Unofficial StumbleUpon FAQ

new user restrictions

A user account is allowed to send messages only if the account (a) has a nickname specified, (b) has interests specified and (c) has existed for twenty-four hours.

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password security

Passwords are stored as plain text in the stumbleupon.com cookie and are sent as plain text in communications with StumbleUpon servers. Users should choose a password unrelated to banking and e-commerce accounts.

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privacy

StumbleUpon tracks site ratings for the benefit of fellow stumblers. If you don't want to be identified with your ratings, blog entries, webpage comments or forum posts, choose a non-revealing nickname, and don't include personally identifiable information. To assist those wishing to remain anonymous, StumbleUpon guarantees not to share personally identifiable information except as required by court order, etc. See the formal privacy policy for details.

In addition to standard privacy guarantees, users who sponsor receive the ability to hide the Recent Favorites list, the Comments list or both by setting the number of items on said list to zero.

Although StumbleUpon offers more than enough anonymity for the casual user, that anonymity isn't complete. For instance if user Alice has a computer capable of serving HTTP, Alice can discover the hostname of user Bob's computer when Bob visits Alice's profile. Realize that relaying the hostname of your machine is part of the normal Web communication process and that most people don't consider sharing it to be a privacy intrusion. The procedure for discovering the hostname of a user can be found in the document "Stumble Webbug Howto." Via an anonymizing proxy, a user can avoid divulging even that innocuous information.

Whether your "I like it!" ratings are indicated on the stumble info page for a webpage depends on your Privacy Filter setting. For instance if your Privacy Filter is set to "No one can see your ratings", then you won't show up as Suggester on a page that you're the first to rate, and you won't show up in the list of avatars for persons who have recently rated a page "I like it!". The default Privacy Filter setting is "No one can see your adult ratings". (Note that many popular domain index pages show no Suggester because the default Privacy Filter setting for very old accounts was "No one can see your ratings".) The Privacy Filter setting is retroactive in that it affects visiblity of all ratings (old and new) for all webpages outside the stumbleupon.com domain.

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premium features and sponsoring

The following premium features are listed on the sponsoring info page:

• Ability to turn off sponsored stumbles
• Messaging email integration (for both sent & received messages)
• Ability to Create new Groups (see the directory)
• Larger pictures in your profiles (up to 50KB rather than 20KB)
• 14 additional theme colors for your profile page
• Stumble "Buzz!" and "Comment Follow-up" features
• Configurable number of great sites and comments to display on your profile.
• An increase to Top 20 Informants on your 'My Stumblers' page.
• Red audience meter indicating you support StumbleUpon.
• Access to Private Sponsors Forum

Using Paypal is the preferred method for donating. If you use Paypal, expect premium features to appear shortly after receiving the donation confirmation via e-mail. See the sponsoring info page for details regarding these and other payment methods. That page also includes a convenient method for donating on behalf of another user via Paypal.

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Stumble! button, Friends and rating

How both your Friends list and page ratings affect stumble selection is described by the following pages:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/what.html

http://www.stumbleupon.com/how.html

Here's a quick summary of behavior:

• StumbleUpon correlates your "I like it" and "Not for me" ratings with those of other users to select pages in your selected interests to serve via the Stumble! button.
• When user Alice selects the Add as Friend button on user Bob's profile, Alice appears on Bob's fan list.
• In addition, to the correlation-based stumble selection mentioned above, users who have added Friends enable another source for pages served via the Stumble! button. Quoting developer gmc: "Adding a friend is essentially subscribing to their content. You will stumble upon pages they have rated, filtered according to the shared interests displayed on that persons profile."
• The Fans and Friends lists on your My Stumblers page are ordered by most-to-least recently active.
• A user with the mature filter turned on will not receive pages introduced to StumbleUpon by a user whose mature filter is turned off. Note that you may turn the mature filter off via the "Turn off mature filter" link on the interests page without necessarily selecting an adult topic category for stumbling. That may be appropriate if you happen to be socially liberal and/or if you're eager to increase audience size.

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Keyboard Shortcuts

In the Mozilla Firefox browser, you can invoke primary toolbar functions using keyboard shortcuts. The shortcuts are:

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audience meter and audience count

Sponsors receive a red audience meter, as opposed to the default blue audience meter.

Here's the help text for the audience feature:

Audience is the number of people who 'stumble upon' sites rated by a particular stumbler. A stumbler's audience contains only people who have been recently active.

You can increase your audience by rating websites that other people will like, signing up for all topics you are interested in, and getting more people to make you their friend.

Audience size is measured on a scale of 0 to 5, 5 being the biggest.

Here's a relevant quote from developer gmc:

The audience rank is a percentile system, based on the number of people who give the same ratings as you. People with high ranks (level 5, or within the top 20 percent of all active users) are much like popular authors—everyone agrees with everything they rate, where those with low audience ranks are people with unpopular opinions or not very many ratings. This means your audience rank grows as you rate lots of useful pages, and reflects how helpful you are to the community.

The following phenomena can cause a user's audience to decrease:

• Tweaks to the audience algorithm
• User accounts being marked inactive and/or deleted
• The user making unpopular ratings
• Changes to topic category structure
• Possibly changes to the user's topic category selections
• Changes to the user's adult filter state

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comments and blogging

Blogging (in case you're unfamiliar with the term) is short for "publishing a weblog." A weblog is an online journal of one sort or another.

While many users choose only to stumble and to rate, many others choose also to add commentary about webpages as they surf. The stumble toolbar makes it easy to build a blog featuring that commentary. You can add a comment to any webpage via the quote blogging feature, via the speech bubble (aka Website Comments) toolbar button or via the image context menu item. A comment automatically appears both on the relevant stumble info page and on your profile as a blog entry.

Experienced bloggers can also benefit from the convenience of the stumble toolbar: Via RSS syndication, a blogger can incorporate StumbleUpon blog entries and/or rated pages into a blog or a news feed hosted elsewhere.

Here are some other details about blog entries and webpage comments:

• Blog entries can be created and edited via the Post Comment form and the Edit! links on a user's profile page.
• Blog entries feature automatically generated links and allow a subset of HTML markup.
• For efficiency reasons, only the ten most recent blog entries can be edited.
• Hiding the Comments list or deleting a blog entry doesn't delete the corresponding comment on a stumble info page.
• Only the most recent ten stumble info page comments are editable. You can add an additional comment to a given stumble info page only after your most recent comment has advanced to a position beyond the most recent ten.
• A user's blog may contain multiple consecutive comments for the same webpage.
• Editing a comment via a stumble info page creates a new blog entry.
• Internet Explorer users who enable the Prompt for Comment option have a third way to add a comment (in addition to the toolbar button and the context menu item cited above).

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images

StumbleUpon.com webservers will store only a user's avatar image. However, any image featured on most webpages can be included in a blog entry. StumbleUpon offers two methods for including an image, a context menu method and a manual method.

Details of the context menu method differ depending on which version of the toolbar you use. In the IE toolbar:

1. Rate the page if it hasn't been rated before. (Most users choose to rate each blogged page rather than to visit the stumble info page to determine whether the page has previously been introduced to StumbleUpon.)
2. Right-click on an image to invoke a context menu.
3. Select the "StumbleUpon: Blog This" context menu item, which will take you to the stumble info page for the webpage containing the image.
4. Note that some default markup is supplied in the comment form. You may add (either below or above the supplied markup) commentary about the page and/or the image.
5. Select the Add Comment button.
6. Select the Website link (in green) at the top of the stumble info page to return to the webpage contain the image.

In the Mozilla toolbar:

1. Right-click (or Control-click on one-button Macintosh computers) on an image to invoke a context menu.
2. Select the "StumbleUpon Photoblog It!" context menu item, which will rate the page "I like it!" and take you to the stumble info page for the webpage containing the image.
3. Note that some default markup is supplied in the comment form. You may add (either below or above the supplied markup) commentary about the page and/or the image.
4. Select the Add Comment button.
5. Select the Website link (in green) at the top of the stumble info page to return to the webpage contain the image.
6. Optionally, re-rate the page "Not-for-me".

The second method for including an image in a blog entry or a webpage comment is to craft an HTML IMG element manually. For instance, this markup

<a href="http://www.stumbleupon.com/faq.html#promote" border=0><img src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/getstumbleupon.gif"></a>

.

<img src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/images/stumble4.gif">

.

See the "markup" item of this FAQ for more details regarding markup and rendering.

Beware that some websites disallow external linking to images. For instance, some publishers prefer that content not be featured (and consume serving bandwidth) outside the context of the published page. Unless the page containing the image specifically mentions a prohibition on external linking, the best advice is to try and see. If external linking is disallowed, the served image may be moved, or an image with a notice about external linking may be substituted.

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miscellaneous toolbar features

quote blogging

Note that rating a page causes the thumb-up icon or thumb-down icon on the relevant toolbar button to change to a speech bubble icon. If text is selected on the page prior to clicking the rating button a second time, the selected text is supplied as default text in the comment dialog on the stumble info page. The selected text appears in quotes, prefixed by "From the page: ".

Stumble After Rating

The user interface for Stumble After Rating differs across toolbar versions, but in all versions it's configurable via the dialog accessible via the Toolbar Options menu item of the toolbar. This feature has caused confusion for some new users, possibly due to its not yet being documented in the toolbar help. A user experimenting with toolbar options will sometimes enable "Stumble on 'I like it!'" then become confused when rating a site causes a new page to be served.

stumble to a new window/tab

This feature exists only for the Mozilla toolbar. Right-clicking or middle-clicking the Stumble! button causes a stumble to open in a new window or tab.

Prompt for Comment

This feature exists only for the IE toolbar. It is enabled via the option labeled "Show Comment Dialog when I rate a site that is new to StumbleUpon."

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markup

You can control presentation using a subset of HTML. Here are some details regarding markup and rendering:

• A link is automatically generated from a URL in a forum post, a webpage comment or a blog entry. But a link is not automatically generated from a URL in a message or in "About me" text.
• The following HTML elements can be used: <a>, <img>, <ul>, <ol>, <li>, <br>, <font>, <b>, <em>, <i> and <del>. (See the "images" item of this FAQ for examples featuring the <a> and <img> elements.)
• The style attribute of the aforementioned HTML elements cannot be used.
• Any Unicode character can be included via the "&[entity-name];" syntax, via the "&#[char-code];" syntax or as a literal. However, upon editing, the text presented to be edited will contain the character as rendered rather than the originally supplied markup. Most of the time that isn't a problem, but it can be problematic for   and <.
• Line breaks behave as expected in blog entries and forum posts (i.e. linefeeds are translated to <br> tags automatically), but <br> tags must be entered manually to create line breaks in webpage comments, messages or "About me" text.
• Leading and trailing whitespace is always omitted.
• BBCode is not supported.
• Javascript event attributes (such as onclick) of the aforementioned HTML elements cannot be used.

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language

To assist stumble filtering, a user should indicate language proficiency via the Languages Spoken field on the My Info page.

In addition to stumble filtering, specifying a less common language may also help a user to find ethnically similar users via the language description page. A language description page can be accessed via a URL of the following form:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/language/[language_name]/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/language/norwegian/

To request that a language be added to the list of available languages, submit a request via the feedback form.

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favorite list item conventions

StumbleUpon uses standard title capitalization conventions for items in the Music, Movie, Books, TV and "What I like" lists. In addition, the database uses a normalizing comparison when determining whether a user-specified item is new. The normalizing comparison ignores capitalization, punctuation and initial articles (such as "The"). If user Bob is the first to list the album "dark side of the moon" and user Alice subsequently lists the album "The Dark Side of the Moon", then the text "Dark Side of the Moon" (regardless whether that's most correct) will appear in Alice's favorite music list. Under some circumstances where versions of the title differ by punctuation or symbol characters, two versions of the title may appear.

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sponsored stumbles

StumbleUpon offers a content-oriented advertising service in which anyone from a blogger to a shoe retailer can purchase a certain guaranteed number of views for a page. Here are some facts about how sponsored pages influence your stumbles:

• Sponsors can disable their influence via the "show sponsored stumbles" checkbox on the My Info page.
• You will be shown a given sponsored page only once.
• You will see no more than one sponsored page in fifteen presses of the Stumble! button.
• You will see only those sponsored pages that are in a topic category that you've selected for stumbling. Each sponsored page is reviewed by a StumbleUpon employee and placed into the appropriate topic category based on content of the page.
• Unless a sponsored page would have been served based on its ratings without regard to its being sponsored, the sponsored page will not appear within the first few stumbles during a session.
• StumbleUpon will not allow a page to be sponsored if the page generates a popup window or a download prompt.

Note that after the purchased number of views have occurred, a sponsored page behaves like any other stumble. In other words, it will become popular or unpopular depending on its content. That strongly motivates page sponsors to create interesting and entertaining content. As commercial pages are frequently recommended by stumblers and non-commercial pages are frequently sponsored, you probably won't be able to distinguish sponsored stumbles from unsponsored stumbles. Reappearing junk pages are probably caused by phenomena other than sponsored stumbles.

If you believe that sponsored pages negatively impact your stumbling, please recognize that they are necessary to keep the basic service free for the majority of users. As mentioned above, a sponsor can disable the feature.

If you're interested in sponsoring a page, see the pricing page for details.

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topic categories and miscategorized URLs

Within fifteen minutes, a newly rated URL will be associated automatically with a stumble topic category. The subsystem for automatically categorizing has mixed success, and improvements are being developed. Manual categorizing augments automatic categorizing. Manual categorizing is a two-tier process. First, a user suggests an alternate topic by submitting a miscategorization report (aka miscat). Then, a set of system administrators and volunteers review miscats. Miscats are sent to those reviewers in order of decreasing popularity. A miscat for a popular page will generally be reviewed within twenty-four hours. The lead time for reviewing a miscat for a less popular page depends on the volume of miscats.

To submit a miscat:

1. Go to the stumble info page by using the speech bubble (aka Webpage Comments) toolbar button.
2. Select the "[Update]" link adjacent to the current topic name (in the Website row near the top of the page).
3. Choose a more appropriate topic. If no topic seems appropriate or if you don't want to spend time becoming acquainted with the set of topics, select the "I don't know" option.
4. If you submit miscats frequently, consider including your name or nickname in the optional "Description of Problem" field.

Note that when a user selects a topic category for stumbling, the Stumble! button will return pages in that topic category as well as highly rated pages in Related topic categories. Related topic categories are listed in the Related section of a topic page. (See the Animals topic page for an example.)

To submit a request for a new category:

• Use the feedback form.
• Please justify your request, possibly by listing some pages that belong in the new category and don't belong in any existing category.

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reappearing junk pages, redirects, session IDs and 404s

When a user rates a page, StumbleUpon associates the rating with the URL for the page. A few phenomena can cause ratings to be misdirected, namely (A) content on a page can change, (B) a popular URL can be redirected, (C) a page can be removed or (D) a page can be served via a URL that is user- or session-specific.

Cases B and C can be the most problematic for users of the Stumble! button. A traditional standards-compliant website will return a 404 error when a page is removed. These well-behaved 404s are detected automatically in time. Selecting Report 404 from the toolbar menu (which is available only for the Mozilla toolbar as of this writing) may speed the process. But often a website—particularly one managed by a hosting company—will redirect the old URL to an index page or a search page. Redirecting also occurs frequently when a domain name is purchased by another company. Unfortunately, either rating "Not for me" or selecting Report 404 on the ultimate target of the redirection doesn't affect the old URL, which allows the old URL to retain its high rating.

Case D occurs primarily on commercial websites. In one common implementation, a user is redirected from the requested URL to a URL including a user ID or a session ID. Ontologically, this is often appropriate if the page being served is customized to the user or the session. For instance, Amazon serves different content to each user to customize the shopping experience. However, often a page contains little or no customized content and still is identified via a user- or session-specific URL. Unfortunately since each user sees a different URL, StumbleUpon can't track ratings for the static content.

Developers have solicited suggestions and, preferably, code contributions for tackling cases B, C and D.

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automatically generated links

In a blog entry, a webpage comment or a forum post, a link will automatically be generated from a URL; no special markup is required. Most commonly, this feature is used by copying a URL from the address/location field of a browser window and pasting it into the the comment or post submission form. Be sure to include the "http://" or "https://" protocol prefix. Unfortunately, the feature currently has a few issues, described below.

An automatically generated link based on a URL that includes an internal anchor (something of the form "#[anchor-name]" at the end of the URL) will omit the internal anchor. And if the character preceding the "#" in the URL is a "/", the slash (aka solidus) is omitted as well. A workaround is to remove the internal anchor before posting or to use one of the techniques described below to avoid automatic link generation.

Some characters in URLs accepted by major browsers are mangled either during storage or during automatic link generation. For instance, a comma, plus or colon character in a URL causes an automatically generated link to have its URL ended prematurely just prior to the offending character for links not created via the toolbar. A workaround is to replace the offending character with its escape character equivalent. For instance, comma (",") can be replaced by "%2c". Note that the escape character equivalent is the US-ASCII hexadecimal character code for the offending character, prepended with a percent symbol. Here are a couple US-ASCII hexadecimal character code charts currently favored by Google:

http://www.jimprice.com/jim-asc.htm
http://www.asciitable.com/

Note that since URLs aren't fully normalized in the database, a translated URL must be rated separately.

Avoiding automatic link generation requires avoiding strings of certain forms with "http://", "https://", and "www" prefixes. The most convenient and intuitive way to avoid automatic link generation is to enclose the URL in single or double quotes. For example, none of the following will generate a link:

"http://www.stumbleupon.com/sponsor.php" "http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/http://stumbleupon.theprawn.com"
"www.stumbleupon.com/sponsors.php"
forum.stumbleupon.com/forum/Bugs/152/#2

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raising bug or feature issues

Virtually every service of StumbleUpon is still under active development. And the StumbleUpon developers appreciate feedback. Realize that even a seemingly trivial bug (such as inconsistent capitalization in the toolbar user interface) deserves to be reported. If the issue reporting process below seems needlessly complicated, feel free just to post a description in the Bugs or New Features forum, as appropriate. Please use a descriptive subject.

Following the full issue reporting process will maximize the chance that the issue will be examined in detail and addressed. In general, submitting a bug report or a feature request is a three-stage process. First, you verify that the issue hasn't been presented before. Second (if the issue is new), you present the issue to the stumble community by posting a description in either the Bugs forum or the New Features forum. (The more people investigating an issue, the more thorough a formal report will be.) Third (if the issue appears to be either a genuine bug or a viable feature request), you submit a formal issue report via the StumbleUpon Bugzilla bug tracking system.

Here is the process in detail:

Stage One

2. If the issue hasn't been formally reported, search the StumbleUpon forums via the search field at the bottom of the forums index page. If the issue exists, skip to step 5.

Stage Two

For a bug, use this checklist:

• Use a descriptive subject!
• Include relevant platform information. Namely if the bug is related to a toolbar feature, include the toolbar version, the browser version and the OS version. If the bug is related to a profile or forum feature, include the browser version and OS version.
• If possible, test with multiple platforms to determine whether the bug is platform-specific.
• Describe actions required to reproduce the bug.
• If the bug report relates to an error message, include the text of the error message. Those users with access to an image server may choose to serve a screenshot and to include a URL to the screenshot with the bug report.

For a feature request, use this checklist:

• Use a descriptive subject!
• Describe not only your proposed feature but also the problem or need being addressed. Realize that identifying a problem or a need is often more helpful than outlining an immature proposal, as developers may know better how to devise a solution that's compatible with the site ontology and infrastructure.
• If you happen to be a programmer, realize that portions of StumbleUpon are opensource and that the developers gladly accept code contributions. Here's a relevant quote from developer Geoff Smith:

  I would *love* to have more people submitting patches to stumbleupon. The mozilla toolbar source code is under MPL, the cvs is publicly available. I have already given 1 stumbler write access to CVS.

  I have had a lot of people ask how they can see the code/contribute to the code. However only 2 people have ever submitted patches. I really appreciated their contributions, please send more!

4. Allow a week or more for fellow stumblers, including developers, to comment on the issue.

Stage Three

6. Post the bug ID of the formal report in relevant forum threads.

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submitting bugs/feature requests

Before submitting a bug report, please review the "raising bug and feature issues" item of this FAQ.

When you are ready to submit a bug report, go to StumbleUpon Bugzilla. Then, proceed as follows:

1. Select "Show Currently Open Bugs" and scan for existing bugs identical or related to the issue you intend to report. (If you're familiar with Bugzilla, you can also use the "Query existing bug reports" feature to search for related bugs.)
2. Once you've confirmed that the bug is not already in the database, return to the Bugzilla index page. Click on "Enter a new bug report". If you already have a StumbleUpon Bugzilla account, login to proceed. If you don't have one, you'll need to create one.
3. Select the StumbleUpon component either that exhibits the bug or that will be modified by your feature request. (For completely new toolbar feature requests, select the "Mozilla Toolbar Feature" component.)
4. Fill out your computer information.
5. Leave the Assigned To, CC and URL fields blank unless you're instructed otherwise.
6. Enter, in the Summary field, a brief title for the bug that describes the problem or need being reported (as opposed to a proposed solution).
7. Lastly, provide, in the Description box, as much information on the bug as you can, including (where applicable):
   • the steps required to reproduce the bug
   • the toolbar version number
   • a more explicit description of the problem or need being reported than the Summary field could accommodate
   • any solution proposals that have been mentioned in the forums
   • URLs for related forum posts.

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glossary

blog entry

an item in the Comments section of a stumbler's profile

IE toolbar

the StumbleUpon toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser and for other browsers (such as MyIE2) that use Internet Explorer services

miscat

a miscategoriztion report

note:  See the "topic categories and miscategorized URLs" item of this FAQ for details.

Mozilla toolbar (aka Mozbar)

the StumbleUpon toolbar (or, more precisely, a browser extension) for browsers based on work of the Mozilla project

note:  The Mozilla toolbar usually sees feature additions before the IE toolbar.

note:  Stumblers frequently recommend the Mozilla Firefox browser, augmented by the Tabbrowser Extensions extension, in preference to Internet Explorer.

nickname

a stumbler's username, configurable via the My Info page

profile

the set of pages where a stumbler's personal information (if supplied) is published

note:  Your profile is accessible via the house (aka My Profile) toolbar button.

stumble

1. a webpage known to the StumbleUpon database via its URL and, hence, servable via the Stumble! button of a StumbleUpon toolbar

2. a nickname for the services of StumbleUpon

stumble info page

a page accessible via the speech bubble (aka Website Comments) toolbar button

note:  An example is the stumble info page for this FAQ.

stumbler

a user of StumbleUpon services

webpage comment

an item on the stumble info page for a webpage

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