Thoof users may have noticed a marked increase in low-quality “spam” stories over the past few weeks. While our targeting algorithm does identify and bias against such stories, the shier volume of them resulted in many of them being visible for quite a while. So we have implemented some more aggressive anti-spam measures, to identify both spam stories, and users with a track-record of submitting spam.

We are happy that many people have identified Thoof as a good source of traffic, but we are only interested in sending traffic to those that have earned it by providing interesting content. This doesn’t include blatantly promotional posts (ie. “Isn’t our website great!!”), or posts to blogs which simply embed or link elsewhere without adding any real value.

You can help this process by using the “mark as” drop down on stories to mark such stories as “spam”.

We hope that you see an immediate improvement in story quality, please post comments and feedback below.

Sometimes there is a genre of stories that you instantly know won’t interest you.  While our personalization algorithm should determine this quite quickly based on what you read and don’t read, now you can speed the process along using our Block by Tag feature.

Now you can click on a tag on a story, and select “block”, and you will never see another story with that tag.

Enjoy!

We’ve just deployed a major upgrade to our submission process, breaking it up into several stages.  Among the improvements are a much nicer interface for assigning tags to your story, and a fun and novel captcha mechanism to prevent story spamming.

Despite the best efforts of Thoof’s personalization technology, sometimes you will see stories that aren’t going to interest you.  In some cases, you know that you probably aren’t going to be interested in any stories from a particular source or submitter.

Well, Thoof now has the answer.  Just click on a source or submitter, and you will have the option to view more stories, or you can block that source and submitter permanently!

Let us know what you think!

We’ve just deployed a significant upgrade to Thoof’s personalization technology.  As you probably know, one of the best things about Thoof is that we figure out what you want, and personalize the stories you see to your interests, rather than showing everyone the same thing.

We are constantly working to improve our personalization algorithm, and have just given it a major upgrade, that should have an immediate and noticeable effect.

Let us know what you think!