App updated with improvements

We have updated the backend for the app by ensuring that users who frequently read news through our app get the freshest articles. There was an issue with only old articles bein shown after the first page which has been fixed now. 

Anonymous login enabled for app

A lot of users don't want to go through our social login process before trying out our application. Hence, we have enabled an anonymous login option which gives users a taste of our app without going through the login process first. 

Massive outage fixed

Our offshore team were working since last night to identify and fix the login issue on the app. Turned out it was happening because a certificate expired. This problem has been fixed currently.

Sections area fixed

After spending even more time on this issue. It has been completely fixed now. A migration process for older data is underway and should get finished soon. Thanks for your patience on this.

More improvements to news delivery

We have done some major improvements to our news delivery service today. You should be seeing a lot more new news articles from this time onwards.

Fixed issue where new articles were not going into your inboxes

I found that since March 1st 2014, new articles were not going into your inboxes. That issue has been fixed now and a limited number of articles you may have missed in the meantime are being added to your inboxes right now.

Sections page should run faster now...

We are pushing out an update and migrating user data as well, which should resolve the issue for all users soon.

Update being rolled out tonight

Tonight we will roll out an update making the "sections" page faster and based on articles in your "inbox" rather than just general articles for a section.

We are also planning out an app update on iOS which should let you log-in without going through any of the social login mechanisms.

Yes we know the sections page is slow

We are currently working on a long term solution to fix the slowness in this page as well as make it more personalized.

Minor bug fixes posted to site

We found some bugs in the app which has been fixed as of now. The issue where some pages would not load new articles has been fixed.

Site Update Tonight

The site will be updated to show a categories section instead of real-time news to make it more easier to discover interesting content. I know right now it is currently boring to read some of the news especially because nothing much is happening. We are exploring ways to surface interesting content from our extensive database in an easier manner. Real-time news will still be there, but it will be inside the "More" area. We could show articles based on your preferences which we glean from your reading habits - however we have shied away from doing that so far because by the very nature of the medium, you might be very interested in reading a news article which is much different from your normal reading habits. This is not like listening to music or reading a book where you like a certain kind of content. Tomorrow, a totally new thing might come out there and it may be outside your current preferences or likings.

Categories are better than news sources because they aggregate news from different sources. We might replace the Today section with Sources, so you can dig into your favorite site in particular. However note that your inboxes are separate only for popular and real-time news - this means that other sections can show you the same stuff the next day if nothing much has changed. It is only within the popular and real-time news which acts as inboxes - you read the news - it goes away forever.

This may not be such a bad thing because the other pages would let you come back and see an article later as well. There are so many things which can be done to the site experience, we are constantly thinking of ways to improve the overall experience. Feel free to connect with us on our Facebook page and leave comments, suggestions and feedback.

All Issues resolved as of now

After working relentlessly over the past few nights, we have finally fixed the frustrating issue where new articles were not getting loaded when you used the load more articles button. Next we will be working on adding more functionality like categories and search in the new interface.

Remember, we are constantly testing and updating the app so we know about the issues and we are fixing them asap.

Fixing site outage issue - All Issues resolved as of now

We detected a site outage today evening. We are currently working on fixing it ASAP.

[Update] Outage is fixed.

Improvements underway

We are working on improvements to search and categories. This will be in place in the next few weeks.

Data Migration Completed

The data migration has been completed. You will notice the site is faster and will always show the latest articles first now. There will be one more change coming in the next few days wherein the default news page will currently show the latest popular articles first. 

As of right now, all systems are up and running fine.

Data migration in progress...

Users please note that a long running data migration is running in the background currently. Expect some slowness when this is in progress. This will take a while to complete.

[Update] There was a problem with the migration. We are re-running it, to fix the issue. This should get done in the next few hours. You will see significant difference on our pages once this is done.

Site being updated...

I am fixing some long standing issues with the site today. The daily news page and the category news page should work better now. You will notice significant speed and stability improvements in the site. The best is yet to come...

Site being updated...

The site is being updated. We are trying to reach the sweet spot between performance, availability and cost. Just to note - from now onwards, site updates will not cause any outage of the service.

More changes rolling out tonight

Don't be surprised to see many changes to the site making it easier to use, faster and removing unwanted stuff which is done automatically behind the scenes now.

Some changes to the site

Mark Read buttons have been changed to Hide buttons - because you don't need to click on them anymore to mark articles as read. Just keep going forward and the articles will be marked as read automatically within 2 hours.

Improved read item tracking without manual button click

Earlier items would be marked as read only if you used the mark read button. Yesterday, we pushed out an update - after this - one hour after you have downloaded articles, whether you marked them read or not, they will be marked as read.

This should reduce the frustrating behavior of articles coming up again and again all the time.

Next: We plan to improve the display of duplicate articles in the system.

Updates rolled out yesterday

We rolled out some updates yesterday to fix some issues where you keep seeing articles you have already read. Expect more but fixes I'm the coming days.