First things first, I'm glad to report our on-going giveaway is doing extremely well, in fact, I'd dare to say it's going to be our most popular contest ever as more people continue to join every day and we haven't promoted it beyond the sticky news post on top of our homepage.
So far the Apple iPad has the edge on the poll but don't worry, if you adhere to the rules of quality posting and happen to win, we won't have a problem replacing the prize with the product of your choice. Let me also reiterate that a wide majority of participating members are keeping the discussion at the desired quality level, this only encourages us to offer subsequent prizes after this contest is over.
Our newly revamped homepage has been a success during this first few weeks of operation. On top of that we have tried our best to deliver on various other fronts. The algorithm behind the "What's Trending" tab has been tweaked to penalize older stories. This was a common complaint as old stories were taking precedence over the most recent headlines most of the time. Inevitably, if a story that is a few days old has been very popular (measured in terms of views, comments, etc.) it will still show among the top trending headlines but that's precisely the idea, to give you an additional tool to track what's been going on during the past few days, or even the last month.
I'm also happy to announce that we have added the option of instant email notifications to our news discussions. Look for the checkbox right below the posting form that will let you subscribe to any news story, so you can easily track whenever someone replies to a comment you have posted. This is a common feature on our forum but we didn't offer the same functionality for our news comments until now. You can manage all your subscriptions on this page.
Last but not least, we've performed several improvements to our site backend this past week, which should result in a snappier browsing experience for you. Just in case you had noticed any slowdowns lately, those should be gone now. That's all for now, until next week, make sure you let us know of any suggestions you might have in mind for improving TechSpot.