Stumbler

Looks like he’s stumbling over something…

First of all, I love StumbleUpon. I think it’s an awesome website and tool. It’s a wonderful way to get people to visit your blog.  I get a lot of traffic through SU and I’ve come into contact with some pretty cool people there. Overall, it’s a good way to share info about websites and it’s more fun than your standard social bookmarking function.

However… there are some things that I’ve found over time which I don’t like or which have caused me some problems. Many of these issues have been covered elsewhere, so they may not be new to most of you. Nonetheless, these are the things that have “tripped me up” a bit, so to speak.

  1. Keep your post slugs simple - no special characters. StumbleUpon especially hates commas; it makes them very hard to submit your posts to StumbleUpon without doing some trickery. Wordpress in particular tries to take your post title and use it as your post slug, which becomes part of the URL for your post. If you insist on using these additional characters, take care to type in a post slug using just numbers and letters separated by hyphens.
  2. Use the correct URL. Some sites, like the Triond family of websites, will run articles over multiple webpages. It would make sense to Stumble the very first page. Otherwise, you may accidentally submit multiple pages, which could dilute the value of your Stumble.
  3. Tags can be overwritten. If you are the kind of blogger who is very particular about how you want your submission tagged, it’s possible that a subsequent Stumbler may change them. Keep your eye on this.
  4. Tags can also be incorrectly chosen by the submitter. I’ve seen some weird choices, including adult-oriented tags, where they probably weren’t intended to be used. It could be the result of using a plug-in to automate the submission process.  Similar to problem 3.
  5. Remember to “thumb up” the post before clicking on the Comment button. Otherwise, the post might not be correctly registered as a “thumbs up”.
  6. Unfortunately, people will occasionally downvote your submissions. Resist the temptation to reciprocate unless the downvoter is being abusive. Even then, use caution
  7. The 200 mutual friend limit. After awhile you just can’t add any more friends, which sucks.
  8. The Send To function is very annoying, especially if you have more than 35 mutual friends, because you have to scroll for several seconds until you find the friend you are looking for. Yes, you can argue that the Send To function can be abused by spammers. However, if I want to send a link to someone whose user ID begins with the letter Z, then I have to scroll all the way to the bottom. It gets really, really tedious with 200 mutual friends. Maybe there’s an add-on or other application out there that circumvents this problem?

None of these problems seriously damage StumbleUpon, they are merely annoyances. However, they do represent some ways that the service could be improved. Are you reading, StumbleUpon?



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