dRother

The fact that they are using rails demonstrates more newbie-style cluelessness, to me. Not even remotely a good choice. But, the sort of things 4 guys fresh out of college with no experience would think was the obvious choice.

To the average person who hasn't encountered this word much, it is reminiscent of 'spores' and 'diarrhea'. Clearly, not the best branding.

I think anyone might find it confusing when they search for something specific and their words are automatically changed - except for spelling fixes.

It has a lot to do with Reddit in that Reddit was available, better, and already fairly well known. It's not like the article could possibly go "How Digg's Whatever Benefited Mixx.com". Reddit was basically standing there ready to soak up Digg users once masses of them stuck their heads up for long enough to notice that Digg isn't really that entertaining or informative, and other sites may suit them better.

Oh no, you mean they have to go to Starbucks or something?

I, too was annoyed when Google changed to automatically 'fixing' your terms a few years back. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it isn't. Sometimes they TELL you at the top, sometimes they don't. It took me a while to figure out that single quotes are ignored while double quotes are taken very seriously. In the meantime, the usefulness of Google went way down for me. I don't mind having to use double quotes, but it should be the other way around - I'd rather click a 'do a fuzzy improved search' box than have to say 'yes this is what I really want to search for I MEAN IT' with double quotes.

I have seen a blank page on Google, too within the past couple of days. Never saw anything of the sort before. It was when I clicked to try a search on News, and I couldn't get that search to come up with anything different - until I turned of 'Instant'.

Oh well, whatever. I'm sure they logged an exception and will fix that soon.

As for people gaming the results, it is a huge problem, but it's a problem that is bound to plague any market leader in search.

I'm sure they do that on a bit by bit basis, when they're isolating one transaction at a time, but are you sure that when they 'freeze' an entire account, they reverse all of the transactions?

I totally agree. But still, these people are serious in a way. It's generally the hobby or very-very entry level range. The thing is, they'll spend plenty of money on supplies and marketplace fees, but have this aversion to purchasing something relatively virtual, especially as they think they can do themselves or get it for free. The same goes for their websites.

It's bad decision making, no doubt. They're sacrificing their professional image, and being penny-wise and pound foolish.

Ha, that's funny. I work with web advertising for micro businesses and some people just will NOT pay even $10-20 for a web ad to be designed.

It's not 'virtual' money. We're not talking tokens here, this is actual money.

Directing to the original source is more authoritative and informative.

Their site really is slow as can be. I dread not being able to dig something up in my email, that means I have to go use Paypal's search - each page can seriously take 10-15 seconds to come up.

Look how they recently froze $10m that was donated to Burning Man.

Seriously, how does they review process work, exactly? They could try Googling the customer and find out it's an internationally famous festival that has been going on for years and years. Instead, they just seem to notice the money involved and try to seize it. I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand to benefit financially, personally and directly.

Sure, rebooting is often the most straightforward way to fix runtime issues because it resets everything. In this case, sounds like resetting the clock would have been just as effective. I'm sure these days, you'd have something like the equivalent of a ntpd update every hour to take care of that.