I debated about even putting this into a column about tips and tricks. It is, certainly, a tip about a trick. It is not, however, completely positive. Instead, all it can be is a description of something that you can do within the StumbleUpon system that is not directly available from a menu. This particular thing, however, does not seem to do anybody much good.

Surely, you have been Stumbled onto a page which says at the top that the page was discovered by Someone. That says, of course, that the system does not know by whom that page was found. How the heck can that happen? If the page was discovered, somebody had to do it, right?

Well, no, not really. The method by which this occurs is not really very intuitive. It took us a bit of thought to figure it out, but we finally did. Here is the way that you, too, can discover a page that winds up without your name on it.

1. Find an undiscovered page.
2. Send that page to a friend using the “Send To” function in the toolbar.
3. There is no step 3.

How does this work? Although this is just a guess, the SU system has to keep track of the page involved in the “Send To” operation in some way. It seems to do that by registering the page, which automatically places that page in the system with no known discoverer. Generally, there is also no topic assigned, either, although this does not always appear to be true. Instead, the entry at the top of the review page says something like “Someone discovered this. The topic is unknown.”

There is not real advantage to this method of discovery, except to discover and put into the system a page that you do not want to take credit for. We have done a couple of tests, and a page discovered in this manner seems to perform less well than one discovered by conventional means. That is to say, it is apparently not displayed to as many Stumblers, and therefore stands less of a chance of being reviewed or thumbed up.

Well, now at least you know how that happens. Some people that I mentioned it to were sort of impressed that it could happen at all. But that’s all this trick has to offer. We’ll try to do better next time