Official announcements and happiness!
A few changes, including Email OR Phone Number MUST be verified in order to contribute on Imzy
Hi everybody!
I hope you're all having a wonderful weekend! As many of you noticed, we had our first burst of "less than ideal" activity this past weekend, and we've been making a bunch of behind the scenes changes as a result.
Unfortunately, we haven't had a chance to mirror the changes across all platforms (mainly web and apps), so you might see some weird behaviour over the next couple of days while they get caught up.
Some of the changes, that have happened:
Rate limiting
- Previously, our only limit was on creating communities (2 during the beta), we've extended rate limiting to comments and posts as well. I won't say the exact numbers, as we're still tweaking the numbers, but the essence of it is:
- You can only create one post/comment per
Xseconds. - You can only post/comment
Ytimes per 24 hour period. - In the communities you lead, there's a
Zmultiplier (e.g.Y*Zposts per 24 hours and posts perX/Zseconds).
- You can only create one post/comment per
- Accidental thanks to @ifindkarma and @Ellis who educated us last night that our initial
X,Y, andZnumbers were not adequate.
Mandatory Verification of Email/Phone Number
- Creating communities, posts, and comments will now require a verified email or phone number.
- Users can join communities, message leaders, like posts/comments, without a verified account, but in order to contribute, they must verify their email or phone number.
New users will receive invites after 30 minutes on the site
- Previously, it was 5 minutes, but we've made it a tad longer.
- Note Automated invites are completely disabled for the next day or two while we work on some more tools for leaders and staff.
- Community invites will still be manually handed out, and if you're in need, you can use the "chat with us" and feature and we'll get to it when we next do a batch of invites.
How these changes might look weird on the site
- If you are in a state that you can not comment, you won't have a reply option, on comments or posts, like this:

- If you can not create a post, you will receive a warning as to why, like this:

- If you can not create a community, you will be told it is because you are over the creation limit, no matter what, like this:

- We'll be working with our web and apps teams over the next couple days to make this far more user friendly, but unfortunately, we had to push some backend changes to stay ahead of the game first.
Thanks for being a part of the beta, we really do appreciate your feedback and continuing support!




You're very welcome. Happy that @Eilis and I could be helpful to you! :)
I wonder when I will hit the limit of comments in communities I don't lead, in 24 hour periods. :)
Ah. Huh! Our Zs needed to be increased?
This looks brilliant!
giphy parties oh no
We should be okay. Challenge accepted!
/kindness/post/sunday_afternoon_giphy_party
:) :) :)
Mmmm, sundae...
You two are the best commie leaders I know of. Thanks.
I mean, commie leaders don't really have a very strong track record if you look at history, but I'd have to agree on this one!
Yay, thank you for the much needed changes, I don't entirely agree with liniting members posts or comments, and would like to see that go, but it's definitely better than the cough less than desierable content (one might also call this phenomenon, reddit) however I doubt I'll ever hit the limit and it's certainly something that can be worked around.
Although perhaps in the future there could be a reputation feature with this, it's just a thought but when a person joins they start with 50 reputation (min 0 max 100) then as they make posts or comments that goes up, votes also give it a (very very marginal) boost, and a report would bring it down. To stop it being abused perhaps if the person reporting doesn't give an adequate reason or is very obviously in the wrong it would bring their score down as well.
I don't know, it's just a thought.
Input is more than welcome!
Part of me is seriously hoping the rate limiter as I wrote it yesterday is not what the rate limiter looks like in a month, or a week.
It is really nice to be able to interact with you. Input is more than welcome is a delightful phrase. And I get the feeling you mean it. Thanks.
So in theory, normal users posting in a normal manner probably shouldn't hit the rate limit. If you do, please let us know!
And yeah long term we can look at other methods/variations, but this was a quick fix
Thanks for all the work you guys have done this weekend. It's been pretty crazy but we'll be better for it in the end 👌
:) You're welcome!
Does the rate limit affect scheduled posts? If I have five or six posts scheduled at say, every one hour, will that matter?
... That is a good question. I my gut says yes. I'll make note to make sure it doesn't when I get back to it tonight/tomorrow.
Okay, thanks. And here's hoping you can find the right balance of xyz to keep everything running smoothly.
This is awesome nice work!!
I think it might be important to have the reply buttons show up even for currently rate-limited users. If I'm a new user and I've been excitedly posting all around, and all of a sudden the reply button is gone, it doesn't tell me that I need to slow down. It seems to signal that the site is broken or that some posts can't be replied to, and is confusing imo.
I think a better solution is to have reply be styled differently to denote rate limiting, and have the mouse-over text reflect that. Possibly even have it link to an explanation page about rate limiting. Maybe even allow them to draft their next comment but explain that it cannot be posted yet in big letters.
That being said, I think rate-limiting is a great feature, and a necessary one. Probably all user operations should have some amount of rate limiting, or abuse is still possible, and it allows you to tune how hard the servers are getting hit at peak load.
There will be UI changes coming sooooooon. This is mainly a problem of we had to get the back end changes out now now now now NOOOOOOW, and the guys who work on the web level were not in a state to drop everything and run to fix it.
ETA: The abuse that was coming in was not coming in via the web or app interfaces. It was people monitoring our API calls, and scripting calls to them.
Maybe it should be a 30 minute post limit, not a 24 hour one? Would give leaders enough time to deal with people trying to spam or being otherwise inappropriate, without limiting the community at large to much.
On Reddit it's a 9-minute limit if you're being downvoted to hell in a community (I sometimes have run into that problem in the defaults when I support feminism or affirmative action in any way, and get blasted to hell by the typical Redditor)... But since we don't have downvotes here, maybe this is a good solution so that we just don't get flooded with spammers/troll posts too quickly.
Hey Leslie!
One thing I noticed is that if your email isn't verified, the banner that shows up to tell you about that has a higher z-index than the top-right drop-down menu. Currently, the practical effect of this is that you can't (easily) invite other people if you haven't verified your email (maybe that's something you'd want to do anyways, I don't know), but I imagine as that banner code gets used for more things it'll become more of an issue.
And speaking of z-index problems, my profile when focused on posts has the footer overlapping some of the profile boxes, so I can't click "Add a public bio and links".
Whoa, I recognize you.
What a coincidence, I recognize you, too! :)
Hey you! How's it going?
We noticed both these things shortly after they went live, and team front-end is on it. Not sure it'll get fixed tonight, probably tomorrow.
Ha, I did it tonight 👍
Excellent.
@xiongchiamiov, the issue is fixed now.
Thanks, swell.