Top Opera 10 promoter!

Winner of the Opera 10 affiliate contest: Karbonade.

The Opera 10 contest has come to an end and we'd like to thank everyone who participated!

There was one person in particular who managed to get more than 8,000 Opera points: Karbonade. We grabbed hold of him for a short interview how he manage to sustain such a high affiliate rank.

Could you please introduce yourself to the Opera community?

My name is Csaba. I live in Hungary and work as a software developer. I'm also a proud father of two little girls.

When did you start using Opera and why?

My first experience with Opera 5 was back in 2001. I was really amazed how many features there were available in Opera: It already had tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, an integrated search field and very good pop-up blocking. I found Opera 6 to be even better so I used only it for browsing most of the time and liked it so well that I even bought it later. I didn't like the integrated mail client at first, but when M2 was introduced I started using it as well, he he.

What's your favorite Opera feature?

This seems to be an easy question, but it isn't. When I have to use other browsers, I always miss a lot of features that are available in Opera which I had not even realized. The best features do not disturb the user; they just work: Features such as the very responsive UI, the quicksearch boxes everywhere, the fact that mouse gestures work in the whole browser, and so on. The bigger features I like are Speed Dial, Opera Link, mouse gestures and "Find in Page" with the dot.

Many are probably curious how you manage to sustain such a high affiliate rank! What's your secret?

Most of my affiliate points come from my Hungarian Opera blog, which is very popular in Hungary among Opera users. I just changed the download links there to my affiliate link. I also shared my affiliate link on social sites and on Twitter too, but these take only a very small part from the affiliate points. My blog has a high Google rank and it is the first hit for words "Opera letöltés" ("download Opera" in Hungarian), I have several hundred visitors through this search every day. Most of the points come from them.

Any tips/tricks for our affiliates?

Try to get high Google rank for "Opera download" in your language as this can help a lot. Opera has no localized download pages yet, so it is possible to get a good result for it.

Could you please tell us a little bit about your Web site, "Magyar Opera"?

As I mentioned before, this is the biggest and oldest Hungarian Opera blog ("Magyar Opera" means Hungarian Opera). I started it in 2003 when Opera 7.21 was released, so it is already 6 years old. There were no Hungarian translation for Opera at that time, so I also managed to make a new translation for it, and I'm still doing this. In the beginning I managed it alone and tried to publish the most interesting news about Opera, tips and tricks, description of features, etc. Now, there are 3 other authors on the blog and it has more than one thousand visitors a day.

We try to connect the Hungarian community with contests and events. We just made an Opera 10 release party, and we have a series called "My Opera" where the users can write about their personal connection with Opera - how they find it, how they customized it and how they are using it. This has become very popular as we already received a lot of stories. We have also translated My Opera through the translation site.

Got any favorite My Opera blogs or forum topics?

I usually follow only the official Opera blogs on My Opera. Occasionally, I also check the blogs of members of the week. I used to follow the forums too, but currently I'm not really active there. My favorite forum is the Desktop Wish-list.

Any last words or shout-outs to people you want to thank?

I would like to thank both my partners on the blog and all the Hungarian community for helping me in this contest. And of course, we all thank Opera for giving us such a great browser.