Snipplr: How to Annoy Your Site Users

Update: Snipplr now has a new owner so these issues should be ironed out very soon, I’ve written a new blog post here.

I feel quite sad I’m having to write this post but it’s been a long time coming. I’ve been a big fan of Snipplr.com, having been using it for over 4 years it’s become an essential part of my daily development process; I even mentioned it a few months ago in a recent blog post ‘Useful Websites for a Front-end Web Developer‘. Lately a few things have changed on Snipplr for the worse.

My first annoyance is the amount of spam posts and comments the site gets; now I understand it isn’t Snipplr’s fault that they are a target for spammers but they don’t seem to be doing anything about it. The sign-up process obviously isn’t strong enough to stop the spam bots getting in, so have a rethink and change that. I can’t tell you the number of hours I’ve spent pressing the “Report this snippet” link on spam posts; recently I’ve just given up. Unfortunately you can’t report comment spam and in the last week I’ve had an influx of spam on quite a few of my snippets. Not good!

Now spam, okay it’s annoying but I can live with it as all I want to do was get to my code snippets. The final nail in Snipplrs coffin for me is all the new advertisment banners they’ve recently added. There are now so many it’s actually effecting the usability of the site!

I understand it may be costing money to run the site as it is quite popular, but shoving banners down your users throats isn’t the best idea if you want to keep them using the site. They will just go elsewhere, and thats exactly what I’m doing. In the Snipplr setting you will find an export function, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment so it could be a long copy / paste job… bugger.

A couple of alternatives I’m trying at the moment are Snipt and DZone Snippets, I haven’t decided on which one I prefer yet, but they both look promising.