TeamThotswap's Public Profile

We're happy to announce the availability of a much-requested feature: email alerts. Now, members can elect to receive updates, conveniently delivered to their email addresses, of activities related to their Thotswap accounts.

Examples of activities that can trigger alerts include someone leaving a comment on your public profile or on one of your blog posts or reviews, or someone becoming a fan of you. All of these alerts can, of course, be modified by every member. As a convenience, we've turned them on for you, so if you want to disable some or all of the alerts, you can do so from within a new panel in your Dashboard.

Due to the release of Internet Explorer 8 today, we have been hard at work testing and making sure Thotswap works properly under this new browser. We have already identified a few minor rendering issues with our website, but if you see other problems with the way our website appears under IE8, please let us know.

There was one greater issue with Internet Explorer 8 that caused some of the functionality of our website to break. This would occur through the use of functions like rating someone's entry or retrieving a user information tooltip, and would result in an undefined error. We've since corrected this problem, but some of you may have cached files on your computer, which don't contain the fixes we implemented. If you see this error, simply force-refresh the webpage and the problem should disappear.

We had some issues with our database server last night after our web host decided to perform maintenance and upgrades on our server. We've managed to restore the database to a working state, but unfortunately there is now some data that is missing because we had to restore an older snapshot of the database from earlier last night.

We're aware that at least one user is affected by this and will probably be unable to log into his or her account because the account was created after the server went down for maintenance. In addition, any activities on the website such as posting comments or creating and updating reviews and blog posts performed late last night (or early this morning) will not be present on the website.

First and foremost, you'll notice that we've renamed the Private Profile (or often referred to as the Profile for short) of past to the much more cleaner Dashboard. This is a move we feel will reduce confusion, as every member now has both a Dashboard, which is accessible by that member only, and a public profile, which is accessible by everyone else. From this point on, the Dashboard will now be the home of information and controls that can be used to monitor and modify every aspect of your account.

Secondly, we'd like to introduce you to a new feature we added today: favorite links. Do you have a favorite website or blog that you would like to share with your friends and visitors? Now, you can add a list of favorite links to your public profile for everyone to see -- like a blogroll for those of you familiar with blogging terminology. You can manage your list of favorite links right from within the Dashboard, under the "Profile" tab:

If you are a member of AdSense, you may have received an email from Google last week about their new interest-based advertising. The email message contains the following paragraph:

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

Today, we're excited to announce an important update to the Thotswap website. As of this evening, all current and future members will have their own domain name underneath thotswap.com to call their own!

When you create an account, you will now be automatically given the URL http://yourname.thotswap.com, where visitors can find your public homepage. Additionally, all your blog posts will also be published under this domain.