My Opera Community
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 Screenshot of the My Opera Community Main Page |
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| URL | http://my.opera.com/ |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Maintained by Opera Software ASA for non commercial purposes and to provide support for numerous versions of the Opera Browser. |
| Type of site | Internet forum, Software Support Site |
| Registration | required to post but not to view postings |
| Owner | Opera ASA |
| Created by | |
| Launched | August 2001 |
| Revenue | text sponsor links at bottom of front page only |
| Current status | Active |
The My Opera Community is the support community for the Opera web Browser. Over 1000 new members join per day [1]. According to Big Boards My Opera ranks 78th for software boards, and 39th overall based on total number of members [2]
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[edit] History
The My Opera Community was launched in August 2001 and currently has over 500,000 members from all over the world. [3] It had its first upgrade a month later on September 11. This upgrade included the introduction of Opera Composer.[4] On December 15, 2003 the site underwent an upgrade. [5]
[edit] 2005 upgrades
In September 2005 the My Opera Community added a few major improvements [6]. These changes improvements include adding many of the features currently available on the website. During this upgrade users were given acesess to person photo albums, improved blogs (formerly journals), the ability to create custom groups and 300 mb of free disk space.[7] Improvements to blogging included the introduction of "mobile blogging" or blogging from a mobile phone through MMS.[8][9]
[edit] Fall/December 2006 Upgrades
In the Fall of 2006, My Opera's servers were straining to handle site traffic. New servers were available since September 5[10]. The hardware was originally scheduled to be installed alongside a software upgrade but the software upgrade became a major effort. It occurred on October 10 at least 2 weeks before any hardware upgrade[11]. It was scheduled to begin at 6:00 UTC and last for 4 to 5 hours[12].
Changes scheduled for the software upgrade included:
- polls in blog sidebars
- deletion of your own forum posts
- improved search interface for forums
After the install was complete not all of the new features were fully integrated and there were a few bugs, including a problem with the tagging database [13] There was however, a bonus upgrade in that new smilies were added.
On October 30, 2006, it was officially announced that the new hardware would be installed on October 31. The installation lead to a site downtime from 8:00 AM to 10:00 AM CET.[14]
On November 3, 2006, the "Grand Opening" of the new My Opera Community server room was announced. Contained within this server room are only servers that are for the My Opera Community and canisters of Argon Gas to extinguish fire without damging equipment.[15]
On November 14, 2006, the community shut down for a few minutes while 50000 NOK worth of memory was installed in the servers to improve performance.[16]
On December 13, 2006, it was announced that a new database server was installed for visiting users, that it users who aren't logged in (e.g. Viewing Blog and Forum posts without signing in). Right away the new server began to handle more traffic than the old one. This meant that the old server had more resources available to it and could handle standard logged in traffic more effectivly.[17]
On December 22, 2006, a new server "Fatboy" was announced. This server was bought to handle the anticipated load increase due to the introduction of the Wii Internet Channel.[18]
[edit] New Site (Introduced in March 2007)
On March 8, 2007 Opera released a new version of the site.[19]
[edit] Future Upgrades
The new hardware for the 2006 upgrade was put to use for a beta test site on October 26, 2006. This site was intended to remain up even after the final install of the new hardware on the regular website. There are extensive plans for various subdomains on the My Opera site.[20] The site did remain up for a while after final install of the hardware but it now appears to be down.
[edit] Older Version Screenshots
 The original design for the My Opera Community |
 The second version of the My Opera Community |
 The third version of the My Opera Comminity |
 The fourth version of the My Opera Community which exsisted between September 2005 and March 2007 |
[edit] Member of the Week
Every week the Opera Community announces a "Member of the Week". There are a number of ways a member could be become an MOW. These include being creative with their blog or doing something for the Community. Members of the week started on September 12, 2005 [21].
[edit] Server Monkeys
Whenever there is a page error on the My Opera site a server monkey comes to inform you of the error. Similar graphics are also in use to illistrate yet-to-be-written help pages.
Server Monkeys were introduced during the 2005 upgrades, and are often blamed for server/software problems in a similar way that gremlins are.
[edit] Forums
There is a subsection called "Forums" devoted to Opera themed forums. There are also separate Forums in individual Groups. All forums support standard BB Code based features with the exception of image support. The [img] BB Code tags have been disabled for all forums. An alternative to this is support for users to "attach" a file (such as an image file) to a forum post from their personal file storage. There is a UserJS script to display attached imaged within forum posts. One user discovered how to get around this by placing the image address between square brackets e.g. [http://www.example.com/image.png]. For a few weeks it was a popular game to display images until this "bug" was fixed.
[edit] Groups/Personal
Opera Community allows for the creation of subgroups with their own Blogs and Forums. Groups are very much like personal pages except that you can create forums. Every My Opera user gets 300MB of space for file storage.
[edit] Blogs
Blog support started out with a personal "Journal" service. In September 2005 along with other major improvements this service was changed to a "Blog" service. The My Opera Blog service currently allows HTML, BB Code, Smilies, and customisable Cascading Style Sheet formating. A lack of customisable HTML means that buttons cannot be added to Blog pages however, support for customisable link lists offers an alternative. Opera also uses groups as a way to give news on its weekly updates through the Opera Desktop Blog, which also happens to be consistently the most popular blog on the community[22].
Users also have the option of listing their blog on a worldmap.
[edit] Photo Albums
Users are allowed personal Photo Albums. Currently a slide-show will show images from the newest photo album on the users blog sidebar. Photo Albums in groups will group images within the photo album but images are still hosted within the uploaders allocated filespace.
[edit] Project 365
Project 365 is a photo collection project first launched by Opera Community user Ramunas. The goal of this project is for all participants to collect one photograph for each day of the year[23].
[edit] Subdomains
There are several Opera subdomain sites that use a My Opera account. These include Opera Widgets, a site for downloading Widgets for the Opera browser, Dev.Opera, a site for developers to write articles and share tips and tricks, and Opera Portal, the default page for the Opera Browser, it includes a search engine and customisable news feeds.
Dev.Opera was announced on November 1, 2006.[24][25]
[edit] References
- ^ Opera Watch: Opera Community site reaches 500,000 members; More than 1,000 new members join per-day
- ^ Software Forums and Message Boards (in English)
- ^ My Opera reaches 500,000 members! Yeay!
- ^ Opera in Your Community Opera revamps MyOpera community and enhances the Opera Composer
- ^ My Opera revamped: New Site Unlocks Hidden Features in Opera
- ^ My Opera - One Year Later
- ^ New "My Opera" Community Gives 300MB of Free Storage
- ^ Opera Enables Mobile Blogging
- ^ Blog while you jog: People run to new My Opera Community
- ^ Hardware!
- ^ Upcoming Opera Community Downtime
- ^ Upcoming Opera Community Downtime 2
- ^ Tag Problems
- ^ New Hardware! - Opera Community News
- ^ Server Room Grand Opening (More Hardware Porn)
- ^ Server Maintenance Today
- ^ bigpa To the Rescue
- ^ What's Under the Tree?
- ^ Oh Glorious Day!! - My Opera Community Main Page Blog
- ^ Introducing the Opera Community Beta Site
- ^ First My Opera Member of the Week
- ^ My Opera Blogs arranged in order of most visited
- ^ Project 365 - Opera Community News
- ^ Dev.Opera launched
- ^ Opera Developer Community site launches
[edit] External links
 Opera |
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|---|---|
| Companies | Opera Software • Telenor |
| Topics | History • Features • M2 • Community • Presto |
| Notable individuals | Håkon Wium Lie • Jon S. von Tetzchner • Geir Ivarsøy |
| Devices | Opera Mobile • Opera Mini • Nintendo DS Browser • Internet Channel |
