New Automated Notification Management System - Includes Quotas

One of the attractive features of the hi5 platform is the many viral channels we've made available to allow developers to advertise their applications to our members. The unprecedented success of our platform has demanded that we keep an eye on the flow of notifications and invites to make sure that this opportunity is not exploited by a minority of abusers, thus degrading the experience for our members and making the service unusable for the developer community as a whole. In other words, we are opposed to having spam on hi5; moreover, a flood of irrelevant or misleading notifications drowns out those  that come from useful and legitimate applications.

To manage this ecosystem in as efficient a manner as possible, we are introducing a new automated system that will implement notification quotas. To date, we have been moving these switches manually but the communication overhead has been too high. The automated quotas will respond daily to abuse report rates and usage. Specifically, the fewer times our members mark a notification as spam and the more they click through to engage with the application, the more notifications your applications will be able to send.

We think our automated system will help the platform respond in the most timely manner to positive user perceptions of applications and notifications. Very soon, developers will be informed via the response to (rejected) API requests for sending notifications if they are in violation of quotas. We also expect soon to expose the actual quotas on a daily basis via the Developer Console.

If you have any questions about the quota system or suggestions on how else we can support your apps on hi5 while also best serving our membership, please get in touch with us via email, our discussion forums or the wiki --- all contact addresses are available on http://developer.hi5.com.