Balatarin

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Balatarin
Balatarin main page
URL	http://balatarin.com
Commercial?	no
Type of site	News site
Registration	Free, with invitation
Owner	The Balatarin Team
Created by	Mehdi Yahyanejad and Aziz Ashofteh
Launched	August 16, 2006

Balatarin, which means the highest in Persian (بالاترین), is a community website through which users can post links to the webpages of their interest, with an emphasis on Iranian audience. Although only registered users can post links to Balatarin, registration is free and extremely easy. New links initially go to the "recently posted" page and once they collect enough positive votes, they are moved to the front page, which increases their chance of being viewed. The underlying idea is a mixture of reddit, digg, newsvine, and del.icio.us.

Balatarin was named editors' pick in 1386 (March 2007 to March 2008) in 7 Sang, a Persian Internet magazine, and it was voted the second most popular Persian website in the same year.^[1] Balatarin was also voted the best "News Website" in 1385 by readers of the same magazine.^[2]

Contents 1 History 2 Filtering 3 Features 3.1 Credit system 3.2 Personal bookmarking 3.3 Tag cloud 3.4 Commenting 3.5 Hot topics 3.6 Moderation 3.7 Live 3.8 Wiki 3.9 Abuse report 3.10 Highlights 3.11 Privacy policy 3.12 Blog 3.13 Invitation 4 Criticism 4.1 Online vandalism 4.2 Democracy 4.3 Energy pool 4.4 Statement of policies 4.5 Hidden negative votes 4.6 Visibility 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] History

Balatarin is the first Web 2.0 Persian website. It is co-founded by Mehdi Yahyanejad and Aziz Ashofteh. It was launched on August 16, 2006 by Mehdi Yahyanejad and Aziz Ashofteh joined him in early October 2006.

The number of required votes for a post to move to the front page increased from 3 to 5 on November 30, 2006, in an attempt for keeping popular links in the first page for a longer time. This number is regularly being increased with the increase in the number of users. In February 2, 2007 Balatarin introduced different minimum number of votes for different link categories.^[3]

As of June 2007, Balatarin is still in the development phase and new features are constantly being added to the system. Balatarin underwent a complete redesign on October 24, 2006, which dramatically increased its usability. A second major redesign was done on March 11, 2007, to further improve the user interface.

Balatarin changed its server on December 5, 2006 to cope with the overwhelming number of requests sent to the server, which had made it noticeably slow in certain times of the day. Although a down time of two hours was anticipated, Balatarin was not accessible for about 9 hours. During this time, a vague, strange message was shown on the website (in Persian and English). The English message read "we are moving the server. come back 2 hours from now" [sic]. The Persian message was "Do not post a link or cast a vote for two hours, because the server is being moved." Both equally funny, as there was no reference as when "now" was. Moreover, nobody was even allowed to view pages excepts for the modified front page, leave aside being able to submit content to the website. During this time, the title of webpage remained "unknown_request." The move was completed on December 6, 2006 and the message changed to "Move is finished. Now you may continue using Balatarin. Also, happy Student's day."

Balatarin started to use "doodles," in a similar way that Google doodles are used, on December 6, 2006. The first doodle was in celebration of Student's Day, which is 16th of Azar in the Persian calendar. The doodles are designed by Pendar of the Legofish website.^[4]

The access to Balatarin website has been blocked in Iran since January 2007; however, Iran-based users are still able to visit the site, through the use of proxy servers, or the https scheme.

As of October 12, 2007, there are 11979 registered users with a total of 150559 posted links, 447937 comments and 1873872 votes.^[5]

[edit] Filtering

On February 1, 2007, the website was filtered by the Iranian Ministry of Information and Communication Technology. Iranian government blocks access to many sites including Gooya News, Iranian Magazine and Sobhaneh. After the filtering of balatarin.com, Balatarin launched balatarin.info to allow users in Iran access the site without a need for a proxy. However, the new domain was subsequently filtered. Currently, users who access Balatarin through proxy have difficulty voting or using Ajax aspects of the site.

[edit] Features

Balatarin is written using Ruby on Rails and uses MySQL for database management. As a Web 2.0 website, it employs AJAX for improved usability.

[edit] Credit system

After a "Commenting Campaign" by a group of high-credit users who started using comment section for chatting, a limit was imposed on the number of comments a user is allowed to post in each 24-hour period. Later this limitation was reviewed and changed into an Energy concept, in which there is a "pool" of energy that can be used for any kind of activity, such as commenting, voting, and posting a new link. The initial amount of energy is determined by user's credit.

Balatarin uses a non-conventional credit system different from similar websites such as Digg. Each user has a credit that increases over time based on their activity and contribution in Balatarin. Credit of the user in turn determines the volume of allowed activity (or equivalently, their energy). This could prevent overly-active, inexperienced, new users from deteriorating the quality of the system. The formula used for calculating energy is^[6]

where E is the total energy, C is user's credit, c is the number of comments written, l is the number of links posted, p is the number of positive votes, n is the number of negative votes, and r is the number of abuse reports, all measured during the past 24 hours. There is no explanation on how or why these specific coefficients are chosen.

This formula, in contrast to the old formula, reflects the number of abuse reports, to prevent overuse of this feature. Moreover, this new formula generally provides users with more energy compared to the older formula, shown in the following^[7]

The credit C is roughly calculated as^[8]

where l_fp is the number of links moved to the front page and l_neg is the number of links with a net negative vote.

User credits are updated almost once a week on Saturdays. This is not, however, strictly true as Balatarin is silent about it. Besides, during the server move user credits were updated quite a few times.

[edit] Personal bookmarking

Users can bookmark the links for later reference. There is a profile page, where a user can include a link to their website and post a short note about themself. User's activity categorized by comments written, links submitted, and links bookmarked can also be viewed from the profile page. Balatarin lacks the functionality of embedding links in other websites. There is, however, a method suggested to convert the RSS feed of the main page to a JavaScript code using a third-party website.^[9]

[edit] Tag cloud

There is also a tag cloud, which shows tags that are used to label the links. These tags are supposed to show the level of interest of Balatarin users in a specific, very narrow subject, but the problem of non-standardized Persian glyphs has reduced the usefulness of tags.

[edit] Commenting

Since September 17, 2006, users can post comments for links. They also can rate other users' comments. As of December 12, 2006, users are able to post comments directly from the front page without visiting individual pages.

[edit] Hot topics

A new feature was added to Balatarin on December 7, 2006 after a two-week test period open to a limited number of users.^[10] While only users with a credit of 1000 or higher can add a new topic, submitting a link to existing topics is possible for all registered users.

Hot topics are defined as subjects that are in spotlight only for a short period of time. Hence, a current issue that remains in attention for a long time is not considered a hot topic. A minimum of six links should already exist in Balatarin before a topic can be posted as a hot topic.^[11] The title of a hot topic or its description may be edited by the administrators.

[edit] Moderation

Balatarin announced moderators (or Balayars, a just-coined word) in April 1, 2007 after a three-week probation period. They invited the then five top-credited users to act as moderators, of which four accepted the responsibility.^[12] Moderators' responsibilities include preventing and reacting to vandalism, cheating (such as possessing multiple IDs), and copyright infringement. There is an unpublished "Guidelines for Moderators" that governs moderators' operations.

[edit] Live

Live was launched on April 6, 2007.^[13] Live provides a real-time activity log of Balatarin, which shows submissions, votes, and comments. It comes in handy to spot the current trend of activities on Balatarin (such as a debate). At each instant of time, it shows the last 15 activities of the system.

[edit] Wiki

As a response to more user collaboration in developing Balatarin guidelines and to document current practices, a wiki website was initiated on April 30, 2007.^[14] Balatarin aims to redirect all the Balatarin-related contents, submissions regarding suggestions, bugs, and controversial actions, to the Wiki and keep the front page free of such content, to remain of interest to the general audience rather than only its own users.

[edit] Abuse report

Abuse report is a measure to enable the Balatarin community to submit reports about users abusing the system, or the links violating Balatarin's terms of use. It was added on May 13, 2007.^[15]

[edit] Highlights

Highlights (or the Bulletin of Today's Top News) is a page that gathers links that have caught a relatively high attention. It list the top-ten links for each of the seven main categories. For links to be eligible to be included in highlight, they must have a certain click-to-vote ratio.

[edit] Privacy policy

Balatarin has a privacy policy contained within the Terms of Use page.^[16]

[edit] Blog

The Balatarin team maintains a blog hosted at http://blog.balatarin.com. The name of blog is "Balatarin Blog," which literally means "the best blog." The blog serves as a board from which the Team announces its official policies, views, and also the updates to the Balatarin software.

[edit] Invitation

After a period of accepting no new users (registration closed on September 24, 2007), Balatarin activated registration via invitations on February 14, 2008,^[17] ironically on Valentine's Day.

Invitation was activated for the 45 users that had the highest credit at the moment. Invitations were also sent to whoever asked for it. All invited users can invite others; therefore, all new users are able to invite. Users registered before this date need to be invited before invitation is activated for them.

Balatarin guidelines and terms of user were also updated at the same time. All users that can invite, need to accept the terms of use.

[edit] Criticism

[edit] Online vandalism

Similar to other online, open systems, Balatarin is prone to abuse. Possessing more than a user name for an individual has become more of a concern with the growing popularity of the website. There is also a common misunderstanding about the purpose of negative votes, which is turning into a serious issue. This made Balatarin to change its policy of keeping negative-voters anonymous and now it reveals all voter names.

[edit] Democracy

In Balatarin users are asked for their opinion about introducing changes in the system. This is, however, disputed as there is no clear explanation on how votes are interpreted and put into action.

Moreover, Balatarin claims to have minimal administrative control over the content of the website. However, it has promoted some high-credit users (four, as of June 16, 2007) as the moderators of the website. Moderators, in contrast to the normal users, are able to remove a link or ban a user according to a written (yet unpublished) "Guidelines for Moderators."

Over time, moderation and submission rules have been controversial and raised tension in many aspects (removing links or banning users probably in order to impose personal ideas, political view, or other interests). This issue has led to some users complaints and treat of quitting the website for the so-called violation of Balatarin's promises as a democratic website. Moreover, one of the founders published a post in the official blog announcing that the site is democratic only to a certain point:

This abstract impression that some users have, that the democracy only means voting, is incorrect. Democracy needs framework and rules. Balatarin is a democracy only to the extent that links go to the first page by your votes. Some few links (maybe less than 5 percent) that are removed, are according to the rules mentioned in submission page.^[18]

[edit] Energy pool

The energy pool concept is suspected to promote lower contribution of the users to website, as the weight of posting links is quite high. It also demotes administrative operation of some users, as negative votes require much energy. The reason for the relatively high weight of negative votes is to discourage their misuse. However, mathematical analysis of the energy formula reveals that there are optimal strategies for increasing the credit in Balatarin.^[19]

[edit] Statement of policies

Before December 7, 2006 Balatarin lacked an official guideline and policy statement. However, there was a number of unofficial, undocumented standards followed by majority of users, such as no duplicate links, no links to the adult content, and no insult.

[edit] Hidden negative votes

Although positive voters in Balatarin are visible to everyone, negative voters are kept hidden. This could be a cause of abuse of the system as while users are normally quite conservative about their positive votes, they may not be as responsible for their negative votes. However, it has been argued that showing the identity of negative voters may encourage retaliating.

After a long debate on the Balatarin blog^[20] and the related post^[21] on whether to show the negative voters, the Balatarin community decided to turn them on as of December 15, 2006.^[22][23]

[edit] Visibility

Although balatarin.com defaults to the "popular links" pages, not always a link in this pages receives more views than a link still in the "recent links" pages. This particularly happens in rush hours when lots of popular links are posted to Balatarin and relatively older popular links are rapidly moved down.

[edit] See also

• Community website
• Web 2.0
• Ruby on Rails
• Reddit
• Internet censorship in Iran

[edit] References

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2008)

[edit] External links

• Balatarin website (alternate domain)
• Balatarin blog