Why You Should Never Cancel a StumbleUpon Discovery
StumbleUpon is a great way to discover new websites that appeal to you and share the ones you find interesting with your friends and the rest of the StumbleUpon community.
When a you choose to rate a page (thumb it up or thumb it down) that has not been previously discovered, a window will pop up prompting you to choose a category, add some tags, and write a review about the page. Sometimes you will be in a hurry and won’t want to take the time to write a review about the page nor do any of the other steps, and so you click the cancel button, BIG mistake.
Rather than doing the website owner a favor by submitting his award winning article, you make his article lose out on hundreds or even thousands of potential visitors. I’m sure that you have occasionally seen this on a review page of a StumbleUpon submission: Someone discovered this in ?category?. This is what happens when you click the cancel button in the middle of a discovery, StumbleUpon files it under an irrelevant category and doesn’t say who submitted it. This is actually a bug that should have been fixed by the StumbleUpon team long ago, but it seems that it hasn’t caught their attention yet.
No matter how many thumbs up and positive reviews that submission gets, it will eventually be lost with tons of other submissions not related to its chosen category. Maybe you wanted to thumb up “The Top 100 Firefox Addons” article on Lifehacker but hit cancel when the discovery window popped up, thus causing StumbleUpon to file it under the “Gardening” category and making it loose out on tons of traffic.
This method can also be used to harm extremely popular blogs by submitting their articles to non-related categories, but don’t say you heard this from me 
By the way, reporting the story for being under an invalid category will usually return no results, I’ve tried it several times and the only thing I ended up with is a lot of valuable time wasted.
One of my recent articles – 101 things to do when you have no Internet – got a huge traffic spike from StumbleUpon even though I hit cancel while submitting it. It was placed in the “Journalism” category when it was clearly supposed to be in the “Internet” category.
The first few days it started getting an average of 5,000 uniques per day, but after I contacted the StumbleUpon team and asked them to change its category to “Internet”, traffic numbers exploded and I got over 20,000 unique visitors in one day. I’m not trying to impress you with the statistics (OK, maybe just a little 
), but I’m trying to show you what a big difference the category of a submission can make.
Here’s my tip for you, next time you write an awesome post and expect it to get a lot of traffic, Stumble it yourself using the correct categories and tags, you won’t regret it.
To be honest, I’ve canceled a few submissions over my time Stumbling, but know that me and you know the damage that can cause, we should never hit cancel ever again. Ah well, all the best for next time 
Oh yeah, the StumbleUpon team didn’t change my article’s category because I reported it using their special link, they did it because I contacted them using their feedback form. What’s the point of having a special link to report miscategorized articles if it doesn’t ever work?
37 Responses to “Why You Should Never Cancel a StumbleUpon Discovery”
I use to do this a lot lately
but never thought of what you said here
i don’t know how many people must have lost thousands of hits because of me
lets try to even that loss with one more stumble Lol
stumbled this post
Hey Sunil,
Oh, and thanks for Stumbling this post, now all you need to do is Stumble 1,000 more of my posts to make it for all the canceled submissions 
I also used to do it occasionally, but anymore
thumbs up on sunil’s stumble… hope he didn’t hit cancel and ended up in “gardening”
nice post!
Good point, you could really screw someone over with haphazard submission cancellations. Stumbling your own stuff seems to be on a fine line between “too much self-promotion” and “dangit, i see someone canceled the submission and my business article is now in the gardening category.”
@Rajaie you don’t really want Stumble Moderator to suspend my account do you?
@Stratosg no i didn’t and no one will after stumbling this post lol
Wow!!!
Truthfully I have never used stumbleupon at all because I didn’t think it had the potential to bring me that amount of traffic.
Trust me that now I am going to be using stumble upon for every single post i do.
Thanks for the advice
Interesting! Never paid attention to it actually or go beyond clicking “I like it!” button. Now it gives me a different perspective I’ve taken for granted. Great article, Rajaie.
Yan
Rajaie,
You have perfectly described me….too lazy to follow through. I must have done this unintentionally to about 10 articles in the last year. I haven’t use stumble enough to have noticed this little error and will make sure that I don’t do it anymore.
Thanks for looking out. And while we are all stumbling around why don’t you guys go stumble all of the articles on my site.
Adam
Hey stratosg,
Actually, I took the liberty of submitting this post myself, just in case ;P
Hey Sucker,
I wouldn’t really recommend Stumbling every single one of your posts, only the ones that you are SURE will rake in tons visitors
Hey Sunil,
Hehe, I’m sure the StumbleUpon team won’t mind you guys Stumbling every single one my posts
Hey Ryan,
While I do admit that huge boost of traffic was pretty nice, it did take about 5 GB of my total 60 GB allowed bandwidth, and I only got a few extra subscribers (10-40). I’m just saying that you shouldn’t go offtopic too much since that will probably annoy past readers, just try to limit your social media posts to once a month.
Hey Yan,
I’m glad this post has enlightened you and will be of a help in the future
Hey Adam,
Lol, I’m sure there are tons of people like you and me that still don’t know about this bug, especially considering how minor it is.
Heading over to your blog to Stumble every single one of your posts, heheh
That’s a handy tip. In fact, while digging or stumbling, I just skip through familiar screens
Of late, I am not using stumble much. As for digg, I always evaluate the article when I receive shouts (gets 15-20 a day, unfortunately) and then digg to help them, if found good.
Ajith
Great post, Rajaie. You’ve presented some good points there. Keep it up!
Interesting, I did not know this, and have never done it. Stumble should most definitely fix this bug.
Hey Ajith,
I don’t really use Digg too much, I kinda got tired of logging into my account everyday to find hundreds of new shouts
Hey Lucas,
Thanks man
Hey Keyword…..,
It’s a good thing you haven’t done it before, now that StumbleUpon police won’t come looking for you 
Well now you do
On my early blogging days, I was very attracted to use Social sites as Digg to drive visitors to my sites. However, at some point I got bored of submitting my entries to these sites and after that I never looked back on them.
I believe that social sites are good to attract traffic but in the long run most of these visitors won’t visit your site again. It’s only a temporary thing. I prefer to build a loyal readership and get rock-solid stats than getting 1000 UV one day and see those stats drop over time.
Just my 2 cents
Hey Ikki,
I have the same opinion as you mate, but I don’t mind getting an extra boost of traffic every now and then…
Hi Rajaie,
Such helpful information. Thank you!
Congratulations on all the hits you got on your post. That was a great one!
Ten THOUSAND hits? Wow! Thats a milestone.
Wow, i never thought this could happen. Fortunately i haven’t had the misfortune of pressing the cancel button.
Thanks for taking the time to write this!
(Stumbled!)
Hey Barbara,
I’m glad you found it useful, and thanks
Hey Wong,
Well, at least now you know never to hit cancel for the future, and thanks for the Stumble 
Actually, twenty thousand
Awesome advice. I had no idea SU did that, haha.
Great I didnt know that stumble upon is such cool site.Thanx for the post
omg, i didnt knew this. the discovery dialogue takes ages to load, so i often cancelled… i fell guilty..^^
Hey Corey,
No problem, I just thought that it was important to get the word out
Hey Harish,
It’s weird you haven’t heard of StumbleUpon yet, it’s such a popular site…
Hey Benny,
That’s the main reason I close the discovery window, because it takes too long to load!
Only if I knew about this earlier, I nearly always press cancel.
Hey Reliable…,
I’m sure you will be forgiven for all those canceled submission… or will you?
I just don’t like the traffic from SU. They are not worth it
Hey Hussein,
W ell, traffic is traffic my friend, no matter where it comes from, but I like you don’t like the quality of traffic SU sends.
Wow! 20,000 visitors is huge. I’ll definitely write a killer post like that.
Hey Ganesh,
I’ve also been getting a steady 2.5K daily from that article alone
Good points, I only really used I like it… didn’t think about this
If you get traffic from SU that adds to your RSS feeds and email base then it should qualify as a good lead
Hey GuesssWho,
Thanks mate
Hey WebTrafficROI,
I was also thinking about that. Usually the traffic from StumbleUpon isn’t that great in terms of quality, but when I checked the bounce rate on that individual post, I noticed that is was only %50! Most of the times is about 70%-90%
Hi Rajaie,
Is that just for a one off post or is the bounce rate high in general with traffic from stumble upon
Hey ZK,
Only the post that brought in the SU traffic.
i just started using stumbleupon in my job and i have found some of the best sites, including this one. stumbleupon is king.
The StumbleUpon service can bring in thousands of visitors in a short period of time, based on the link being categorized correctly. Canceling in the middle of the procedure looks to have negative effect.
thank you for sharing this valuable information
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