nexopia

Evolved from the small community site Enternexus.com, created by Timo Ewalds, Nexopia.com is a Canadian website, based in Edmonton and designed primarily for people aged 14 and up (accounts with users that are proven to be under age are deleted), that allows its users to design their own profiles with pictures and interact with each other via private messages, comments and forums. The website used to contain a "Rate Your Picture" feature on users' profiles, but it was taken down from lack of use (less than 1% of users voted on it). The picture rating system also experienced many different ways of cheating. At first, the picture rating was on a users profile itself, but because of various problems with up-voting and down-voting, it was made random. Once it was made random, the amount of use the feature received dropped to well below 1% of the sites population.

Coding

The whole site is custom code written since early 2002 by the CEO. Most has been rewritten or updated in the past four years. Only in October 2005 did the site employ additional programmers to help maintain and grow the site.

Members

Though users from all around the world can now be found on the site, over 95% of its users are Canadian and the site has become quite popular in western Canada. With over 10,600,000,000 hits, over 841,000 member accounts, and over 300,000 Active Users.

It's impossible however to know if each account corresponds to an individual person, and there is no standardized system for auditing claims of membership levels of different online communities. Often, a person will create multiple accounts, usually to change usernames, but occasionally to take on different personas. Additionally, a web site can't tell if two accounts are of the same person, or two people sharing a computer.

many tools to help protect the users. No nudity, racism, violence or gore are allowed in any of the forums or profiles, and all profile pictures are checked by moderators for content before being allowed up on a users page. The rule of thumb used by picture and content moderators is that if it is not allowed in public, it is not allowed on the site. Nexopia has also changed its rules regarding official user pictures. If the picture can be in any way perceived as sexually explicit, or suggestive, it will not be allowed on a users page.Of course though, moderators don't catch everything, and the site does contain sexually suggestive images.

Forums

The forum system, among other things, have been custom designed to fit the large number of users. The forums include many official nexopia forums, some regarding the website's functionality, while others are themed towards topics such as music or transportation, and some, such as User Topics, Teens, and Attention Seekers are non-specific to topic.

Aside from official forums, nexopia plus users have the option of creating their own forums, which any user (if the owner of the forum chooses) can participate in.

Nexopia Plus

Nexopia also has an optional premium service, used to keep the site up and running. Nexopia Plus gives users extra features, such as an advanced user search, the ability to create a forum along with a custom forum rank, the ability to customize the colors of their profile, ability to choose whether or not to have iFrames in layouts and the elimination of ads. Also, With Nexopia Plus, users can see who has visited their profile,and can have up to 12 pictures on their profile, whereas members without Nexopia Plus can only have up to 8 pictures on their profile. Users can also be one of the randomly generated profiles to be on the front page in the "Plus Spotlight" Section, where an image from the chosen users profile, and a link to the users profile profile is shown. Other features included with Plus include an advanced user gallery (Regular users have galleries, but are limited to 20 pictures.) File Storage, which eliminates the need for sites like photobucket. Also, Plus users receive priority picture moderation, and customisation features for their profiles. In regards to what percentage of the site actually has Nexopia Plus memberships is left to speculation, as the administration will not release this information. ^[1]

The site charges users a fee for additional features that are generally free on similar websites.

The site has more technical difficulties than most other sites like it, the biggest being the pictures of the user profiles. These usually will not load and require multiple reload attempts. This in itself brings up another issue: refreshing the site will default you back to the main page instead of refreshing whatever page you were viewing.

References

1. ^ /National "Net holds dark hints on slayings: Pair accused in deaths of Alberta family posted messages on notorious websites"], The Globe and Mail, April 26, 2006.

See also

• List of social networking websites

External links

• Nexopia Website
• Nexopia Information on Big-Boards.com
  • Nexopia Statistics on Big-Boards.com