Yup, we've been tinkering around with a bunch of stuff and are now unleashing/forcing it on you!

1) We have Terms of Service - you should read them, because we are going to expect you to abide by them!

2) You MUST login to comment. No ifs, ands, or buts. There's an option to let you post your witty anonymous comments, but they will now be tracked to your user account, so admins will be able to sniff out trouble makers (see #1)

3) Some people like the drama. Some people don't. We're defaulting to the side of those who don't. Those horribly dramatic comment threads, err flame wars, can and will now be "buried" so the public doesn't have to be constantly accosted by them. HOWEVER, there is an option under My Camura->Account Settings that will allow you to have them included in your streams.

4) The row of post buttons are GONE - well, kind of. The interface was kind of cluttered and people kept bitching about not being able to click on the little buttons. So now all that stuff is under the new "more options" link you will see under each post. Clicking on a post does still bring up the Comments window, though.

5) Following the pop-up menu change, adding things to albums now has it's own menu that gives you control over the caption, and more complete view of the album name, and lets you control whether duplicates should be allowed in the album.

6) Basic Keyboard Navigation - this setting is turned off by default, but you can try it out under My Camura->Account Settings. When it is turned on and you are viewing a Stream, you can use the Left and Right arrow keys to go Back a Page and Forward a Page, respectively.

7) Private Message! You can now PM folks to reply to comments directly or you can just compose messages straight up. Look for the reply/arrow icon on comments lists or check out your Private Message Inbox. That link is also available from your My Camura area

8) Signups are turned off for now. They'll likely come back in the form of Invites when and if they do.

Early this morning I rolled out some changes that you may or may not care about...

Twitter OAuth support

If you setup your Twitter account with us (or most anywhere), we were forced to ask for your username and password up until about a month ago. At that point they started allowing folks to use this thing called "OAuth". Honestly, the only part about that that you should care about is that we don't need your username and password anymore, so go authorize us to use OAuth and we'll automatically delete your username/password details once it is successful.

Mobile User Streams

There was a request to link usernames on the mobile site to user streams. It seemed to make more sense to link them to a User Profile type page, so that's what happens now. At the top of that page is a link that will take you to the user's current stream to browse through it.

Misc Look & Feel Updates

You may also notice that some things, particularly text boxes and buttons look a little different - they probably do if you are using pretty much anything besides IE. Hope you like it!

Today's Issues

As you may have noticed, due to a series of unfortunate, ridiculous events we've had some issues today.

From about 7am (maybe 3?) till about noon everyone just saw the tetris/maintenance page. Obviously that's been fine for a while. Additionally, until about 7pm we were bouncing messages sent to special addresses of the form phlog-username-code@camura.com addresses. That too has been fixed, but all of those posts are lost. If you want to post them, they'll have to be resent. SORRY!

Update: 4/26/09 11pm EST : and then more shit stopped working. Now I think all is actually well, and obviously we didn't miss that last set of post failures.

Post View stats

As of today, we've started tracking Post views. It's an interesting little stat that several people have asked about and, frankly, I kind of was curious too.

We are providing counts of both total views and unique views. Total is exactly that - every single view on a post. Yes, that means continuously reloading a page will cause it to increase. Unique views are being tracked by IP address, so that will be harded to fudge, but also won't count, say, multiple views from different people in a single office. Deal with it.

Currently view counts are only available to a post's owner. That may or may not change later.

So when do we track them? I'm glad you asked...

• Perma link views - this will include the shortened URLs on twitter and the links in RSS feeds if people click them
• Comments popups - anytime someone pops up the comment box on a post
• Original Images - when the "magnifying glass" is clicked. Note that we change

Ok, the big thing here is that you can now edit images! Woohoo! There's a before & after example here

We are using the Picnik Online Image Editor and simply streamlining the process of heading over there and saving them back here. Got a bad pic? Give it a try!

The miscellany - by request, the pink theme is now more pink. Who knew it could be?

A few more things got fixed today:

• anonymous comments will show up in the sidebar again when you are logged in. uh, sorry about that.

• some fixes to the stats area in case you ever found private posts or bad links in there

We also turned on UserVoice. It's that little orange tab over on the right. You may have seen these elsewhere. Basically UserVoice helps us collect your ideas in a more public space so you guys can also leave your feedback on things. It's been seeded with some ideas we've had and from your tickets.

What we'll try to do is work on the things you guys want first, so go talk it up.

Oh, but don't even bother putting in image rotating - we know, it's going to get done!