Today, I spent a little time making a couple of changes to Salvia Trip. The number one thing I needed to do was create some kind of spam filter. Initially, I planned on moderating all the experience reports myself, but all the american ones had to wait ages before I got out of bed. This kind of delay isn’t very helpful when there’s community buildin’ to be done. A few days later, I just published them automatically, until someone’s salvia experience could apparently be summed up soley by a list of links. “What a spiritual journey”, I thought. After the second beautiful interpretation via the medium of linkage was brought to my attention, I realised something needed to be done… eventually. Naturally, procrastination took hold, and I resorted to deleting them from the database manually as a quick fix. So today, I put my coding hat on and made a little filter to halt any report containing a link. I’ll then delete all the spam, accept all the legit reports and everybody’s happy.
Since my coding hat was barely on for five seconds, I decided further action was necessary. Other changes include:
- Changing the number of trips/comments on a user’s profile page from six to five, like the front page
- Swapping the order of the most popular trips when browsing — least popular were at the top for some reason…
- Adding a default avatar to profiles without one
- Displaying avatars with all trip reports and comments
- Changing the advert blocks to be a bit more complementary instead of blended in with the text
Here’s the new default avatar, inspired by those next to comments on this blog. You might recognise the salvia leaves from SageWisdom — I painted in the leaves, spread them further apart and used them as a pattern for the background.
My head is now sufficiently toasty, so off comes the coding hat and on goes the relaxin’-in-front-of-the-telly poncho. We have some powerful new smoking mixtures to try out…
I love your salvia trip site.
It’s a good idea.