Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! We at Propeller are celebrating by releasing a few new features and improving the performance of the website. Here is a rundown on the changes:

Drop Upgrade: We have noticed two major uses for the new drop function we released last month. Some use the drop to signal that a story is not news and should not be shown on the site. Others use the drop to tell us that they disagree with the point of view of the story's author. Both uses of the drop are extremely valuable to us, although we want to treat those two situations differently.

A story is a drop candidate if the number of drops as a percentage of the total (props + drops) exceeds our defined "drop threshold." As of today, if a drop candidate has not gained significant participation from the community, we will consider it "grounded" and block it from hitting the homepage. If the story passes the threshold but has significant community involvement, we will flag it "controversial" instead. For those interested in seeing grounded stories, you can click the "show" link to the right of the "Most Popular Stories" header on the homepage (image shown here).

(show link to the right)

(flags for grounded, then controversial stories)

Member Block: The top member request at the moment is to return the full member block functionality which previously existed in a prior version of Propeller. We are happy to announce that this feature is back! When a member blocks another, they will no longer see the other's comments or messages. An image showing the "Block" button, and the subsequent collapsed comment by a blocked member are shown below. In order to unblock a member, go to your messages page and select the "Block/Unblock" option from the Message Center menu on the top left.

(showing the block button)

Performance: There have been a number of members who sent in feedback urging us to improve Propeller's performance. We have worked hard to improve performance over the past three weeks, and believe that Propeller today is noticeably faster than it was a month ago. For the geekishly inclined, our performance improvements came from aggressive content and data caching, optimized database queries, code optimizations, and image consolidation using spritemaps.

We also brought back the read count display (shown as "Read(#)" next to the "Discuss" link), and restored the ability to access the context menu by right clicking on the "Read Full Story" link.

We hope that these changes improve the overall Propeller experience. Thanks to all of the members who wrote in to tell us how we can improve the site, it is truly appreciated. We will raise a glass of green beer and celebrate the Propeller community tonight, before getting back to work on the next set of features. As always, feedback is welcomed here.

May Your Propeller Continue To Spin,
Tom (tdrapeau)