Today, if you’re in a part of the world that observes it, is when Daylight Savings Time ends, and your clocks fall back by an hour. It’s a free hour of the day! Depending on how you look at it!

One question we’ve never gotten - which has always been kind of surprising - is how DST affects Project Wonderful: we charge in terms of time, so aren’t people getting a free hour of advertising when we fall back, and isn’t an hour of advertising disappearing when we spring forward?

The answer is of course no: all temporaral calculations on Project Wonderful are done in terms of “Unix time“, which is the number of seconds elapsed since January 1st, 1970. This may sound weird, but it makes a lot of things in computer science easy, including DST. Since Unix time measures the number of real seconds since this date, it’s not affected by changes to the clock: when we leap forward, we aren’t gaining an hour in any real sense. The second after the leap forward we’re still only one more second away from January 1st, 1970, and that’s what Unix time records.

I recommend checking out the linked articles on Daylight Savings Time and Unix time! They’re both really interesting, and there’s so much history and controversy and trivia behind DST that you might not expect.

We’ve updated our help pages recently: gone is the open-source phpMyFAQ and replacing it is some homegrown software more suited to our needs.  Nothing against phpMyFAQ, as it is a solid piece of software, but it was never a perfect fit: our new software is perfectly integrated with the rest of our site and set up more like a book you can browse, with some wiki-like features added in.

Questions are organized into categories, which are themselves organized, so you can see the context of each article you’re reading, and also see related articles on the same theme. Of course you can search for articles as well, but this new help system should make finding the information you want easier, while also making the system less daunting to new members!

Behind the scenes, there’s some exciting management features, like recording the most common search terms people use that don’t result in an exact match: this way we can see what we’re missing that people want, and add it into the database!

You can check out the new help system here. We’re adding new articles to it all the time, and one of the most popular new articles is the one titled Which sites can I put Project Wonderful ads on?, which explains our publisher standards in some detail. If you’re thinking of applying to become a Project Wonderful publisher, it’s worth checking out!

One of the most common questions we get at our customer service address goes something like this:

“Hi! I like your service, but I’ve noticed that many bidders cancel bids before they expire. Does that mean they’re ripping me off, because they don’t have to pay when they cancel a bid?”

The short answer is “No, as a publisher you earn money every second a bid is displayed on your site“. And as an advertiser, you’re charged every second your bid is the high bidder. These charges happen every few seconds and are credited (or charged) to your account automatically.

The longer answer is that, although we discuss advertising in terms of cost per day (ie: how much it costs to have your ad on a site for an entire day), bids don’t have to last a full day. We actually charge bidders every few seconds to the nearest 1/100th of a second, so there’s no way anyone can gain anything by cancelling a bid: it just prevents future charges.

For example, if someone bids your ad box up to $24 a day and sits there for an hour before cancelling, then we will charge them $1.00. On our site, the values we show are rounded to the nearest cent, but if you hold your mouse over the “current profits” number (if you’re a publisher) or the “current expense” number (if you’re an advertiser), you’ll see the a less-rounded version.

As most of you know, we do allow bidders (and publishers) to cancel any bid at any time. Often bidders will try out a site for a bit to see the performance. When a bid is cancelled, there’s no way anyone is gaming the system or not paying anything - they still have to pay for the time they were up. In addition, our campaign system will sometimes cancel bids as it manages the campaign: that’s probably where most of these cancelled bids are coming from!

But I’m not just posting this to clear this issue up. Over the past few weeks, we’ve made changes to the site to try to make this more clear to our members, but nevertheless, this question still arrives in our in box once in a while. Much less frequently, granted, but still enough for it to be noticable! I think it’s time to admit that maybe the word “cancelled” wasn’t the right choice: it has connotations of “undo” to it, a sense of “oh, wait, wait, I take this back”.

We’re considering renaming the “cancelled” status to something a bit more clear: “Expired early” is our current favourite, but we’re open to alternatives! If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them in the comments, with our thanks. And you can expect to see the current naming of the “cancelled” status to be “expired early” in the near future.

We’ll be rolling out a new update on Wednesday with two major changes. First off, after you log in the welcome page will display stats about your ad boxes and bids. Secondly, we’ll be limiting you to a maximum to 20 tags for describing your site’s contents.

The welcome page change is part of the usability enhancement program that we’re developing to improve our member’s experience and make frequently used features more accessible. When you log in to your account, if you have active bids or active ad boxes, then the welcome page will change from the default “how to use the service” message to a display that gives you up to date information on performance and other stats.

Give it a try and let us know how you like it.

On the tags side of thing, we noticed that while the vast majority of our members had less than 20 tags describing their sites, there was a small minority of ad boxes that had hundreds of tags! While we get wanting to ensure maximum exposure for your site, having hundreds of tags to describe the content is functionally equivalent to having no tags at all. If you have 500 tags, then the fact that one of them says “recipes” doesn’t really give me any information about the content of your site. The consequence is a race to the bottom where advertisers end up losing trust in the tagging system and going back to checking site content by hand, which is bad for everyone.

Starting Wednesday, we will limit sites to 20 tags. If you are currently over the limit, we’ve automatically selected 20 from the list you had, though we recommend checking with our choices and readjusting them to better reflect the content of your site. We hope that this move will help clean up the tag namespace and ensure better accuracy in searches as well as encouraging our publishers to be more focused on their core topics.

-Tim

Project Wonderful will be in attendance at Experience!Tech 2008 and we’ll be exhibiting from 10:00am to 1:00pm on the 19th.

Come visit us if you’re in town.