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The new Propeller.com is a social news portal programmed by you—the audience! All of the stories on Propeller are submitted and voted on by our members. We also have a Propeller web browser.
We have a team of full-time "Propeller Anchors" in our newsroom
that monitor the site 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These anchors
do a number of things to keep the Propeller experience clean and
compelling. First, they remove spam (we all hate spam). Secondly, they
select the stories in "Propeller Anchors recommend..." box at the top
of the page. Finally, they do followup journalism on many of the
stories you vote to the Home Page and create original video on topics they feel you would enjoy. You can see their comments in the
yellow "Propeller Anchor Commentary" box. Stories with Anchor
commentary are noted with an "Anchor" 
on
the top level of the site.
In addition to the Anchors, we also have a team of part-time Scouts, who submit stories of interest to Propeller, help in the endeavor to remove all spam from Propeller, redirect stories breaking the middle-man rule (see below) to their original source, and generally serve as leaders in the social news space.
We also have the Propeller Development team working full time to improve the site by adding new features and fine-tuning existing features.
Of course, last but not least, we have our Propeller members. As a member of Propeller, you have the power to make your voice heard and to help create a diverse and effective social news experience. Despite our best efforts, we cannot keep the site as interesting and filled with life on our own as we can when you are actively participating in the Propeller experience. Don't hesitate to report spam or any abusive comments to us so that we can make the Propeller experience a pleasant one for everyone.
The entire Propeller team—the Anchors, the Scouts, and the Developers—are here to serve our member community. Please feel free to contact any of us via site mail with any ideas, questions, or concerns you may have.
The stories making it to the Home Page are a cross-section of the most popular stories on Propeller as determined by votes and comments from our members. The Home Page consists of a list of 25 stories. These 25 stories consist of 2 stories from each of the top 10 most popular channels and 1 story from each of the next 5 most popular channels. These stories are all individually ranked via an algorithm based on the number of votes and comments that a post has received. The channels themselves are ranked based on the number of high-ranking stories and traffic they receive. As a result, the Home Page experience is a diverse news experience that changes often throughout the day, based on the interests of our readers.
Stories submitted to each of our channels are purely ranked based on an algorithm that gives each of our member-submitted stories a score based on the number of votes on the post, the number of comments on the post, and the age of the post.
Tags are descriptive words you should add to your submissions to make them easier for others to find. For example, a story about a new iPod might have the followings tags: Apple, iPod, mp3, Steve Jobs. The stories listed on tag pages are ranked in the same way as they are on the channel pages.
Yes. The portal is free to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
You don't have to become a member to read the stories on the site, however if you would like to vote for, comment on, or submit stories you need to register. Registration takes less than a minute and we'll never share your email with anyone.
Another major benefit of registration is that you can "add friends" and watch what stories they vote for, comment on, and submit—like a shared reading list.
If you're having any problems with logging in please reply to any email that you've received from us in the past and the entire team will receive your message.
In order to ensure that there are not multiple duplicates of the same story, it is important that Propeller community members always link to the original source of a story. Whenever the Propeller Anchor team spots a story that is not linked to the original source, we will change the link and leave a note in Anchor Commentary noting the change.
For example, if you have posted an AOL UnCut Video, YouTube or Google Video video to your personal blog and you wish to submit the story to Propeller, unless your blog post presents substantial analysis or discussion of the video, you should link directly to the source video.
This same rule should apply to any stories—regardless of whether they are audio, video, pictures, or text—that you submit to Propeller. We want to avoid cluttering the system with rehashed stories, and we appreciate your help in this matter.
In order to prevent duplicates, we permanently ban sites like TinyURL.com or other URL aliasing services online. We also permanently ban URLs from sites that clearly violate our Terms of Use (this includes links to pornography, spam sites, sites which are abusive, or sites that promote crimes).
If sites are reported by users or our anti-spamming algorithms for spamming the system with stories, we place a temporary ban on the site while we investigate and as a warning to the possible spammers. If there is a repeat second offense the ban will be reinitiated and extended. If the site has been reported and temporarily banned multiple times or shows evidence of actual spamming tactics, Propeller will ban the URL permanently.
You're more likely than not familiar with spam from email. It's unwanted content that is often trying to sell you something. Besides eliminating actual spam stories in the system when they are reported by Propeller members and our anti-spamming algorithms, the Anchor team watches for spamming behavior.
For example, if a group of individuals (or a single individual registering multiple Propeller member accounts) only post links to sites with which they are affiliated (more likely than not profiting from any traffic coming to that site) and only vote and comment on stories with which they are affiliated and all these actions are clearly a coordinated effort to push the stories to the Propeller Home Page, these individuals would clearly be trying to game the system and spamming Propeller with their stories.
That being said, if you and your friends have similar interests and tend to vote on the same stories or on each other's stories, but this clearly isn't done as a concerted effort, then that would qualify as normal social behavior, which we not only approve of, but encourage.
If you want to make sure that you aren't setting off either community of computer alarms, we recommend that you participate fully in our community, submit stories from multiple sources, avoid group voting, and clearly announce when you submit stories with which you are affiliated.
Propeller is a news site, so newsworthiness is something to consider when submitting stories to Propeller. We reserve the right to close stories that:
1. Are old news.
2. Are non-html files that do not qualify as news (this includes direct links to executable programs, screen-savers, PDFs, Word Documents, Excel Documents, etc).
3. Are in any way deceptive to our readers (this includes spam-heavy websites that place a full slot of advertisements above the fold, forcing our members to scroll down to read the real content on the site, or blogs that disguise links to advertisements in the text of their posts).
4. Are press releases. For example: A story about Apple Computer's newest product by Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal is news. A press release from Apple about the new product is not news. A blog post on Engadget about the press release that discusses it, adding additional information and questioning how good the product will be, is news.
5. Detail ways to hack or otherwise exploit our site. For security reasons, any such stories will be closed. Please message us directly with any vulnerabilities or bugs you think you may have discovered.
You must be a registered member of Propeller.com to upload videos. Membership is free.
Provided your videos do not violate our Propeller Video Standards or the overall Propeller Terms of Use, any video you submit will remain on Propeller indefinitely.
There is no time limit on your videos, but all videos must be 150MB or smaller and either a .mpg, .mpeg, .mov, .avi, .mp4, .wmv *, or .m4v file. There is no limit on the number of videos you can upload.
* Currently, Propeller Video only supports the wmv1 and wmv2 formats, not wmv3. Althought the filenames may all end in .wmv, the wmv1 format was used Windows Media Video V7, wmv2 by Windows Media Video V8, and wmv3 files are those that were encoded by Windows Media Video 9 Series. If you upload a .wmv file that uses the wmv3 format, you will most likely be shown an error message like "Could not convert video to Flash Video format (Unsupported codec for input stream #0.1); video may be malformed, incomplete, or in an unknown format."
If you have uploaded a video that you wish to remove you can message one of the Propeller Anchors and request that it be removed. According to our Propeller Video Standards, however, Propeller is not required to take any action unless the video violates those standards or our Propeller Terms of Use.
Your videos will be displayed in Flash Video and the original version of the file will be available for download, as will a version formatted for the iPod.
This varies depending upon your connection speed.
You can either link to the Propeller story containing the video or you can click on one of the "Put it on your site!" links underneath the video to get the necessary code to post the video directly to your site. Example:
All videos uploaded must abide by both our Propeller Terms of Use and our Propeller Video Standards where all of our restrictions are outlined in detail, including our policy on copyright infringement.
There is a "report" button for each Propeller story/video. You may also send a message to any Propeller Anchor, drawing his/her attention to a video that violates our Propeller Video Standards. Once an infringing video is reported, it is listed in a reported list for the Anchors. Please understand that it may take some time to take action against a video that is reported. If a video you have reported is still up after 24 hours have passed, please message the Anchors directly to make sure that the report was received or to find out why action was not taken.
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