Several Big Changes ready for the new release of Mizozo

I am excited to report that we have several big changes ready for release. As it stands, almost all functionality is complete and the site is in test mode. We haven't initiated the code freeze yet because there still are a few minor details we need done, but for the most part Mizozo Labs is in test mode.

The big changes, however, will make the user experience much better. Over the last year we have been experiencing a large influx of users. Unfortunately, these users have been predominantly SEO experts that are pushing content of other sites. These links have their benefit, so we aren't removing them, but they don't benefit our users much. Hence, we have added a new type of categorization for these pages, aptly labeled SEO. When an article is labeled as SEO, it will no longer show up on the home page nor on any category pages. These articles will be available via search, tag lookup or directly link. By removing them from the Homepage and Cateory pages, however, we feel that the user's will not have as much clutter and better articles to chose from when visiting.

Likewise, we have implemented another label ... SPAM. While most of the SEO guys are posting SEO articles, some of them opt for simply spamming us with random garbage about porn or just blatant advertising ... both of which we aren't pleased with. So far, we have been simply deleting them in a round about way, primarily because we never really implemented an easy way to remove articles. Now, however, we have. Likewise, these spammers will be faced with additional banning from the site, but I won't go into these details quite yet.

A slightly less useful item, but extremely useful when it comes to advertising revenue, is a "No Home" categorization. If an item is deemed unworthy of being on the homepage (generally because the primary image contains nudity), we will assign it this status. All it will do is remove the item from the homepage, but it will show up everywhere else.

Speaking of advertising, the last feature I would like to discuss is one long in the making ... a means to switch our advertisers for given pages. We have noticed that some of our most popular articles were free of Google ads, usually because the article contained some form of nudity. We have now implemented a means for switching between two advertisers on any of our pages. Google will still be our primary advertiser, but if we see that Google isn't showing up somewhere, or we know that Google will not be pleased with such an article, we will switch to our backup.

Of course, there are many more additions to the site, but I can't possibly list them all. These additions, however, are most likely to affect the user experience, hence I felt obligated to share.