Stars though, so we’ve built an optout.  If you deactivate Stars, the Stars option should disappear from your site soon.  Just go here to turn them off:
 
  * http://edit.xanga.com/editaccountprivacy.aspx   

By the way, sorry to have launched Stars without a head’s up!  We had planned to post about this ahead of launch, but due to an internal mixup we didn’t get to it in time .
  
Let us know what you think of Stars!