What's up with the N/A ?

One of the more frequent questions about our firefox extension is the N/A status in the outbrain voter at the bottom of the browser:

So here's the story:
outbrain is intended for sorting through the massive amounts of blog posts and news articles hitting your RSS readers daily.

The problem is - how do we enable voting on all those blog posts and articles without adding a whole lot of noise into the system from other URL's? That kind of noise can quickly degrade the quality of recommendations going out to outbrain users... not something we want to happen...

So we decided to start off by enabling the outbrain voter selectively on pages that can easily be identified as being blog posts. We do that by looking for the permalink structure in the URL. Unfortunately, many blogs do not comply with the permalink structure, and so the N/A status appears on way more pages than we'd want it to.

We know this is somewhat annoying (especially for posts that were recommended in the personalized outbrain feed... what's up with that?!...), and are working to resolve this in a way that allows voting on any item you see fit, while keeping the noise level down to a minimum.

Stay tuned!