The Official bragster blog

Hey Bragsters,

Here’s a quick note to let you know about a few new changes we’re making to the site today.

1. Bragging Rights – We’ve tweaked the algorithm for these a little, to give a greater weight to videos over pictures. While pictures can be cool, videos tend to be better most of the time, and we think they provide much better proof of the craziness you guys and girls get up to! As such, you’ll now get significantly more BR for your videos than your pictures.

2. Navigation – The “sub-nav”, as the technically-inclined call it, has been significantly changed, as you can see here:

As you can see, clicking on BragTV will now give you the three options of ‘Video Brags’ (the default), ‘Image Brags’, and ‘Hall of Fame’. This makes it much easier to find the kind of things you want to see. The same categories (up&coming, most BR, etc) as before are in the drop-down box, making it very easy to sort what’s hot, newest, and so on.

3. Cool/Lame – We’ve renamed the voting buttons to “Cool Brag” and “Lame Brag” – we think this makes it a little more obvious what the purpose of voting is, have a look:

The more observant of you may also have spotted the ‘This is not a brag!’ button in the image above – this feature isn’t quite ready yet (we’ve still to put the icing on that particular cake), but should be coming soon, and will help you guys let us know when someone is posting something that doesn’t belong to them, like a google image for instance.

We think the above changes, as well as more to come, will help to make Bragster a better and easier-to-use place for all our awesome users – but what do you think? – Be sure to let us know on the feedback group, by email, or in the comments here on the blog!

We noticed both on the feedback group as well as in some comments on the site that peeps are getting annoyed with the “dare me” types of dares people have been creating. Well we are too, so we’re taking them down. If you put up a dare for someone to dare you, we’re going to nuke it. We’re in the process of coming up with a solution to ze problem of letting everyone know that you want a dare, but for now we recommend that you put in your status update that you want a dare. Sooooo, it should look a little something like this:

Does this make you happy? Sad? Phlegmatic? Did you just have to look that word up? If so, good; it means you learned something today. As always, drop us a line-tron if you want to say haaaaaaaay. Or don’t. Whatevs.

Hello Everyone!

We’re getting closer and closer to the launch of the new site, so we’re going to start phasing some things out in order to make the transition a little easier. Tomorrow, the following things are going to take place:

1. Polls: you will not be able to create any new polls. All old polls will remain in play, and BragBucks will be paid out as usual. You will also still be able to view all existing polls and leave comments on them.

2. Feedback: The thumbs-up/thumbs-down system is going to be retired from now on. This means that the green box under your avatar will disappear, and people will no longer be able to rate you on how you settled a brag.

3. Referees: This isn’t a hugely used feature, but we’re going to remove the ability for you to have external refs for your brags. When you create a brag from now on, you will be the default referee.

If you have any questions about anything or just want to tell us what you think, send us a message or leave a comment on this post.

And now here’s a video of Yamakasii trying to catch a frisbee in his mouth:

Later.

Hope you’re all enjoying the Bragster Olympiad and are inspired for a wicked summer full of dares and bragging. You’ve been asking for a lot of changes for a while now, and the team here has been working very hard to make them a reality. In a few months time, you’ll be able to sample the result when we release an upgrade of the site after summer.

So what will change? We’ve been following all of you closely and got a lot of feedback after launching dares earlier this year. You all seem to be crazy about dares as they are the majority of all new events created (as opposed to bets or polls). So we decided to give you more of the good stuff, and do some serious restructuring of the site’s functionality related to daring and showing off in general. The main goal is to reward our best users more, while enhancing the social experience for everyone.

1. We’re retiring bets and polls. As we have been growing organically, we’ve added new features really quickly. Some of them took off straight away, but we never really removed the less popular ones. We have now decided that we’re going to focus on dares and remove all bets and polls. We will also have a more consistent language and refer to Dares for all challenges and Brags for all pieces of evidence or other show-off material (like videos or pictures).

2. Turn on BragTV. The focus on the new site will be on what really matters: videos or pictures you want to show off to your friends and other bragsters. We’ll have a big Brag TV section that will host all those videos and pictures and make it easy for viewers to browse the best bits on Bragster.

3. Upload videos directly to Bragster. After the new upgrade, you’ll be able to upload your videos directly to Bragster, and we’ll play them in a higher resolution on a dedicated Brag page. You will also be able to embed them on other sites.

4. Two new dare types. On the current site you can only dare one person directly, but we’re working on the following three types of dares: (1) open dares, (2) personal dares, (3) dare a friend. An open dare enables you to challenge the whole Bragster community to do something the best, fastest, farthest, … e.g. “Who can down the most Tabasco shots”; a personal dare is a statement that you can do something yourself, e.g. “I bet I can down 10 Tabasco shots”; finally you can dare friends directly in the same way you already can on the current site, e.g. “I dare Bertrand to down 10 Tabasco shots”.

5. Bye-bye BragBucks, hello Bragging Rights! We’ve heard from you that BragBucks aren’t really the best way to reward real Bragsters. This is completely true: right now you can earn as many BragBucks by placing your bets on the right outcome, as the person actually completing the dare, which is why we’re replacing BragBucks with Bragging Rights. You will only earn Bragging Rights for Brags you uploaded yourself. How many Bragging Rights you’ll earn will mainly depend on how much people see your Brag, and how they rate it.

6. Thumbs up/down are out. Since we’ve retired BragBucks, we also decided to retire the rating system. Bragging Rights will also take the place of the rating system.

7. Join Groups and Teams. You’ll be able to create groups and teams, and we’re going to make search better, so it will be easier to find your friends. You can team up with your best friends or join your university group. To get you started, you’ll be able to import your contact list from your email address book.

That’s about it for now, we’ll keep you updated via our blog as and when we make some of the changes listed above. The look and feel of the site will also change, and we’ve even thrown in a new logo! The screenshot below should give you a bit of a flavour already.

If there is anything else you’d like to see, don’t hesitate to let us know by either leaving a comment on this post, contact us, or send me a personal message at wim @ bragster [dot] com.

Now get your Bragster on!

One of the most requested features from all of you has been the ability to delete the comments on your profile page, so without further ado... You can! There's a little delete link in the comment box, so just click that, and the comment will disappear.

If you'd like to suggest anything else or give us some feedback, leave a comment or send us a message!

Check out Killertu's latest dare upload; it's awesome!

Sup bragsters!

You may (or may not) have noticed that the views on your brags and profile page have shot up in the last couple of days. At some point, deep in the recesses of our data center something happened, something scary... The googly-eyed monster that counts how many times people view your brags and profile pages stopped doing his damn job. Luckily Peter and Chris managed to whip the lazy bastard back into shape, so the page views should be back up to speed.

That was sort of boring, so I'm going to show you some sweet video evidence now:

We’ve released a few changes today that affect the notifications section of the ‘My Feed’ page:

• ‘Brag Invitations’ should now be hidden if you are already participating in the brag.
• ‘Brag Invitations’ for events that you can no longer join (ie. time has run out) should be hidden.
• ‘Dares to complete’ should now only list those dares that you have actually accepted.
• You can now leave feedback on dares which people haven’t accepted.

We’ve still got a few things to work out in that department, but we’re on the case. Let us know if you run into any bugs or if you’ve got any more feedback. We heart feedback!

Have Fun! Brittney

Hello Everyone! In the last 17 seconds something has changed, and in our opinion, it’s changed for the better. In the past, there was some confusion about how dares worked when someone declined them, didn’t upload evidence or didn’t accept, so we’ve revamped the process so it’s more clear.

This is how it works: if someone does not accept a dare, declines a dare or fails to upload evidence than the people who chose ‘They Won’t Do It’ will win the bet.

And from the other direction: if you choose ‘They Won’t Do It’ and the daree doesn’t accept the dare, declines the dare or doesn’t upload evidence than you will win the bet.

Everyone got it? If you’ve got a question about this works, leave a comment or let me know, and I’ll be happy to explain further.

Bragster is dependent on you, our illustrious members, to create great bets, dares and polls. We also rely on you to settle them, but sometimes you let us down… We know you don’t mean to, and sometimes you just forget, or you don’t know what happened. We do the best we can to step in settle some of the obvious brags i.e. sports, news, celebrity type things, but when it comes to the dares, we can’t really settle them for you.

There are two deputies on the site, moi and MikeRowave. Between us, I’d say we do a damn fine job of making sure that the aforementioned, obvious brags get settled. As deputies, we have the power to step in after the bet/dare has been pending settlement for 15 days and choose the winning outcome.

We only do this when the outcome is obvious, so please understand there’s not a lot we can do about messages like the following:

“I don’t why this gurl settled her bet saying that Kanye West is better than 50 Cent. Everyone knows that 50 Cent invented da game, and Kanye West is a wannabe playa with no skillz.”

But, Brittney, you say, it IS obvious that 50 Cent is far superior to that game-hating Kanye West and his NuRave, hipster shades. Sadly, I cannot make such determinations for the general public, because, as a deputy, I cannot settle opinion based brags or those which are based on facts to which I don’t have access. While I value your thoughts on the current state of Hip-Hop/Gangsta Rap, I cannot take it as fact.

If you’ve got a question or some f-f-feedback, then, in the words of Mr. Ryan Adams, “When you get the time, sit down and write me a letter. When you’re feeling better, drop me a line.”

Later skaterz.

Luckily you’ve got me to tell you all of the nifty ways to get some more BragBucks without having to whore yourself out to some boring Coke vs. Pepsi brag. Without further ado, I present to you, a list:

• Invite your friends who haven’t joined Bragster yet. For everyone of them who signs up, you’ll get 1,000 BragBucks. Just make sure they follow the link in the invite email you send them.
• Create a bet with more than 25 participants, and you’ll get a popular bet bonus of 1,000 BragBucks!
• Make a fire altar to the Bragster gods, and do an interpretive dance to ‘Gimme More’ by Britney Spears around the fire. If you do this, please send us the video, and I will personally gift you an undisclosed number of BragBucks¹.

I hope this helps everyone out, and we do know how absolutely irritating it is when you’re trying to join some cool brags only to discover that joining that Boys vs. Girls bet for 5,000 BragBucks has really wiped you out. We’ll be introducing new ways to get BragBucks in the future, and we’ll keep you updated here on the blog.

¹ I am completely serious; do this and you will be handsomely rewarded by yours truly.