mis•cel•la•ny
pronounced mis-uh-ley-nee
a miscellaneous collection or group of various or somewhat unrelated items.

Or, in Mixx terms, our mixxcellany release. First, and most importantly, a number of user requests (and props to their suggestors):

• Thanks to JNBammer, a “Career” category in Business
• Thanks to m4tt, a “Google” category in Tech (and in return, m4tt wrote a nice thank you note to us!)
• Thanks to NaturalWoman, a submit button on the Search Results page so you can submit directly from there after searching for duplicates.
• Thanks Pleeker, RobDiana, Calinazaret, Tunisian Guy and Yoda among others, improvements to the way Breaking News is presented. You can now see “Almost Breaking” news that one SuperMixxer has flagged as breaking. Making it easier for news to break, and giving credit to the SuperMixxers who are flagging breaking news.T
• Thanks Camille, a much better link to “Edit Your Mixx.”
• For CMcGill, we moved the “add everything” option on the “Add To YourMixx” widget to the bottom of the list.
• For MarkCarras, we moved the “Email This” link back to where it used to be on the story/photo/video pages.

And a couple of things we found:

• On your profile, under your “Voted for” tab, you now only see things you voted for that you didn’t submit.
• We cleaned up some problems with our story clustering feature related to groups.
• We also fixed a bug causing votes within groups to be counted incorrectly.

Finally, we introduce The Cook’s Corner. This can be found in the Kitchen section in the Mixx footer. In The Cook’s Corner, you’ll see some links (more coming) to some experimental stuff our engineers have cooked up in their spare time. Yes, even with all the above stuff going on, they still find time to play around. We are especially interested in what you think of some of the stuff there!

Think that covers it, but if you find other stuff we did, be sure to let us know!

Mixxers are a tidy bunch of people, as you may have guessed by the many instances of paired comments: the actual comment followed by the apology for typos in the original. So you’ll be happy to know that we’ve come up with a way for you to put a little extra polish on your work:

• Change your mind about the story, photo or video you just added to the Mixx? Now you can edit or delete it within 15 minutes of posting. The edit function will allow you to easily change the title, description and tags.
• Find typos in your comment? Just edit or delete the original. Again, you’ll only have 15 minutes to do it, so clean up those typos and grammatical errors, and any errors of logic and/or reasoning that you may have left lying around.

Speaking of cleaning it up . . .

We’ve always said that we have one of the friendliest, most intelligent communities around—and you ask some great questions, too. For instance: every now and again, we mention something about “good behavior” and “playing nice” as being qualifications for becoming a Super Mixxer—and, in fact, for being a Mixxer at all. After this we’ll occasionally get questions about what, exactly, we mean by “good behavior.” So to answer these questions, we’ve updated the Mixx Terms of Use (TOU) where it applies to submitting content and commenting. You’ll also find a better explanation of what “spam” means to us (beyond giving us tiny little migraines, that is).

Some of the specific TOU changes include:

• No spam. Please. Ask yourself: If the sponsored ads, links, copied/scraped/cut-and-pasted/used-without-permission content were removed from the page, would your submission have anything of value left? If the answer is “no,” Congrats! You’ve just Mixxed spam! Now use your 15 minutes and take it out! No, not you-you’re a good, play-by-the-rules Mixxer, right? Right?
• No conspiring to create voting rings, fake accounts, or using any other means to manipulate the rating or ranking of a submission. Doing so will get you kicked out of the Mixx immediately.
• Let’s try to keep the self-submitting to a minimum. Every once in a while is OK, but to be a good member of the community, you need to submit content from a variety of sources. Think of this as a dinner party with scintillating conversation; does anyone actually like the person who keeps interrupting and only talks of themselves? No, because that isn’t actually “conversation.”

We wanted to make sure you knew about these changes to the way we’re administering the site because we don’t think that you all actually reread the TOU every time you log on, and you can’t be expected to play by rules you don’t know exist. We hope you’ll agree that these are fair and clear, but if you have any problems with the changes and no longer want to Mixx, we’ll be happy (well, not exactly happy) to delete your account.

Many thanks to everyone who suggested these changes; your input is an important part of what makes Mixx such a great community. And as always, send us Feedback about changes or features you’d like to see on Mixx—you might see them posted here!

Your Mixx Team

…we really are launching one new feature this morning.

Head to a user’s profile and you’ll see something fun–we now offer an RSS feed that lets you subscribe to a user’s submissions and comments.

See, all you had to do was ask, and we delivered.

Now go play a real April Fool’s Day joke on someone!

Don’t tell anyone, but there is way too much cool stuff stashed in the Mixx categories. At least that’s what our resident news junkies tell us—something about forgetting to check the news until it was no longer, well, news. We admit that we were too busy catching up on the latest celebrity gossip NASA research to pay much attention.

But, of course, they have a point. Timeliness has long been a problem with social news sites—Mixx included—and is a result of what also makes social news sites great: the voting process. In order for something to reach a lot of people, it has to get a decent number of votes and get kicked into “Popular” for a category, meaning it can take a while to get out in front. Breaking news, however, is something you want to know about while it’s still breaking (rather than once it’s been swept into the trashcan).

As Mixx is just shy of six months old, you’ll forgive our excitement and pride as we announce that we’ve come up with a brilliantly simple fix to a problem four years in the making: The Mixx “Breaking News” category. When a big story hits, any of our Super Mixxers can tag it as “Breaking.” You’ll find these stories on the right-hand side of both the “Popular” and “News” categories. You can also subscribe to “Breaking News” on YourMixx. Though we don’t expect it to happen often, if nothing appears in these spaces, don’t panic! Mixx is not broken; it’s just a slow news day.

Here’s how it works:

• Only Super Mixxers can tag a story as “Breaking.” If you haven’t achieved Super Mixxer status, just keep Mixxing: add great content, vote and comment—you’ll get there! (For more info, check out the Super Mixxer FAQ.)
• It takes two to Mixx a Breaking News story. Two Super Mixxers, that is.
• Only a limited number of stories can be in the Breaking News category at any one time, and only for a limited time.
• Once a Breaking News story gets enough votes, it will move over to “Popular,” and to any other category with which it was tagged (entertainment, politics, science, etc.).
• Right now, only text stories can be marked as “Breaking,” but we are working on this capability for photos and videos.

Oh, and we almost forgot to mention. If there is breaking news on a day, the Mixxer who submitted in the highest vote-getting bit of breaking news will get a brand new award: the News Hound award . You can check the Mixx Lounge daily to see who the News Hound with the biggest scoop was!

In addition to this big news, we’ve also made a couple of other tweaks:

• The response to the “On Deck” feature was amazing and many, many of you asked us to make it easier to get to. How’s one click? That’s right—instead of residing under “Recent,” we’ve given “On Deck” its own tab!
• Several Mixxers also asked for a way to see the top stories, photos and videos from the last day, so we’ve changed the time filter options on the “Popular” tab from “Day, Week, Ever” to “Now, Last Day, Last Week, Ever.”

Well, that’s all we have today, but there’s more coming soon. Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Use the Feedback link—you know we love hearing from you! Now excuse us while we go and pat ourselves on the back again!

Your Mixx Team

We’ll be doing an update to Mixx this morning! We’ve been tinkering with Mixx Mail. Why? Because we’re not fans of the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” (and not only because we once had our knuckles rapped for saying “ain’t”). So we’ve made a few upgrades and we think you’ll like what we’ve done.

No more trying to remember a MixxID or squinting at all your Mixx friends’ tiny little avatars. Now you can just start typing the name and Mixx Mail will automatically narrow the list until it finds the right Mixxer. Select the name and continue on to the next person on your list, or just click send. Pretty easy, no? NOTE: Please be sure that you’ve selected the correct MixxIDs, as we cannot be responsible if what you should have left in Vegas actually ends up being sent to everyone in the Group you set up for work. Just sayin’.

Several of you gave us some great ideas about interface changes, and a couple that we’ve incorporated (so far!) include:

• How we display who is in on the conversation, say for example, you, Richard Simmons, Jerry and Ricky. Any more Mixxers than that and it will say “Get back to work and stop watching talk show reruns.” Well, that or “between you and X+ people.”
• At the bottom of each message you’ll now find a “Return to Top of Message” link, a “Return to Inbox” link and a “Remove Me From This Conversation” link. There’s also a “Remove Me From This Conversation” link at the top of every message, in case, you know, you’re pretty sure you know how it’s going to turn out and don’t want to stay ‘til the end.
• You can now choose to only receive Mixx Mail from your friends—no more unwanted fan mail clogging up your box!

Now you can send a message to a friend while you’re on their profile page! Just click the Mixx Mail link and we’ll pop up a message box, pre-populated with that Mixxer’s name. Just think up a snazzy subject line, add a clever message and click “Send.”

New for Group Administrators

Are you the Group administrator? We’ve made a few upgrades that we think you’ll find very handy.

• Send broadcast messages to Group members directly from your Group page. This feature will act like the new Mixx messaging from a profile page (see above), with the addresses pre-populated. The big difference is that this is a one-way only communication.
• Get an RSS feed for your Group, as long as that Group is set to “public.”
• You’ll now get Abuse Reports on items that appear within your group and you’ll also have the ability to banish recidivists—that’s right: Repeat O-ffenders. (Raising Arizona? Anyone?)

So check it out and happier Mixx Mailing! We hope the changes make it easier to communicate with your fellow Mixxers and, as always, we expect to hear from you! Comments, questions, suggestions, expressions of your undying devotion (because you know you have ours), whatever you have, we want to hear it.

Your Mixx Team