MacRumors.com screenshot (2008-04-24) |
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| URL | MacRumors.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | News, information, and rumors related to Apple Inc. |
| Owner | MacRumors.com, LLC |
| Created by | Arnold Kim |
| Launched | 2000 |
| Current status | Active |
MacRumors.com is a website that aggregates Mac and Apple related news, rumors, and reports. The site was launched in 2000, and is owned by Arnold Kim.[1][2] By consolidating reports and cross-referencing claims, MacRumors attempts to keep track of the rumor community. The tagline of MacRumors is "News and Rumors You Care About." The website is updated daily with new rumors.
MacRumors is also home to one of the largest Mac-focused forum sites, with over 400,000 members and over 10,000,000 forum posts as of May 2010.[3] Users can find support for many Apple-related issues, as well as talk to other Mac users about other community and industry related issues.
In addition to providing rumors, news, and an active forum, MacRumors also serves as one of the most prominent sites for broadcasting live coverage of Apple announcements via MacRumorsLive.com.
The site has become increasingly popular since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and increasingly with the debut of the iPad in 2010, although has been criticized in reporting iPod and iPhone related stories when the site is named after the 'Mac' side of Apple. As a result, the URL "Applerumors.com" forwards to MacRumors.com.
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As of May 26, 2010, according to Quantcast, MacRumors receives an average 55,795,496 page views globally per month, and 6,589,541 visitors per month globally.[4] Traffic to the website often increases dramatically during Apple events, such as WWDC.
MacRumors has an Official "Internet Relay Chat" Channel where current events are discussed "Real Time". It is also a place where many Mac users seek assistance from other proficient Mac users. The channel is moderated by many lively "Operators" who provide assistance as well as good natured discussion of many topics. Topics are not limited to "Mac" only conversations. Anything Apple Related is welcomed, and often general "Technical" questions can also be answered here.
The channel can be found at irc.krono.net #macrumors
The site has a specialized guide for buying new Apple products based on release times. They have tracked new releases of Apple's biggest products since as early as 2002 and keep a running tab of how long the average refresh cycle is for each product. From the "Days Since Update" and average time between refreshes, they recommend if you should buy a product now or not, ranging from "Don't Buy - Updates soon" to "Buy Now! - Product just updated." [5]
MacRumors also has a personalized wiki page, based on the MediaWiki software (the same as Wikipedia), which they call "Mac Guides." Guides are divided into categories and, within each category, then into a directory-style navigation to find step-by-step guides for help with Apple products.[6]
During the Macworld 2009 keynote live coverage, it was discovered that administrator interface to MacRumorsLive.com was not protected, which allowed people to disrupt the feed. The first non-related post, at 9.24am PST stated "STEVE JOBS JUST DIED :". A few minutes later, the admins acknowledged the message and stated they didn't know how this entered the stream. This was quickly followed by hundreds more foul comments and language, and the feed was promptly shut down. MacRumorsLive remained offline until the iPhone 3.0 event.
In a statement following the incident, Arnold Kim stated: "The MacRumorsLive feed was compromised as described. The cause of the security breach is best described as "user error" due to admin files being inadvertently mirrored across multiple server instances with incorrect permissions. This allowed php code to be displayed rather than executed, which was clearly a "bad thing". Our actual admin panel is password protected, of course."[7]
On Thursday 12 May 2011 the site was given a graphical refresh and the following features added:
• Full RSS Feeds - All existing RSS subscribers have been automatically upgraded to full content feeds. • Page Load Times - Pages to load faster and the site will be able to handle more traffic. • Content Changes - The content of the MacRumors front page will remain the same. It will aim to highlight the most significant iOS and Mac news and rumors. Page 2 has been retired and has been replaced with a Mac Blog, and an iPhone Blog which expands to cover iOS and iPad topics.
Also, new RSS feed options have been made available:
• All MacRumors Stories • Front Page - Existing subscribers have been upgraded to this feed. • Mac Blog - Existing Page 2 subscribers have been upgraded to this feed. • iOS Blog - Existing iPhone subscribers have been upgraded to this feed.