BBC has an alarming article about how Brazil’s amazon rainforest is disappearing at a rapid clip, due to that country’s industrialization.

It attributes the deforestation to high commodity prices that are encouraging farmers to clear trees to plant more crops.

Its a difficult, non-cut and dry case. I have sympathy for farmers that are just trying to provide for their family, yet the rainforest is such a valuable natural resource that is not easy to replace.

The number is staggering. Something like thousands of square miles in the last few months. While this site may be saving a drop in the bucket compared to the magnitude of deforestation mentioned in this article, it is still a drop.

Actually, its a square foot at a time.

Thanks to all of our visitors for submitting questions, answering questions and telling other people about One Square Foot.org

One suggestion we had was to add some decoration on the page. Since I don’t know the first thing about design, I didn’t know what to do, but since we’re saving rainforest, I thought it fitting that I made some leaves to make things pretty. So this is my first attempt in doing so. Yeah, I know. It’s laughable. But I tried, and that’s what matters, right? Oh well.

Other changes… yeah, they’re all on the admin side. Tweaking the viewing/editing/approving questions and such. Regrettably, the user does not get to see this. However! However, eventually, everyone will see it! But not now. We’re still under development. The way in which everyone will see it will be a surprise. I guess our users will have to sit tight until that day…

Money! We’re collecting it to save the rainforest! But we are still struggling and making adjustments. Currently, we are thinking of ways of not going bankrupt, such as adding more banners to the page and expanding our question content for better ad relevancy. Some rocky roads are ahead. Thanks to all of our users who have continued to stick with us through hard times. Your encouragement and support help us stay alive!

Thanks everyone for your words of encouragement and for offering great suggestions!

We thought long and hard about how we could fix this, and how quickly we could get back up and running. We think we have a good first approximation of a solution so less than 24 hours later, we are back in business!

Its going to need tweaking as we go, but hopefully it will let us get the site back up now instead of waiting for that perfect fix and keep the site down.

Basically it boils down to a few things:

1. Financials: Many of you rightly mentioned that some of you guys are not bots. Just really dedicated folks out to save the rainforest! While we do have a few bots, its not the only reason we suddenly found our rainforest commitments outstripping the ad payments coming in.

   A big problem is that we sorely overestimated the ad revenue coming in and we need to re-adjust the payout rate of rainforest acreage. That means we had very little padding going in and had to suddenly shut down to avoid not being able to meet our rainforest protection commitments due to revenue/protection mismatch.

   While we would love to give out 1/4 of a foot per question right, it seems like we need to back off of that and go at 1/9 of a foot per question.Bottom line, while this means more answers per sq ft protected. Not ideal, but this will help us keep our doors open, and deal w/ any uncertainties like bots w/o shutting things down suddenly. We figure its better to go on than to just shut this thing down.

   If you’re an ad optimization expert (nay even semi-decent) we’d love to get your help to improve the ad numbers.

2. Limits per user. We’ve also stuck in a check in the system to put a daily upper bound on how many sq ft you can save. After that, you won’t be able to save any more for 24 hours. Don’t worry though, we heard you. The bound is extremely high–high enough that you willnever h it it unless you can pretty much answer questions without resting, eating or going to the bathroom. If you hit it and you aren’t a bot, you should get a prize.
3. Captchas. Eventually we may go the captcha route. I’m not a big fan of captchas (is that warped letter an f or a t?) so I hope we can avoid it, but we will keep our options open and remain flexible.

Thanks for bearing with us as we adapt to these new circumstances and find the sweet spot of optimal rainforest saving. Thanks also for using the site. You keep us going!

So I did some analysis and it looks like many bots are running rampant on the site and automatically saving rainforest.

This is almost an ingenious idea if it wasn’t for the fact that the ads on the site support how we purchase the rainforest. With bots, we don’t get ad revenue and therefore we can’t go and purchase the rainforest land.

Although it pains us to do this, we will have to put onesquarefoot.org on a temporary hiatus for a little while until we figure out how to deal w/ this botting, and to clean out the bots from the current rainforest totals. (you are most likely a bot if you’ve answered every question at least 4 times, for example)

I really appreciate all of the users and I’m sorry that we have to do this. We will keep the quiz functionality still online for people that want to play the quiz.

We hope to be back soon with a solution to solving this problem.

Thanks to some great submitters, our question size has doubled to almost 200 questions!

Do you know?

What shape the Greeks considered to be perfect? Find out here! (submitted by anonymous)

What city has the largest urban bat population? Find out here! (submitted by me)

[edit]: What animal organisms other than humans use fungus as an antibiotic? Find out here! (submitted by Axel Hållén)

What the largest living carnivore is? (not what you think) Find out here! (submitted by me)

Which president created the Environmental Protection Agency? Find out here! (submitted by Zack)

So many interesting things I never knew!

Wow. Since Lloyd profiled onesquarefoot.org on Treehugger.com we have had a ton of visitors. Ton, in this case, is 20 times more than we’ve ever had since the site started!

Thanks to the Treehugger community for playing and thanks to many of you for submitting new trivia questions.

As I type this we are at 4996 sq ft. Just 4 more ft until we hit 5,000!

Stuck in a few changes to the stats page today. The default map now shows a street next to Rockerfeller center, which is slightly improved over the previous picture of my cousin’s neighborhood. That pic was nice but it didn’t offer much in the sense of scale.

This new picture has alot of details like cars and people so it offers a better sense of how big that “total amount of rainforest” square is.

Below the map are a few timescales so you can see how the square looked a week ago and a month ago.

Clicking through to see how it looked in the past really illustrates how far we’ve come in a relatively short time. A few weeks ago, the site did not exist. It wasn’t even an idea. As I write this, people from as far away as Korea and India have answered trivia questions to help set aside rainforest one square foot at a time.

Sketchy guy N.

Ah, so after many hours toiling away at code, I am finished! I am the other guy behind this project, and tonight I added some mundane cool features such as being able to list yourself as the submitter of a question and making that detail appear when someone answers that question! Easier said than done though, especially since I don’t have much experience building websites. I also added some (friendly? threatening?) tips on submitting good questions (part of the reason for this is that some answers were too long … and it drove me insane trying to position the new information to appear in the answer box).

There were some other back-end functions I updated with the database and the table row positioning in the details panel and what it does when you don’t give it a question number and that flash thing that comes up when you submit a question blah blah blah.

Something else we’ve been struggling with (and was an issue this time around, too) is cross-browser compatibility. We primarily use Firefox to view and tweak our pages, but we were dismayed to find that other browsers made our site look like total crap. It took us a couple hours to sort out and fix the problems we could see. The thing is, we’ll have to continue to check up on it after every update so that we don’t have boxes and text in random places. Quite frustrating, if you ask me.

In other news, we got our first big hit! By chance, we attracted the attention of TreeHugger. That’s like, crazy! Actually, we just got the email today, and my cousin and I have yet to discuss this and put together a reply email about our background and how we’re buying the rainforest. And we definitely have to shape up the site. It looks fine (maybe?) and it’s usable, but I know we can do better. It can look better (although I don’t know how …it just can …although I fear it will be a lot of work), and it can have more features like a link at the bottom of the questions so people can copy it and send it to a friend if they think it’s cool. Anyway, I think I will go dance around now, before I fully realize the site needs some hardcore work done on it.

-sketchy guy k

Hi.

So my cousin and I got together over winter break and instead of sitting around and being a bum, like we usually do, we thought we’d do something useful with our lives. Thats how we came up w/ OneSquareFoot.org.

Its a site where you answer trivia questions (and submit more if you are so inclined) and when you get 4 answers correct, we set aside a square foot of rainforest for conservation!

The way it works is simple. We run ads at the bottom of the screen and they sponsor the rainforest tracts that we buy (one acre at a time) on your behalf. You learn interesting world facts, and at the same time, help us conserve natural habitat!

We’re pretty excited about this venture and look forward to hearing from people. Its a small project that we’ve had alot of fun doing and we hope you find it interesting.

We’ll update this blog as we improve the site and add new features.