After the recent release, some of you asked for clarifications, particularly about hotlinking. We will try to explain a bit more what these recent changes means for you.

Hot-linking

By "hot-linking" we mean uploading files on your MyOpera files section and then making links to them from other external sites. Of course, there's nothing wrong with this. It's just that spammers abuse by creating hundreds of fake accounts (even by hand!), uploading their crazy stuff and then doing their business, sucking bandwidth.

Last release changes

For this release (that went live on April 9th), there were no changes in the hotlinking policy, as strange it might seem. We currently don't allow hotlinking of:

• videos
• executables
• rar/zip/... archives

Some of you were wondering why you can't upload and/or hotlink photos. Please note that:

• you can publish/upload your photos or MP3 files on MyOpera.
• you can hotlink them!
• we are not going to punish anyone! This is not a punishment community, it's a sharing community...

When someone tries to hotlink an existing video file (for instance) stored on MyOpera to an external site, we simply avoid serving the file. Nothing more than that.

Uploading videos

Uploading of videos has been blocked. But this is really a minor change, since if you tried to upload a video to your "Files" section and then tried to hotlink it from other sites, it wouldn't work. As some of you reported, existing videos are still served within MyOpera, and this is the intended behaviour.

The reason for blocking upload of videos is mostly abuse.

We are working on solutions for this.

Uploading MP3s

Some users thought that we also blocked MP3 files. Unfortunately, this is a bug in the new file upload section. We are working on it. It seems that some MP3 files are not recognized as such. By the time this is published, we hope to have this fixed.

Embedding

We all like to have YouTube videos on our blog posts:

This is only a documentation bug. Will be fixed soon.

In the end

Speak with us, so we know your concerns, because in the end, the My Opera Community is yours, be nice to it!

Changelog

• Group members are able to post comments in blogs again, members are sorted by latest updated status, and access rights for group photo albums has been fixed.
• Long status messages no longer break "Status updates" in the sidebar.
• There has been some RSS fixes in general.
• Some fixes to notifications/news and other elements containing parts of text, so it no longer truncates in the middle of HTML code (which resulted in broken page layout).
• Quick quoting on My Opera now properly maintain line breaks in Opera (reported by fearphage).
• Uploading language files should work again.
• There should no longer be empty content in "Latest posts" in the forums.
• Pictures should no longer get randomly renamed when uploaded.
• User validation does not return a 404 upon email verification. If you have already verified, you should not get a 'verification key not found' error anymore as well.
• Avatars from 'my friends latest posts' is correctly displayed in the forums again.
• We've limited the amount of private messages (PMs) a user can send within a certain period of time (to prevent scam spammers sending out hundreds of PMs within a short period of time). The threshold is now set to 50 per day.
• You can now upload files when writing new blog posts again, and it should no longer result in a catastrophically FAIL! In other words; we've fixed it.
• New themes have been added:

L'Amour

Winner

Personal

Flower Explosion

Future City

• These are available from "Design" in your account setttings ("My page" -> "Account" -> "Design").

There are also a lot of under-the-hood fixes which have no visually appearance, but part of our quest for world domination of overall community optimization.

Opera Mini 4

Good news, everyone! Opera Mini 4 has hit the street, so make sure to update your phone today and share the good news with your friends!

Opera Mini brings the full Web to almost every mobile phone. It automatically reduces the size of the transferred pages, so Web sites load faster while reducing the cost of surfing. Also, Opera Mini 4 supports Opera Link. Opera Link is a new platform for synchronizing your bookmarks and speed dial across any device that runs an Opera browser - or any browser that can access My Opera.

The Opera Mini team blog has also been updated.

Want to chat and share your thoughts? Then head over to our IRC channel #operamini.

If you want to help spread the word, then digg it.

We also urge you to head over to Dev Opera and read the article written by Chris Mills. A list of new articles are there to help you (as developers and designers) to find your way around developing web sites that give a good user experience in Opera Mini 4.

Opera Mini 4 Banners

Want to decorate your blog with a brand new Opera Mini 4 themed banner? Simply click a banner of your choosing and follow the installation instructions.

Opera Mini Blog Theme

If our blog banners doesn't fulfill your Mini needs today, then check out this cool Opera Mini blog theme by community rock star Furie. Installation instructions are available here. Thanks a bunch for creating it Furie! Keep up the good work.

Get in touch

For a limited amount of time after the November 7th release of Opera Mini 4, we will be opening 4 instant messenger accounts for you to contact us if you have any questions or feedback you'd like to share.

You can find us on Windows Live Messenger (aka MSN Messenger) here: operasoftware@hotmail.com and operaminibeta@hotmail.com

(Please note: these email addresses are set up for IM only. Please do not send regular email to these addresses, as they are not activated for regular email.)

You can also find us on AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) here: operamini123 and operamini321

Our lines will be open from 11:00 GMT on November 7th until 23:00 GMT on November 8th.