news's Diaryland Diary

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network slowness and buddy lists fixed

Just a note that if the site is slow right now, it's cause our network provider is in the middle of having some big denial of service attack on them. They're usually quite fast at tracking these down and fixing them though so it shouldn't last long, seems like it's pretty much back now I think. Also, if your buddy list didn't work right in the middle of the night last night, oops, i fixed that this morning when I saw the emails on it, it was a really small dumb thing causing that (and wow, I didn't really realize to what extent everyone likes buddy lists until that broke, there were so many emails about it!).

By Andrew Smales. 5:21 p.m. - May. 14, 2002

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annoying guestbook pop-ups banned

Some superlame porn sites were finding guestbooks through search engines and signing them with annoying pop-up windows using javascript (which only worked if you had html turned on for your guestbook). I've just fixed it so this will no longer work (assuming you are using signmyguestbook.com which most people here are). The phenomenon of people advertising crappy sites by signing guestbooks with short generic messages like "nice site, cool" and then links to some other site, often adult sites, has gotten really annoying in the past 2 or 3 weeks, so if anyone does that to you, email me before you delete the message so I can check it out and ban the person/site doing it. I get the feeling it's just a few people (who don't realize what incredibly ineffective advertising it is, they're spending hours finding guestbooks and signing all these messages that mostly get deleted right away when the guestbook owner sees them) doing it, so annoying.

By Andrew Smales. 1:00 a.m. - May. 13, 2002

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another older.html issue, all fixed now

Oops, there was another problem with the archives (older.html) pages for some users due to the changes I made the other day, and a few users had some their older entries listed out of order on their archives page. I've fixed that now (actually a program I made to fix it is running now, so all the users affected should be fixed in the next 5 minutes anyhow), and sorry to anyone who was affected by that and confused. If anyone still has issues with their archive pages let me know, but I'm pretty sure this should basically fix 'em all up now!

By Andrew Smales. 5:35 p.m. - May. 03, 2002

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short downtime due to database problem

The members area was just down for 15 minutes while I had to fix a database error that popped up. If you updated your diary about 30 minues or less before I fixed this, your older.html page might be messed up. If it is, you can just add another entry (and then delete it after) or alter your template, and the older page will pop right back to how it should be. I am also going to set up a program later tonight when the server isn't so busy to fix any up that haven't been fixed by then. Sorry about that! Incidentally, I've been doing some unrelated database improvements for the past 2 days or so that should really speed up the database server, which is totally fast about 95% of the time but lately it seems like certain nights just happen to be disproportionately busy, and that's when you sometimes see stuff like several second delays while you're adding an entry or whatever. I've tested the changes very well now and am just deploying them, but it's taking a long time to do it properly, but yeah anyhow, thought I should mention that!

By Andrew Smales. 9:59 p.m. - May. 02, 2002

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new features

I just added a new feature for everyone, and also one for gold members (sorry, if I added it for everyone, the servers would be overloaded pretty quickly). The one for everyone is this: When you go to add an entry now, it asks you whether you want to add a normal one, or a weblog one, and you can save your preference. This basically is mostly useful for people who are doing weblog-style diaries (more than one entry per page), it saves you an extra step every time you need to add an entry. The gold feature is related to this too: You can now have up to 3 optional fields in each of your entries, so if you want to for instance record how many miles you biked, what you had for lunch and what song you're listening to at the time you add an entry, you can do that really easily now. For info on how to use this, click here!

By Andrew Smales. 3:29 p.m. - Apr. 30, 2002

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clarification of some changes to the members area

I just want to clarify a few recent changes in the members area since I'm getting quite a few questions about them lately: The news section is it's own section now of course, and it appears at the bottom your buddy list, right by your own username. Like your own username there, it doesn't use any of your 75 buddy list spots, and it doesn't appear on your profile page as one of your favourite diaries. As of today, the latest few news items also appear on the main page of the members area, where they used to be. Hopefully by having them in both spots now, more people will read the news and be aware of what crazy hijinks (and antics!) are happening at any given moment. Okay, that's all!

By Andrew Smales. 12:36 p.m. - Apr. 30, 2002

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virus that pretends it's from your domain

Here's some annoying news: There's an email virus going around named W32.Klez that in some cases sends you email that looks like it's from postmaster AT diaryland.com (if you're using a @diaryland address that is). If you get an email that says it's from the diaryland postmaster, and that some mail you sent somewhere failed, most likely you have this virus. Here is some text from Symantec's info page on the virus: "in some cases, if you receive a message that the virus has sent using its own SMTP engine, the message appears to be a "postmaster bounce message" from your own domain. For example, if your email address is [email protected], you could receive a message that appears to be from [email protected]". Anyhow, if you think you have this virus, check out this page at Symantec which has a fix on it I believe, as well as more info (I only know what I've read there as well as a bit from what I've observed from all sorts of people with the diaryland help address in their address books that the virus goes through and mails everyone in. Oh man I'm using a lot of drawn-out bad sentences in this post).

By Andrew Smales. 12:01 p.m. - Apr. 30, 2002

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update on limits

An update to the item from last night: I'm not limiting how often you can add entries or update your html (bold text added since this point does not seem to be clear to everyone). Noone seemed too against that*, but I've come up with something that might be okay for now: When you update your template right now, the latest entry will change, but the rest will take a few minutes more (exact time depends on how busy the server is). Gold members however will update right away. I'll see how this goes.

* I would love to clear something up here though: From a few conversations with members I've had since last night, there really seems to be this perception among a few people (and really it seems like a tiny percentage) that I don't like non-gold members as much as gold members or something, and it's a really weird thing to think, I don't get it. I have really gone out of my way to NOT do that. The fact is, this site costs over six figures/year to run now (even reading that gives me ulcers), and without the gold membership thing there is no possible way it'd still exist, so yes, of course the people who pay are going to get extra perks - if they didn't get extra stuff, there would be no reason for them to pay and the site would die, period. But to think I "hate" non-gold members as someone said is ridiculous, I love all of you (that sounds dangerously close to sarcasm haha, but I mean it). Also, maybe i used the wrong word below when I refered to gold members as "serious users"... I should have said "busier users" or something, I only meant that the gold members on the whole update more often than the average user. I can see where some people read that wrong, but that's what I meant, just that the BUSIEST users wouldn't be inconvenienced in general. Okay this is a really long explanation considering I only really got 2 or 3 angry comments, I'm going back to the database fixes, they seem fun now compared to this haha.

By Andrew Smales. 7:43 a.m. - Apr. 23, 2002

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small server issues tonight, being fixed

Hi! Sorry, the server has had intermittent problems tonight. From what i can see, it's only affected a small amount of people (because the monitoring programs are catching it), but for those people, the database problems are very annoying. The problem is that the site is super extra-busy the last 2 days, and it's not actually clear why. Here is what i'm doing to fix it:
1. I'm staying up very late tonight to do a lot of optimizing, basically working on the database. I know a few things i can change that weren't so bad before, but are slowing down the site now it's extra busy.
2. I may have to add a thing during the busiest times where unless you're a gold member you can only update a certain amount of times per hour or per day, or you can't change your html more than a certain number of times in a given time period. I know this sucks a bit, but I think I can do it so the casual users aren't too inconvenienced, and it won't matter for the very serious users since they hopefully all have gold memberships. I really hate to do stuff like this, but I think it may be necessary to keep the site in good running order (which benefits everyone whether they pay 2 or 3 bucks a month or not).

By Andrew Smales. 10:18 p.m. - Apr. 22, 2002

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