Busy busy WOT

Between new users, new features, and new updates, WOT has been busy as ever, and you may not have even known it. This article explores the depths of WOT's been happening with WOT.

Reading the title or description, some of you may be thinking, Busy WOT? How is WOT busy? While others may completely understand. Those of you not actively involved in the forum may not know all that WOT has been dishing out lately. A new invite a friend feature, an enhanced scorecard, the WOT Publicity and Scambuster Awards, a WOT twitter, interviews, add-on updates, and perhaps their biggest, and best news:Millions of new users.

That's right, millions of new users. In two months, WOT has gone from 2 million, to four million downloads. A remarkable increase, especially in such a short period of time. New forum users have been popping up, and hundreds of thousands of new comments and ratings have been made.

Now, what about those other updates mentioned? What are they?

The invite a friend feature may be the next most important change. Originally, all you could do was send a WOT rating to a friend. Now, you can send an email to pals, with a pre-made description of WOT included, along with a personal message of your own. Best of all, it also increases your activity score.

The next change:The scorecard. First off, in a very recent addition, you can now disagree with comments. Many comments, including several on the WOT scorecard, were not very truthful. Now, the number by comments, that before could only be increased, can now be decreased. The number starts at one when you make a comment. If enough people disagree with it so that it is a negative number, the category they chose to make their comment in, isn't displayed at the top of the scorecard, with the other categories having numbers next to them.
Having the number also gives you an idea of how credible the comment is. A comment with -30, is less likely to be accurate than one with positive 30.
In a not as recent change, WOT also added several links to the scorecard, as well as adding the category "good site" Now the scorecard also offers links to a website's wiki, as well as a change to the website's statistics link. Instead of Alexa, the past service they used, the statistics page now links to Compete, a similar service, with more features.

The last change I want to talk about is the WOT Publicity, Scam Buster, and Top Member Awards. These are badges put on your profile, given to members who have given their time, and effort to help keep people safe on the web. The WOT Publicity award, is awarded to those who have kept people safe, by helping to popularize WOT, through blogs, videos, etc.
The WOT Scam Buster award is for those who own websites that work to stop malware, or have reported malicious websites to WOT users and staff.
Finally, the WOT Top Member award is for those who have actively given their time and knowledge to fellow WOT users, on the WOT forum, and in scorecard comments. You can see who won these awards on the WOT Blog, or find more information on them in this post.

The current project WOT is busy with, seems to be WOT 4.0. They have announced that they are improving the warning screen, however that is the only information publicly available. Many suggestions have been made, and everyone is eager to see which have been included.
A possible side project, may be releasing the sale of WOT merchandise, perhaps stickers, similar to Firefox's online store. This was just a possibility, however, mentioned in a previous forum post. We'll have to wait and see if it ends up being developed.

In addition to all of these, there still have been, and still are plenty of other changes going on, however I can only say so much in one post. Here's a quick overview of some of them:
The WOT company twitter was just released.
WOT's CEO was recently had an interview with the webmaster of firefoxfacts.com.
If you read the last post, you also know about the fairly recent WOT Logo Contest. That Logo will be used during Valentines Day.
WOT has added its features to several new websites, including Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and the search engine, Yandex.
WOT has welcomed several new partners, including TRUSTe, Cloudreight, and Information Avenue.
And, last but not least, WOT has recently had to make many add-on updates for compatibly reasons, to work for Firefox Updates, Internet Explorer 8's beta releases, and more. Once Google chrome releases the availability of add-ons, WOT may also be made compatible for that. (Aka MORE work)

Some additions made by WOT's users, included the WOT Google Group 2.0, releasing this blog, a WOT Custom Search, a WOT Wiki, and more.

As you can see, although you may not have known it, a lot has been going on relating to WOT. The WOT staff deserves more credit than they're getting. We have a new challenge for WOT users. In your profile, you can create a signature, or a message displayed after all comments, posts, etc. The challenge is to include in your signature something mentioning WOT. It can be as simple as saying I love WOT, or as much as thanking the WOT staff.
Do your part, and show your support for WOT!