It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an update on here in the BUMPzee blog, and I’m sorry for that. Wordpress broke and I couldn’t post to the blog. I’ve upgraded it and am trying again… works? great!

A year ago, BUMPzee was a fun and, for me, a useful place to hang out. It was a thriving place for like-minded bloggers to stop by and share their blog posts. Since then, like all good things, spammers have move in. I shudder to think that the only ones getting any real use out of this platform these days *is* the spammers. I blame myself for not seeing it coming, preparing better, and putting a stop to it.

Bumpzee isn’t dead. But it’s got a terminal disease and we’re sort of putting it into a somewhat of a cryogenic state until we can find a cure for its chronic illness.

I’ve shut down some of the features that have been abused. We will no longer pull in ALL RSS feeds from all blogs. I’m also leaving the widgets off for now.

We’ve actually got some cool ideas that we think would be perfect for the great bloggers who fell in love with the initial Bumpzee and we’ll be looking at migrating bumpzee over to a new model in the next several months.

The way I see it, if we’re going to do something great with Bumpzee, we’ve got one more shot at it. So we’re not going to rush into anything at this point (why start now? ;))

Stay tuned.

In case you noticed an improvement to performance on BUMPzee today, it’s not your imagination.

We know that things were getting pretty bogged down around here and something that we’ve been working on for a while now is some hardware upgrades. Those were completed and transitioned this morning, so the BUMPzee site and widgets should be a little snappier.

We’re working on further performance improvements and will implement those as soon as we can.

The following enhancement will be appearing in the next few hours on BZ…

As BUMPzee has grown in the past few months, the increasing set of features has caused some fragmention in functionality. The biggest issues have formed between “zees” and the discussions that happen on blog entries. We’ve recently converted zees into full-blown discussions and we’re excited that they’ve become quite active. This, however, has distracted and detracted from the blog entries and the comments that happen on those. There are just too many places to track the conversations.

So, in an effort to simplify this, we have combined the two. Now, when you post a new discussion, it is created as a new entry, just like the blog entries. So now, the core element is again ‘entries’, whether it is created from a blog post or from a local entry. They all appear together in the same lists, so the attention and discussion should be much more focused.

We’ve migrated all existing zees to entries and comments and removed the separate “zees” tab in the communities. Now all conversations can be tracked in the “discussions” tabs.

Discussions still happen in the context of communities. Non-community topics happen in the “BUMPzee” community.

Check out the top level “Discussions” page for a global view of all the discussion activity on BUMPzee. You can filter the list to see just what interests you.

Or, keep a close eye on one community by viewing a community’s discussions tab.

Local entries will have the picture of the member to the left. Blog entries are a different color and have a blog screenshot.

There will undoubtedly be some initial chaos from this significant change, but I hope that once things settle down and you feel your way around this will be much easier.

Please feel free to provide feedback and ask questions. I’ll start up a discussion on BUMPzee and keep track of comments on this blog post.

Just a quick note to highlight some recent development we’ve been doing. BUMPzee got its start as a community platform and quickly grew into a place to get your blog listed, regardless of whether it fits into a community.

We’ve recently focused our energy on improving visibility to all blogs and launched some redesigned pages today.

The blog profile pages are now packed with info, such as recent viewers, recent blog posts, and if you have a widget installed (for tracking), we’ll show your most popular pages as well.

Also, for the blog owner, you can see some great stats on your blog visits as well as recent hits on individual pages.

But as one of the best parts about BUMPzee is just finding new blogs and new bloggers. We’ve reorganized the navigation to help you find plenty of new stuff to check out. I’m having a blast with the “New to You” page, under the Blogs menu (see picture below.) Go to that page to see a random list of blogs that you haven’t visited before. Go check them out.

Or sart on the BUMPzee homepage to see all sorts of brand new stuff.

We implemented “zees” a month or two ago on a whim. We emulated Twitter on the notion that people in a community might share random thoughts. A zee is a quick thought, what’s going on, make a statement, or ask a question.

As the days go by, I’ve been witnessing some interesting behavior. Zees certainly haven’t taken off like twitter has by any stretch. The times that zees get used, usually turn into a short conversation. But the conversation gets stunted. This is probably because of the format. And like in Twitter, I find that I often want to reply to a previous post but I feel like it’s not really the purpose and I’d be just messing up the place.

Zees feel like conversations wanting to bust out. So who are we to stop that?

Therefore, I give you zees, version 2. Or zees on steriods.

Zees can now be replied to, and these replies appear under the zee in a message board like fashion.

You can view all Zees, only the zees in your communities, or in a single community.

You can post a zee in a specific community or in a general discussion area.

You can sort by date of entry or last reply date. You can search.

You can have fun. Go on. Post away!