website previews

I have just put on to Chainki what I think is neat new feature, the ability to have website previews. Take a random Chainki page, such as Shopping in Thompson Falls and move the cursor over the external links and you will see what I mean. Neat eh?

"Oh, it'll be full of spam". Will it?

One of the initial reactions to Chainki is that, since absolutely anyone can edit, it will soon be full of spam. After now nearly 6 months of being working as a site, how is this prophecy of doom working out? Pretty poorly actually.

When, to start with, there was just me looking out for spammers, there was a little bit, but it was easy for me to cope with it. Now, as the site has grown and there are more and more visitors, true, there are more and more spammers, but also there are also more and more editors who take the time to stomp out any spam they see. Overall, I think the percentage of spammers to people who remove spam remains highly against the spammers.

And just imagine my personal delight when I now see that someone else than me has removed spam.

It shows that the system is working. It shows that the good guys in the wiki world always outnumber the bad guys. It has worked for Wikipedia, and I don't see why it should not work for Chainki.

The really good news as far as I'm concerned is that it looks that as the site grows in visitors, so the good guy vs. bad guy balance will probably stay the same, and so Chainki will never be full of spam.

I for one will be very happy about that.

Alexa rank upward and upward

I have been following the rank of Chainki from the beginning on Alexa.

Now, being the 1st December, I checked again, and note the figures. Horray! Another jump of over 100,000 places in the world ranking!!

The particular rank on a single day or week jumps around a lot, but the 3-month average has consistently shown good steady improvement. The figures are:

1 Jul 2006 - Non-existent
1 Aug 2006 - 1,403,313
1 Sep 2006 - 985,084
1 Oct 2006 - 683,011
1 Nov 2006 - 396,450
1 Dec 2006 - 286,341

I suppose I could do the extrapolation and work out when Chainki will overtake Dmoz. Or Google.