Those wishing to retain a Spot page on TNH or create one are welcome to do so.  In fact, it is still actively encouraged as a way to deal with the many issues that originally led to teacher ads being scrapped in the Classifieds.  Students seeking out teachers like several things about Spot pages over a Classified ad:

1) There is far more transparency about who the teacher is.  Put yourself in the position of a parent who is considering hiring a teacher.  A classified ad can appear pretty sketchy.  They’d much rather know your name (to cross check on other sites), see if others have used your services (and reviewed you), and have a chance to review you themselves.

2) A permanent presence gives them a place to link to from other sites.  There are hundreds of other Vietnamese websites where parenting, education, and life skills are actively discussed.  English instruction is a popular topic, and if you are particularly good (or bad), you’re going to get discussed there.  If they only have a Classified ad that might be up for a month to link to in those discussions, then there are going to be a lot of dead links in those threads.  Give them a longer lasting destination to link to.

3) Manage your Spot effectively.  With a Spot page, you can provide updated information and photos that give your presence in Hanoi the feel of someone who is doing more than just passing through looking for beer money.  Separate yourself from the sorts of teachers who that does correctly characterize by being active in the management of your page.  TNH offers all language teachers trial Upgrades to even further enhance their presence.  These upgrades can get your teaching Offers appearing next to all the other tutors advertising in the Classifieds and give you a competitive advantage.  If you’re interested in such a free trial, contact us via sales@tnhvietnam.com.

One last note: please use the new section responsibly and with respect for your fellow ad posters.  Please only post in the Classifieds with a single account and make sure your ad is in the correct category.  If you have a Spot page, include a link to it in your ad.  Help students learn more about you by making full use of the tools TNH provides you.

If you have any questions or feedback, please send it to info@tnhvietnam.com.

Good luck.

1) Users can now make one ad per week in any given sub-category.  Previously, we limited users to two total ads per fortnight.  This was done to limit the amount of over-posting (deleting and reposting of ads) and the number of duplicates.  Both issues greatly annoyed site users and led to the section being less usable.

The new limits mean that many different kinds of ads can be posted at any one time with any given account, but with a limit of one per sub-category per week.  If you have changes you need to make to an ad, edit that ad instead of deleting and attempting to repost.  You’ll only be able to repost after one week in that sub-category.

Do not try to repost your ad in a different category to get extra exposure.  Incorrectly categorized ads will be removed and repeat attempts to circumvent posting restrictions may result in your account being shut down.

If you have mistakenly deleted your ad before becoming aware of this policy, contact us at info@tnhvietnam.com and we can reinstate your ad for you to edit.

2) We’ve redefined what will constitute prohibited business activity in the Classifieds section.  The Classifieds section is the most heavily used section of the site.  It is used by a broad range of the community and it has proven to be a very effective resource.  Part of what makes it effective, unlike many other classifieds site serving Vietnam, has been that we’ve diligently kept businesses and business activity out of it.  Our volunteer moderators have gone to great pains to prevent both obviously well-established business from posting there, as well as more informal sorts of profiteering.

For reasons that involve both the nature of the ads being posted and the difficulty that our moderators face, we are now changing this approach a bit.  Ads from any business that posts in the section will still be removed, but ads that involve private individuals will remain even if they involve obvious profiteering.  The established standard will be that any ad that can be tied to an outside business presence (a shop/office, a commercial website, a commercial Facebook page, or a TNH Spot) will be considered a business and prohibited.  Others may post, and, as always, caveat emptor.

If we find that this loosening of the business activity definition results in the section being overrun with spammers and scammers, expect the reins to tighten once again.  For those with legitimate users of the site at heart, use it in a way that respects your fellow site users and notify us if you seen anything amiss by flagging suspect ads.

Feedback is welcome at info@tnhvietnam.com.

Apart from the cosmetic changes we’ve rewritten a large part of the site code that handles URLs, so if you see any problems with missing pages (or any other technical problems related to these changes) please let us know at tech@tnhvietnam.com

It turns out in a code update I made around New Year I had left in some testing code that bypassed password security, meaning that you could login as any user using any password.

I fixed the problem last night and logged out all users as a precaution.

There were two basic classes of exploit associated with this issue:

1) Write – post as another user. I haven’t seen any instances of this, but please let us know if you think it may have happened

2) Read – a malicious user could access another’s account to read their private messages.

Additionally, a malicious user could change their victim’s password. This appears to have happened on at least one occasion. If this has happened to you please let us know, and reset your password through the password reset function.

This is obviously very embarrassing to me, and I apologize for any inconvenience that may have been caused. The irony that this occurred when I made a change to login to make your passwords more secure is not lost on me.

If you have any concerns about this or want more information, please post here or send mail to info@tnhvietnam.com

We’ve had some reports of error messages on login or logout. Some of them might have caused alarm, saying your session had been hijacked. This is likely our fault, but we’d like to hear about it at tech@tnhvietnam.com when you run into problems.

Please also continue to send us reports of any problems you encounter, being sure to tell us what browser you are using.

Thanks,

TNH

Site members who are involved with a lot of things on the site may see a backlog of notifications from the past 7 days. These can be dismissed as they arrive, and will not appear again.

From now on you should be correctly notified when anyone or anything you follow has activity.

I urge you not to make contact with anybody who has sent you a following message like this:

HELLODear how are you today? hope fine and you are in good health.My
nameis Miss Victoria, I am looking for a very nice and loving Friend
thati can share discussion with,then after going through your profile
nowon this site and i pick interest in you, so i will like you to
writeme via my email address(victoria_johnson153@yahoo.co.uk)for my
pictureand further discussion of friendship.New Friend Victoria.

As I mentioned, we have made some changes so that you should no longer receive messages from these annoying people.

Remember also, you can always block somebody from following you. Simply visit your profile (linked from your user name in the header) and select the “followers” tab. From there you can block a follower by clicking the ‘x’ in the corner of their box.

Basically we’ve just made it possible to “follow” most anything on the site, and this is the one standard conduit for indicating your on-going interest in something.

Simply put, stuff that you follow will result in notifications (the number next to the number of pm’s you have) on the site.

If you follow

• a person – you’ll be notified of most anything they do, like review a spot, post a classified, attend an event, join a group
• a spot – you’ll be notified when they have a new event, or when they have a new bizlog post
• an event – you’ll be notified when someone else decides to attend or watch, or when the event is edited
• a question – you’ll be notified when a new answer is posted
• a group – you’ll be notified about new discussions and new members joining

For groups and events the following is implicit – when you join a group or indicate attendance status on an event you’ll automatically be following it. For the others there are buttons to click to follow them, or you can follow spots when reviewing them, and questions when answering.

The accompanying big change with this code push is that notifications are now in a drop down from the header (click the number of new notifications and you’ll see notifications). We’ve also aggregated some types of notification so you won’t see 100 of the same “x answered the question y” notification.

With any change this big we expect there to be some teething problems so, as always, please send your bug reports (with as much detail as possible) to tech@newhanoian.com.

We’re going to make it more like Ask ANH, with:

• optional title for first post
• optional image attached to post
• most recent activity listed first
• no threading
• searchability

If you’ve got something to say about this, now’s the time to do it, while we’re still hot and heavy with grouplogs.

Not surprisingly, given how small the indicator is (think Flash “escape the room” game), most people were unable to locate it.

We just made it easier for you to locate good local info on many cities in Vietnam. Simply mouse over  the city name in the page header and you’ll see a menu of our two Vietnam sites with their associated cities. Basically, from Hoi An North it’s The New Hanoian. Points South are So Saigon. Same great taste in a different color.

Some cities are better-served than others. Hanoi, Saigon, Sapa and Danang have quite a bit of content. We’re relying on you as you move about the country to add new Spots that you think others should know about.

For those of you with iPhones, adding Spots just got easier with our new iPhone apps Hanoi City Companion and Saigon City Companion. See the about section for more details, or visit the iTunes App Store / Android Marketplace.