Welcome to Plurk

Plurk is a great place to meet new people with similar interest or belong to the same location. Here are some tips on how you can better explore Plurkiverse and meet interesting people from around the neighborhood.

1.) our recommended plurkers page
Using our not-so-secret recipe, we have built a simple robot that recommends plurkers you might find interesting. This robot takes into consideration various factors such as your age, location and matching keywords. You can find a list of your recommended friends by going to the bottom of your ‘Find/Invite friends’ page.  There you will find a list of 9 plurkers with basic info such as picture, age and location. We compile a new list every now and then so be sure to check back often!

2.) location and keyword search
Our plurker search is another useful way to discover new people. For example, you can search by country name and it will list out all the plurkers that come from that country and you can sort the result by gender, karma or age. Here’s a list of plurkers from Taiwan. And it’s not just limited to country name – try city, state or district. You can also search by keyword such as ‘warcraft‘, ‘second life‘, ‘soccer‘ and etc. Our search page is accessible from the bottom right of your timeline or you can go directly to plurk.com/search

3.) interesting plurker page
Interesting plurker page is the place where we display some of the most interesting data about plurkiverse. The page itself is auto-customized so that it only show data that is close to your location. On this page, you will find interesting things like new plurkers, most popular plurkers, latest plurks, most interesting plurks and etc. You can also filter the timeline to show plurks that are relevant to your interest.

In late December/early January, many of you were understandably upset and had asked for explanations regarding our instability and frequent downtime during what was a rather shaky holiday season for Plurk. Admittedly, we caught the sniffles and those holiday colds are not so easy to shake off. Of course, like all our users, we hate downtime; especially since all of us here at the A-Team are Plurk zealots much like you. Hopefully this quick recap will shed some light on the problems we had related to the downtime and slow service over the prior month and give some guidance on what we’ve done to counter it.

As a summary, these were some of the issues we faced:

• We had servers scattered around our datacenter. This often made it difficult for various servers to talk to each other easily (extra overhead, multiple points of failure, etc.).
• Disk and filesystem space issues.
• MySQL replication issues, database log storage constraints.
• Server migrations and consolidations.

What have we done to rectify these problems?

• We consolidated all our servers into connected racks which lie next to each other: During the January 13 (GMT) downtime we migrated most of our previously scattered servers.
• Enabled more proactive server monitoring. We’ve tuned our notification thresholds and started to monitor a whole slew of new parameters to alert us early so we can quickly fix potential problems before they get out of hand.
• Updated MySQL; optimize our tables; monitor disk usage and purge binary logs as soon as the log space usage reaches a certain threshold.
• Make our cache servers more robust so you’re served content faster without long wait times.
• Kernel tuning to increase network performance.

We’re still continuing to work everyday on improving our infrastructure and managing our growth to keep issues to a bare minimum in the future. Of course with how passionate you guys all are, I know even a few minutes of downtime can seem like an eternity, so when we do hit snags and have prolonged outage windows, we get just as panicky as you, if not much more so.  All that said, we’ve been sailing very smoothly (knock on wood!) and look for a wonderful February with you all!

One of Plurk’s early design philosophy is to create a safe social networking environment where users can protect themselves and have full control over their own privacy setting. This is being reflected in many of our core features. On a micro level, each plurk can be customized so that only certain people can see it, should you ever wish to do so. You can also edit or delete your own plurk. On a higher level, you can also choose who can see your timeline, with 4 different options to choose from.

But sometimes we can only do so much. The gray line between verbal harassment and freedom of speech is thin enough to give us daily headaches when dealing with different situations reported by our users. The best solution seems to be to give our users enough ammo to protect themselves and at the same time, help us police plurkiverse. Here are some of the available options:

How to restrict your timeline so that it’s only viewable to your friends?
You can choose to restrict your timeline so that it is only viewable to you, or your friends, or your friends of friends. Click ‘My Account’ from the top right of your timeline, follow by ‘Privacy’. Choosing the ‘friends only’ option will also prevent people from becoming your fan.

How to hide your date of birth and location?
For extra privacy, you can choose to hide your date of birth and location from the ‘My Profile’ panel. To hide your date of birth, simply choose ‘Month’, ‘Day’, ‘Year’ for each of the drop downs.

To hide your location, un-select the check box that says ‘Show my location to others’.

How to unfollow your annoying friends without them knowing?
Another cool feature that allows you to un-follow your talkative friend’s plurk without actually removing them as friend is the ‘Timeline follow’ feature. From ‘My Friends’ panel, you can see a list of your friends and on the right side of each friend, you can see a couple of toggle buttons. Click on the Timeline Follow button to switch on or off your friend follow status. Both of you will still remain friends and he/she doesn’t even know you have stopped following their plurks . Save the awkward moment for later.

How to block bad plurker?
Sometimes when people gets really, really bad, you might have to use the ultimate weapon – block. Blocked user will not be able to see your timeline or your plurks, or request friendship or become your fan and will remain so until you unblock them. You can block a plurker from a couple of places: by hovering over a nickname in your timeline.

or by going to their profile page dashboard. Look for the block button on top right hand side.