news's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- more problems, but solved now! Crap, another messup today, but this was related to the earlier one: Basically, it turns out that there was a smallish hardware problem with the database server which caused the earlier messup, and while I was just having dinner it popped up again and messed up some people's buddy lists again (basically, it affects those things because they are the most-often-changed table in the database). Anyhow, the root cause is gone for good now, and the buddy lists that were messed up should be back to normal. If yours isn't for some reason though, use the web-based support feature to let us know and we'll see what's up. Sorry for the downtime just now too, I had to shut the webserver down for a few minutes while i fixed the issue with the database server. All in all this is good though, since now I have located the root problem the server performance will be a lot better than it was for parts of today! By Andrew Smales. 7:51 p.m. - Nov. 04, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- some screwiness overnight Howdy! In the wee hours of the morning, the server messed up, but did so in a way where it didn't stop responding, it just started acting funny. Because of this, if you added an entry in the last few hours and you happen to be in a certain percentage of usernames (this basically affected people in a certain database, about 5% of the site I'd say, but mostly new users), the index page of your diary may have appeared blank. I'm running a program right now that is fixing them all, so if it does indeed look blank, it shouldn't soon. Also, if you add an entry or change your template before my fixing-program finishes, that will also fix it. Also if you use the "help section" link in the members area and write to us we can also check to make sure it's fine for you if you're not sure. Anyhow, sorry about this, let me know if you have any questions about it or whatnot. Oh p.s. this also affected buddy lists somewhat, it didn't clear the red lines once you loaded them. That also is fixed. By Andrew Smales. 8:36 a.m. - Nov. 04, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- halloween hijinx! HAPPY SPOOKY HALLOWEEN BOOOOOO WOOO BOOOO! Scary huh? Okay, so I had a few things I wanted to update here, I really need to update this more often! So in the much loved point form: - Regarding the spam protection explained below: If you do filter the email marked as *** SPAM ***, do not just delete it, the best thing to do is to save it to a special folder, so you can just check it once a day or once every couple of days or whatever to make sure no legitimate email got marked as spam. That doesn't happen much, but it will happen from time to time, the spam filtering is really best for just letting you do a quick check every now and then, and keeping the spam out of your face the rest of the time. - BOO! Webpages are hard to scare people with. - Don't forget the new web-based tech support system! I'm still getting a few emails now and then at the old address, but the web-based system is checked constantly, and requests to it are being answered pretty quick-like (thanks Sammy!), so make sure to use that! - A few gold members lately have asked what happens to their images if their membership expires and it takes them a couple of days to renew. The answer is that your images get moved offline, but not deleted, and when you sign up again you just need to add a note in the signup saying "restore my images" and we move them back over so they're online for you again! - As a spooky halloween treat, any gold members who go to the help section and enter a subject line of "trick or treat!" get 5000 free banner views. In the actual message body if you could write what you're dressing as for halloween that'd be fun too! (p.s. Okay, this is done now since halloween has ended!) Okay that's about it! I have to go back to working on a pretty big new thing for the site! By Andrew Smales. 9:56 a.m. - Oct. 31, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- really good spam protection for diaryland email!!! Okay, I have pretty exciting news! Since my friend Sammy has been doing a lot of tech support for the past few days, I have had a bit of time to do things I have been wanting to do for a while. So today I spent the entire day messing around with anti-spam software, and I finally have it set up perfectly, so as of a few minutes ago, your @diaryland.com email account (if you have turned it on for your account) now has built-in spam protection. If you get much spam at all, you'll notice how it works right away: Any spams that come in get their subject lines marked with the phrase " *** SPAM *** " and then whatever the original subject line was, which makes it super-extra easy to set up a mail rule/filter in almost every mail program that will move that mail to a separate folder, or discard it. I am going to make some tutorials on how to do that for as many mail programs as I can, but if you want to do one yourself, email me (andrew AT diaryland.com) and tell me what program/platform you want to do one for, and if noone has done one for it yet, I'll be all "yes please baby!" and we can make sweet beautiful anti-spam music together. Once those tutorials are up I'll let y'all know! If I sound giddy, it's because while I've been writing this, my mail program has caught 5 spams and moved them somewhere where I don't have to look at them, and I am happy. Yay! By Andrew Smales. 8:26 p.m. - Oct. 17, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new and better support system! Howdy. I'm trying out a new web-based help system to replace the email one, because the email one was sort of sucking out, I just did some stats and I was only getting to about 60% of support requests in the last month. This is partly because the email system I was using was quite innefficient, and also just because as the site keeps getting more and more popular, there are just way too many support requests for me to get to and still keep everything running and do other stuff I need to do for the site. So, I have done 2 things: The first is that I've set up a web-based system, which allows me to do the second, which is I've hired a friend to help me with support part of the time. If you're wondering how the site can afford this, well it can't exactly, but I'm hoping that the better support will encourage more people to sign up for the gold membership, and tell their friends to, etc., so umm yeah! Also I just found a way to reduce a percentage of the bandwidth costs a bit, so that should help. So, from now on, please go here to submit any support requests. I'll be linking that from the members area later today when I'm positive it's working perfectly. So yeah, we are entering a new era of Diaryland! A new and better (for you), and even more expensive era (just for me), HURRAH! By Andrew Smales. 1:21 p.m. - Oct. 11, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- short network problems Sorry if you couldn't get to the site in the last 10 minutes, our upstream provider is having some routing issues that I think are fixed now, but I'm waiting to hear for sure. Anyhow yeah, sorry about that! By Andrew Smales. 10:55 a.m. - Oct. 06, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minor problem, fixed A few problems happened today, but nothing major. The most important one is that due to an equipment problem, if you added an entry in the past hour or so, it may not have shown up on your page yet (but it will show up on your archives). That problem is fixed, and no entries were lost or anything, the pages just didn't get generated when you added the entry, so all you have to do is alter your diary in any way and the system will make the entry show up. So, the easiest thing to do if this affects you is to just add an entry that says "test" or something short like that, and then delete it, and then boom, the right one will show up. Sorry about that!! Other than that, the site was down for a bit while I fixed the problem that was causing the thing mentioned above. Also the server that runs signmyguestbook.com and notifylist.com had problems, so if you use those sites, sorry about that too. Okay that's all for now, time for me to fall over. By Andrew Smales. 12:34 p.m. - Oct. 03, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network update There have been 2 times today where network connectivity to the site is a bit wonky for about 4 or 5 minutes. This is cause our network providers are having trouble with a faulty Cisco router, and apparently Cisco sent them a replacement that was also faulty. I'm waiting for another update to be sure, but I think it might be fixed now. The nice thing about paying for a good quality colocation place is, they have all sorts of redundant fail-safe stuff set up, so when the first router broke, they just switched the network traffic to another one they have set up and there was no traffic interruption. I am pretty sure this latest interruption a minute ago is because they were installing the 3rd, non-broken router and are switching routing info, etc. Anyhow, my point is: If you couldn't get to the site for a few minutes, that's why, but they're all over it at the network place. By Andrew Smales. 2:55 p.m. - Sept. 27, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- guestbook problems for some users If you happen to have a guestbook with signmyguestbook.com, it may not be reachable to everyone right now, due to a dumb problem. Basically, the domain was paid till 2003, and it still says so if you search some whois dbs, but the company who I registered it with have it down as expiring 3 days ago (instead of a year and 3 days), so I've just renewed it and written them asking why that happened (they never sent a renewal notice either, very weird). Anyhow, the upshot is that the domain's DNS isn't working now, except for ISPs that have it cached still (still many according to the server logs), but everything should be fine again next time they refresh the root servers. Uhh, the annoying thing is, this could be 12 hours I think. So anyhow, sorry about that if this affects you, this is a paaaaain. (also: don't worry, this wouldn't ever happen with Diaryland, because it's registered with a different company). By Andrew Smales. 11:42 a.m. - Sept. 25, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new template tags Howdy! I forgot to write that i added a feature the other day: There are two new tags you can put in your template. You know how on each entry you probably have links that say "previous" and "next" (or other words you may have changed them to) that are used with the %%prev%% and %%next%% symbols? Well now, you can use that in conjunction with the new %%prev_desc%% and %%next_desc%% tags, so that you can make the description of the previous entry show up. All you do is go into your template and change the "prev" part of the link to %%prev_desc%% and the "next" to %%next_desc%% (this is the text, not the linky A HREF part). I know I am making a dog's dinner of explaining this, but I think you get it right, maybe? By Andrew Smales. 2:51 p.m. - Sept. 24, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- back Sorry, the members area was just down for about 25 minutes. The main problem was that the new database server's monitoring program isn't working as well as it should be yet, so when there was a short burst of extra-high traffic, it didn't fix itself, and then on top of that, my cell phone currently isn't working so it didn't page me, which wouldn't have been a problem most sunday nights (or any other night, but especialyl sunday since it's super busy) since I'd be online, but of course I picked tonight to watch Van Wilder, which really just adds insult to injury. Anyhow, I'm writing a new monitor program now that'll work with the new server, and yeah, sorry. By Andrew Smales. 10:11 p.m. - Sept. 08, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server problems are finished Howdy do! Okay, the new server is now up, and has been for a couple of days with no real problems, so all I have to say is: AHHHH. The database errors that were getting to be a real problem for the past couple of weeks during busy evenings should be history now and I can get back to working on everything else hah. Also I just got an invoice today for the new server and the extra bandwidth the site has been using in the last month and I just thought I'd remind everyone that a gold membership is an excellent back to school gift for anyone and everyone you know haha. By Andrew Smales. 10:38 a.m. - Sept. 04, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- more server updates Howdy. Okay, I again apologize as deeply as I possibly can for the crappy server performance the last little while. The latest is this: The colocation place got my server in place on saturday. Unfortunately, they didn't set it up right (apparently because they aren't used to installing the kernel that you need for a server with the newest Xeon cpus). So, I wrote them, and called them, and wrote and called and waited, and they have been insanely slow to get it fixed up. It looks as I write this as though it's almost set up though, but I'm not going to say anything for sure, since that always comes back and bites me. Anyhow, sorry again, believe me I wish this was fixed more than anyone. It's one of those frustrating things where basically I am saying to the colocation place: "Here is an insane amount of money, in fact here's extra to do a 'quick set-up', please get this thing up and running, just like you do every single day for tons of servers" and them still messing it up. It's so crazy too, because I use a fairly high-quality (read: not cheap) colocation place, since keeping the site running reliably somewhere stable with a great network setup is important to me, and normally they're great, it's just now and then they seem to totally screw up and shaft me and mess things up flukily. I know other people with servers there who have no trouble, it's just my luck or something. Anyhow, soon my pretties, soon. By Andrew Smales. 7:36 p.m. - Aug. 28, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - If you noticed in the last 8 hours that your profile wasn't working right and you couldn't edit the pagename, sorry, all fixed now (this didn't affect everyone, just a percentage of people who updated since midnight sunday night till now). The database server crashed last night and left a corrupted table, which is now fixed. This is extra annoying, because the new database server is all set up and running, but I can't move the site over yet, because it came with some of the OS messed up and I'm waiting to get that fixed. Anyhow, basically every dumb problem in the last few weeks has been in one way or another related to the database server being overloaded, so when I get it running in the next day or so, that should be over finally! By Andrew Smales. 8:18 a.m. - Aug. 26, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new database server almost here Hi! I forgot to mention this until now, but I've ordered a new server for the database, and it'll be set up at the network place on saturday or sunday at some point, so hopefully I will have time to migrate the actual database over to it before the sunday night rush period. The new server is crazy powerful, but I'll also have the old server to farm out some of the database tasks to if the new one gets very busy anytime soon (but it's twice as fast as the old one, which was already really good, so I anticipate it'll hold the site for a good long while, it's all top top quality stuff). I'll keep this site updated with news on that! By Andrew Smales. 5:26 p.m. - Aug. 22, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- national bad luck week Aaaagh. Sorry if you couldn't get to the site for the past hour or so, there was a problem at the secondary network provider I use mostly for DNS. Some people could still get through since it was just a DNS thing, but it looks like quite a few couldn't. This week has had at least one big problem per day, is it national unlucky week or something and noone told me? By Andrew Smales. 5:37 p.m. - Aug. 20, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Okay, more news on the database server problems lately Okay, yet another update on the database errors from the past little while: I have been trying to get the new database software going, as well as speeding up other things with the database, because frankly up until now my options have been: 1. Optimize everything and get the new, much better software (nerd info: row-level locking should solve tons of the problems I've been having) going, which should theoretically totally work and bring the site back to it's normal, speedy self. or 2. Order a new, super-powerful server which should fix everything quickly and easily, but will cost a super-powerful price, which really shouldn't be totally necessary for a few months. So, it turns out that option 1, which should totally be viable, probably isn't for now, because after messing with it all day and talking to people about it, it seems that the new database software has an undocumented bug which makes it not work on the OS distribution DiaryLand runs on. If you are still reading to this point, this is all technical mumbo jumbo that I can summarize by saying: I am just going to order an idiotically powerful server first thing tomorrow morning, and get it up as soon as I can. To finance some of this, I'm going to auction off some DiaryLand-related stuff I don't really need anymore on Ebay as soon as I get an account there all set up, so if you want a G3 lombard powerbook or an iPaq that I was trying to use to do remote sysadmin stuff for the site for a while, keep your eyes open here. Maybe some other stuff of mine too if I can think of anything worth auctioning. This message is really rambly and maybe not super lucid, because I have somehow gotten a summer cold, sorry about that! I think I will start a second diary soon for longer news updates, I keep meaning to do a lengthy behind the scenes one that doesn't degenerate into whiny, long-winded rambling or one bazillion boring tech details. By Andrew Smales. 9:27 p.m. - Aug. 19, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- p.s. to below item As an update to the item below: My network place just informed me that the thing is fixed, it was due to another server on the network doing ip spoofing. They said "The said server has been disconnected and the network should be soon recovering back to normal (given the route flapping caused, it may take some time for certain ISPs to update their routing tables -- dependant on each ISP's local routing policy).", so there you go! Weehaw! Also, the new database software is installed, and once I have a chance to move the database to it's new alternate format, I think the site should run a lot smoother during very busy times! By Andrew Smales. 4:24 p.m. - Aug. 19, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network problems fixed Okay, the site was down for a bit there, our network provider had problems that I'm going to contact them about now, to see exactly what the deal was. Historically, short outages like this at this time of day with them usually are little DoS attacks on their network. The craziest thing is, this almost never happens to them, maybe 2 or 3 times a year if that, but this just happened to occur literally 5 seconds after I shut down the httpd and database server daemons so I could upgrade the database software. That is SO crazy, like what are the odds of my luck being THAT bad? And that always happens to me, I only ever lose connectivity to the site on the very few times when I'm doing something very major. You know when you're having a really lucky day people tell you to buy lottery tickets? After last night and today, I am pretty sure that if I bought one right now and stuck it in my pocket, it'd spontaneously combust and set me on fire. By Andrew Smales. 3:51 p.m. - Aug. 19, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- database problems fixed. Sorry, the database server was just down for about 90 minutes. I usually don't go anywhere on sunday nights, since they're the busiest, but I did a ton of database optimizations this weekend and everything was running super smooth all day, so I figured I'd go and the monitor could page me if something happened. Anyhow, 15 minutes after I went out the database daemon died and didn't restart itself like it should have, and the monitor didn't page me like it should have, so blah blah blah, the short story is: ARGH. Fixed now, sorry! update: It turns out the root of this whole problem is a stupid web spider going nuts in the members area. Yet another huge search engine company has forgotten to set their spiders to not the same domain zillions of times per second. Blocking them now so probably things will be better. Also, later tonight I'm going a major upgrade on the database server software that I'm hoping should make a huge difference for junk like this and will prevent any trouble from happening at all. By Andrew Smales. 12:04 a.m. - Aug. 19, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- buddy lists Hi! If you noticed that your buddy list wasn't showing up in the last 5 hours, or that your favourite diaries didn't show up in your profile, sorry about that, it's fixed now, there was a small problem with a database table. Sorry for not replying to most people who emailed about this too, but there were a ZILLION emails. It's really crazy, when anything else goes wrong I get a bunch of emails, but when it's buddy lists, I get like 100 times more than for anything else. Okay that's all! By Andrew Smales. 9:54 a.m. - Aug. 18, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- database + buddy lists Sorry for the database problems tonight, super busy night for no apparent reason. I'm fixing it up now, unfortunately I wasn't around for the last 20 minutes when it was especially bad. On another note, check out the way the buddy lists work now, they show some extra info. I had other stuff to write here but I forget, and must get back to making sure the database server is definitely back to normal. By Andrew Smales. 12:27 a.m. - Aug. 13, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- problem with the archive templates Tonight (July 17, 2002), there was a database file that got corrupted. This happens now and again, and I went to fix it using the same utility that has worked during these routine problems for about 3 years now. For some unknown reason though, this utility went through the file, popped up tons of errors, and I swear to god, it then deleted the file. This is the weirdest thing that has ever happened technically ever on the site, and it came at the absolute worst time: I am currently geographically far away from the CD that the backups for the archives templates, which is what it affected, and once I can get them, they will not be up to date for everyone, because I do not backup the templates quite as often as I backup the entries (this is a conscious choice priority-wise I made that it would be better to spend more time making better backups of entries, since those would be the worst thing to ever lose for anyone - and I'm glad to say we never have). So, as of right now, when you add entries, etc, your archive page is not going to change, until you follow the easy and fast steps here. Please do that right away while I go see about trying to get the archive template backups to myself a bit quicker than it's looking like right now. By Andrew Smales. 2:24 a.m. - Jul. 18, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a note on spam Oh another thing I have been meaning to post for a few days now: You may or may not know that spam (unwanted annoying email) is pretty much 100% always sent from a fake address... Well lately some spammers have been using some spam program that grabs a bunch of email addresses from their lists and uses one of them as the "From" address. That means that a lot of DiaryLand users are getting spam that LOOKS like it's from other Diaryland members, but it's not, it's forged. (and some people are getting spam that looks like it's from themselves even). For more info on spam and how to avoid it, read this, but yeah the important part is: If you get spam that seems like it's from some other Diaryland member, it's not, spammers never use a real return address, since they don't want to deal with all the bounces and angry replies they'd get if they did. I'm working on a new feature that I should have ready very soon to help people reduce the spam they get (by not having to list an email address on your diary. Not that you HAVE TO as it is of course) more too. By Andrew Smales. 3:37 a.m. - Jul. 16, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server update Just a quick note to say sorry for the errors some people have received now and then on the site tonight and also last night. Sunday and monday nights are the absolute busiest times of the week, and this week especially the servers were very strained, both nights were a lot busier than even normal busy nights. Anyway, no worries, I'm working on a lot of optimizations that should lessen load quite a bit, and I'm also going to get a new server hooked up to take some of the load in the very near future. While the site's popularity has always grown at a quick but predictable rate until now, the last little while it's sped up faster than normal, and tons and tons of new people are signing up all the time (the nicest part is it's all just good old word of mouth, there hasn't been any particularily big press piece or anything. It looks like all the new features in the last little while have drawn in more people than I expected.. and there are more coming!). So yeah, sorry for the slow reply times during peak hours, that should be over quite soon! (and if you don't ever log on during the day, try it some time, it's so much smoother! Go ahead, spend the day working on your diary, your boss won't mind, I promise!) By Andrew Smales. 11:53 p.m. - Jul. 15, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- gold image filters part 2! Okay,about the image filtering I wrote about yesterday: It's turned off now. There are a few reasons why: - I assumed that this would affect a half dozen people who were hosting images for their friends, but it turns out a ton of people have multiple diaries they are hosting images for and this bugged them, or people apparently didn't know they couldn't host images for all their friends (just a note: this has always been in the gold signup rules, it's not something I just made up recently). So, although my earlier research looked like this would only affect a few people who knew they were sort of breaking rules, it turned out to do more than that. - A totally unexpected problem came up: A lot of people seem to have firewalls set up that filter out the http referrer info, so when they visited their own diaries, they couldn't see the images (although everyone else still could). This is sort of odd, and if you have software running that blocks your referrer info, you might want to reconsider that, it will affect other sites that do similar filtering, or other general web stuff (and sending your referrer info really does not make any real difference to your internet security or privacy, I think "security" companies throw it into their software to make it look like the software has more features than it really does). Okay, so right now, the filtering is off, and I guess what I'm going to have to do is basically go through logs, etc., and find the people who are hosting images for other diaries, and contact or filter them individually. The last thing I want is to make the site less fun for anyone (including myself), so obviously I was mistaken in how this would affect people, if you were annoyed somehow, my apologies. Now on the topic of fun, who wants a new DiaryLand theme song? Noone? Okay, it'll be ready by the end of the day! By Andrew Smales. 1:16 p.m. - Jul. 11, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minor change to the way gold images work (updated below) Hi guys! I just made a change that may affect a few people: I have finally set up server filters so that images hosted on gold diaries cannot be used on other diaries. This has been in the signup rules of gold membership from the start, but I hadn't gotten around to setting up filters until I realized how much bandwidth it was really using recently. The reason that the images can only be used on the diary that has the gold membership is that bandwidth costs the site real money, and the gold memberships are so cheap because they are based on the idea of them being for a single diary. So when people would host images for their friends, or put them on am-i-foxy-or-boxy type sites, etc., it used more bandwidth than the price allows for basically, and that kind of thing would eventually endanger DiaryLand's long term health. So anyhow, my point is: If your images don't work, and you were linking them from someone's gold membership account, that's why, sorry about that! I don't always like being the big bad rule enforcer, but it's necessary. And on the plus side, this should mean the servers are a bit less loaded and whatnot! update number 2: Okay, images work on guestbooks again, and a few people have mentioned that they have 2 diaries and only one is gold, but they just use a few images in the second. If you're in that position, let me know, that's cool and I can fix that for you. As long as both of them are yours that is fine. By Andrew Smales. 8:27 p.m. - Jul. 10, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- oops, I fixed it again Okay, an update to the item below: If you had any problems logging in this afternoon where you'd have to try twice to make it work, sorry, that is definitely all fixed now though. Basically, I thought I had the problem fixed before, but it wasn't fixed for everyone (because of an undocumented bug in the latest version of some server software the site uses), but it is now! The server should run smoother during busy times with the upgrades I did today, combined with some database changeovers I've been working on at night for the past couple of weeks. By Andrew Smales. 2:23 p.m. - Jun. 27, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- login problems fixed Okay, for the last half hour or so there was a problem where if you logged out, you couldn't log back in again. That's fixed now, sorry about that. It was a result of me upgrading some software on the server, and unfortunately I didn't notice that the login was broken for a bit cause i was still doing some stuff and not paying close attention to email. Yoops! By Andrew Smales. 12:10 p.m. - Jun. 27, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new feature: favourite entries thing Howdy. I added a new feature this afternoon, which you can see by clicking the new "your favourite entries" link in the members area. Basically, it's a way to keep track of you favourite diary entries that other people have made. For instance, I happen to like a certain entry that a friend of mine made, so I added it to mine, and now when you look at my favourite entries page, it has.. agh, this is too hard to explain too well, so you know what, just click here to see it in action on mine, I think that explains it well enough. By Andrew Smales. 3:31 p.m. - Jun. 17, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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