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.
A user account is allowed to post in forums (other than the Help forum) only if (a) the Stumble! button has been pressed for that account at least twenty-five times and (b) the account has existed for at least three days. If you believe that an account has satisfied those criteria but the account still isn't able to post, a likely cause is that a stumbleupon.com cookie needs to be reissued. The least complicated way to do that is to close all browser windows before trying again to post. (A savvy user can, alternately, selectively delete the stumbleupon.com PHPSESSID
cookie.)
Your password is stored as plain text both in a stumbleupon.com cookie and elsewhere on your computer. It's also sent as plain text in communications with StumbleUpon servers. Choose a password unrelated to banking and e-commerce accounts.
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, et cetera. See the formal privacy policy for details.
In addition to standard privacy guarantees, users who sponsor can hide the Recent Sites (aka Favorites), hide blog entries (aka Recent Comments) or hide both by setting the number of items on the relevant list(s) 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 host name of user Bob's computer. Realize that relaying the host name of your computer 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 host name 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 review 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 visibility of all ratings (old and new) for all webpages outside the stumbleupon.com domain.
How both your Friends list and page ratings affect stumble selection is described by the following pages:
Here's a quick summary of behavior:
The official faq includes items addressing the following topics:
StumbleUpon has published some tips to help users get the most out of services.
The "Stumble! Button, Friends, Fans and Rating" item of this FAQ links to some documents that offer more detail regarding the goals and mechanics of stumbling and rating.
Sponsors receive a green audience meter, as opposed to the default blue audience meter.
The following help text for the audience feature describes the audience meter:
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.
Roughly speaking, the audience meter is a normalized representation of the audience count. 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:
See also the related official FAQ item.
Blogging (in case you're unfamiliar with the term) is short for "publishing a Web log." A Web log 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 Page Reviews) toolbar button or via the image context menu item. A comment automatically appears both on the relevant review page and on your profile as a blog entry.
Experienced bloggers can also benefit from the convenience of the stumble toolbar: Via 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:
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:
In the Mozilla toolbar:
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 (aka hotlinking). 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.
By joining a group you advertise your interest in a topic. A given group may have any sort of theme. Examples of themes include casual conversation, culinary exploration, an obscure interest, a social movement, an academic discipline, et cetera. Some groups focus more on collecting webpage recommendations via the Sites list, and others focus more on conversations via forum threads. Here are some details regarding groups:
The ignore feature allows one user to avoid associating with another user. To ignore a user, select the Ignore Me button on the user's profile. To unignore a user, use the Edit Ignore section at the bottom of the Stumblers page of your profile. Here are some details regarding behavior when user Alice ignores user Bob:
You can control presentation using a subset of HTML. Here are some details regarding markup and rendering:
<a>
, <img>
, <ul>
, <ol>
, <li>
, <br>
, <font>
, <pre>
, <b>
, <em>
, <i>
and <del>
. (See the "images" item of this FAQ for examples featuring the <a>
and <img>
elements.)&[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 <
.<br>
tags automatically), but <br>
tags must be entered explicitly to create line breaks in webpage comments, messages or About Me text.onclick
) of the aforementioned HTML elements cannot be used.The orange RSS and RSS Comments icons at the bottom of the Blog page of each profile link to pages containing a machine-readable version of your recent blog entries and your Recent Sites. This facility can be used to monitor a set of blogs or to incorporate your StumbleUpon blog content into an external blog. A sponsor can disable this facility.
To monitor a set of blogs, use a RSS news feed reader. A StumbleUpon RSS feed displays particularly well with the RSS Reader Panel extension for Mozilla Firefox, but virtually any news feed reader will work.
The procedure for incorporating your StumbleUpon blog content into an external blog depends on what software implements the external blog. For example, user Nog has published some notes that describe using the Magpie RSS parser to provide content for a PHP-based blog.
To assist stumble filtering, you should indicate language proficiency via the Languages Spoken field on the Edit page of your profile.
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.
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.
StumbleUpon offers a content-oriented advertising service via 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:
When you're shown a sponsored page, the toolbar displays a button featuring a green-shirted person icon (). After the purchased number of views have occurred, a sponsored page behaves like any other stumble. That 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 based on content. 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.
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. Two types of manual categorizing exist. The person who first introduces a page to StumbleUpon has the option to preempt automated categorizing by selecting a topic on the review page for the stumble. The second sort of manual categorizing is available to anyone but is a two-tiered 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:
Note that when a user selects a topic for stumbling, the Stumble! button will return pages in that topic category as well as highly rated pages in Related topics. Related topics 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:
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. 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. Rating "Not-for-me" on the ultimate target of the redirection doesn't affect the old URL, which allows the old URL to retain its high rating. Instead, select Menu->Report->Report 404 from the toolbar menu (which is available only for the Mozilla toolbar as of this writing). That reports both the ultimate target and the most recently served URL.
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.
In a blog entry 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.
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"
bugs.group.stumbleupon.com/forum/
Many services of StumbleUpon are still under active development. And the StumbleUpon developers appreciate feedback. Even a seemingly trivial bug deserves to be reported. Beginning a new thread in the Features forum or the Bugs forum is the primary means to raise an issue. Before starting a new thread, please try to avoid duplicating an issue report by scanning recent threads in those two forums and/or by searching those forums. Use one of the following checklists to help create a useful issue report:
For a bug, use this checklist:
For a feature request, use this checklist:
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!
In addition to the Bugs and Features forums, StumbleUpon offers a formal issue tracking system called StumbleUpon Bugzilla. Historically, it has been unevenly employed by StumbleUpon developers, but it's a good venue for the following:
Major FAQ items contributed by Joe Walp.
FAQ maintained by Joe Walp and ThePrawn.
The unofficial FAQ is in no way associated with StumbleUpon, which is ©StumbleUpon.com.
Visit the official StumbleUpon FAQ
Version 2.1, Revision 2004-10-08-a