Gripes
From Ma.gnolia Community Wiki
Annoyed by a gremlin or gotcha? This is place to file your grievance.
Answers from Ma.gnolia are in italics.
"Cannot modify this user" error...if this is such a common problem why not provide a link to the troubleshooting page when you give the user the error message? Would that not save the time of someone having to email you, than you emailing back that link?
It's not all that common, but enough so that the wiki entry is here for it. It's a good idea to show the link to the wiki with the error message; we'll do that.
I don't want to have to mess around with my browser or firewall settings to be able to save a bookmark. Why is a referer link needed? What is a referer link? How come I can save bookmarks to other services (del.icio.us) without having to deal with referer link issues? I am spending time in this wiki because I still can't save a bookmark. So far the new user experience has been a total failure.
The referrer header information is needed to protect against websites adding bookmarks to your collection just by surfing to a page, and the exploit was also being used by automated spamming applications. We're sorry that joining hasn't gone smoothly for you, and we're very responsive to specific questions and problems that come into the support channel; did other stuff go wrong? Get in touch and let us know, and we'll try to help you through it.
Sorry for being dense here - but from a quick look around the internet I am lead to believe that you should never trust referrer headers because there is no way to know that they have not been spoofed. one post I found And from a users point of view letting sites see my referrer headers exposes me to possible attacks. Would someone like to provide a link to which can explain to this to me in simple terms. The only link from this site is one which tells me how to change my browser to enable referrer headers, something I not sure I want to do. Thanks.
It's true that referrer headers can be spoofed, though our goal was to stop a type of exploit and behavior that can be stopped by requiring referrer info. We don't suggest that anyone show referrer headers to all sites, and instead add Ma.gnolia is a site that should receive referrer headers.
Are we having fun yet?
Ok, but from my point of view I don't really care if web site XYZ drops a bookmark into my collection. I would rather that happen than have to change browser/firewall settings. If the same is true for automated spamming applications I can't say I don't mind them dropping bookmarks in, as those would be unrelated to any of my surfing activity. All I want to do is save bookmarks, not have a discussion about referrer links.
We understand that you might not be concerned about other people putting bookmarks in your account, but we are. Many of our members refer clients and friends and coworkers to their links, and others publish them automatically. We think it's important that they be able to trust the site not to show links they don't want associated with their name. Honestly, none of this would be needed if spammers didn't do the things they do.
I would think that it would be easy to understand why users don't want to have to worry about this stuff. I use multiple browsers, on multiple machines. As many people do. I don't want to go through the work of setting this up, only to have to do it all over again for a new browser or a new machine.
It seems like you are pushing off work you should/could be doing onto the user. If that is true it will be easy to track. You will have people just looking some place else to save their bookmarks. IMO
We're genuinely sorry that it's a hassle for you. If we could work this out in a way that didn't require us to ask about 5% of our members to change settings, we would. It's possible that this issue will make Ma.gnolia unusable for you, and while we regret it we can't do much about it. If you have a better technical solution in mind, please contact us through the regular form and we'll be all ears.
In your email about my not being able to save a bookmark you say "...we provide the service for free". Does that mean I shouldn't expect it to work?
You should expect it to work, but also have some understanding that we can't ensure that everything works 100% of the time. Your email made some pretty strong demands, and we wanted to put things into perspective. That's all.
I'd like it if Ma.gnolia implemented a time zone offset so that the pages would reflect my time zone for when I posted a bookmark. Right now, it's two hours "early" (Pacific time) and having to remember that it's in a different time zone hurts my little brain.
Jeffala 15:46, 10 May 2007 (PDT)
We'll consider a time-zone offset when we update the profiles (where your local time zone would be recorded).
The Ma.gnolia Mini Ma.rker bookmarklet is not displaying the ma.gnolia icon. If the bookmarklet is meant to display the icon, how do I import the icon to the toolbar? The FFox add-on implements this function with the .gnolia icon, but also 'bombs' you with an oversized and obtrusive pop-up.
Clark S.
The bookmarklet doesn't install an icon to the toolbar, as it works more like a bookmark saved in the browser. The add-on isn't maintained by us, but you can contact the person who is currently developing it at http://giddlebits.wordpress.com/2007/05/07/magnolia-firefox-extension/ to see if he would change to our smaller footprint bookmark.'
When adding a bookmark to groups -- it's a pain to have to go and edit the details before submitting the bookmark to the group. The flow should be:
Click Add to group --> Pick Group(s) from list --> Send to Group (new button)
That should all happen in one lightbox dialog... and I shouldn't be taken to the edit details page before confirming.
The bookmarks that are sent to groups are whole new bookmarks, so their details can be tailored for the group to which the bookmark is being sent. That's why we present the details page for confirmation before adding to the group. There might be ways to make that sequence of events flow more nicely, though.
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It would be good if bookmark page titles (in the title tag) reflected the title of the bookmark...
For example, the title of this page should be "Viddler.com - Chris Messina talks about hAtomic - Uploaded by cdevroe -- on Ma.gnolia.com" instead of "Ma.gnolia.com - Find Web Sites & Build Community Online", which is the same title for everypage!
Chris Messina, 20 Apr 2007
Agreed - we'll get that into the development queue.
Hi,
I'm loving Ma.gnolia and have a couple of gripes:
I use the mark in Magnolia bookmark to send pages to ma.gnolia (which is very cool, thank you). I use firefox on windows and when I use the mark it page I tend to edit my tags and then use the tab stroke on the keyboard to move to the submit button. I'm not seeing a visual guide to show that the submit button is active for me to hit a 'return' keystroke when I do this.
We can get the visual guide and tab order working correctly. In the meantime, a good shortcut to know about is that pressing the 'Return' key without starting to type a new tag will save the bookmark.
Also, I would really like to see a search tool on every page in Ma.gnolia and for the 'search everyone's/search yours' options to be visible by default. It's the only really big gripe for me about the Ma.gnolia platform.
The options should stay open if you leave them that way. If that 'sticky' aspect isn't working we might have a little bug to fix. Are there any pages in particular where the search should be added?
Good work guys, thanks very much.
-GrandJury, 18 April 2007
Thanks!!
I got your newsletter and read about how the spammers are causing some issues. I hadn't visited in months and decided to. On the front page I thought I was seeing things because in the little scrolly box every third link was almost the same. I would suggest you check out user marknewsham - does he really like that site enough that all 39 bookmarks go there (to each possible subdomain)?
I would have done some marking of it myself but I don't yet see any tools available to do so.
And, as another note - I clicked to look at all his bookmarks and on the right side of the page I am immediately distracted by the "Featured Linker" on the right hand side. I selected to look at all of one persons bookmarks and I see no info about that person on the page except for their name BUT over on the side we have a picture and description of a user - makes me automatically think it is the user whose bookmarks I am looking at.
-lechat, 8 March 2007
You'll be happy to hear that we're just about ready to release features that will allow anyone to flag a bookmark, bookmark collection or group as spam or possibly offensive (the classic not safe for work). We'll also be empowering some members to deal with spam and other abusive behavior, which we'll talk more about when we launch these features.
For your comment about the featured linkers and seeing info about the person whose bookmarks you're looking at, you make a good point and it's something we'll take a look at. Maybe we can add some info about the person at the top of the page. Thanks for the feedback!
I would like to publish an RSS feeds of my latest interesting link. by interesting, i mean links that i consider worth checking by other people. I can create a tag named 'hot' or whatever but it will be inconsist as some links might related to the opposite thing.
Mbn18 00:39, 13 November 2006 (PST)
The first suggestion would be to simply use a tag like 'interesting' but it sounds like that won't work for you. You could create a moderated group with just yourself in it, and then only put the bookmarks in there that you want to share as interesting.
It would appear that the scammers have woken up to ma.gnolia.
I've just received a 419 mail from another luser on here.
lilian4u has sent you this message:
Dearest in the Lord,
I am the above named person from South Africa. I am married to Kone Max, who worked with South African embassy in Ivory Coast for nine years before he died in the year 2005. We were married for eleven years without a child.
When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of 12.5Million U.S.(TWEVLE MILLION FIVE HUNDERD thousand Dollars) with one BANK in Cote D' Ivoire.
Rest of the usal rubbish snipped
Yours in Christ.
SISTER Pauline Max
If this mail is not true please you can contact me with this Alternate email lilian01kone@yahoo.fr
Hopefully someone from the powers that be will give them a good LART-ing.
Steve
Thanks for the heads up. We've turfed this spammer out and pulled their message from the system.
Hi there,
I love magnolia - I have only usability gripe. Apparently the pop-up tool doesn't accept spaces as a way of distinguishing tags, so I just discovered that I have dozens of silly tags like "food 'to do' chocolate" and "taxes design ideas". Why not take Flickr's approach of accepting spaces to divide tags, and requiring users to designate multi-word tags with quotation marks? Also, is there any easy way for me to fix my mangled tags?
Update: I found the "split tag" button. Sweet! :)
Thanks & cheers,
Beth Budwig/eeblet 13:16, 17 October 2007 (PDT)
