We have a release going out tonight at 10:15. The site will go down for a couple of minutes.
Here's what's new...
- We've added the anchor text on the manage post page for advertisers
- Fixed this error that showed up every once in a while on white colored or available opps
- Added a new feature for administration of auto approvals to help Customer Love
Today's release has a few bug fixes, and several behind the scenes enhancements and improvements for our Customer Love team. Here are some of the bug fixes going out:
- Fixed an issue that was preventing a few users from logging into their accounts
- Fixed an error that could occur when a user deleted a blog that had been reviewed
- Fixed a few typos on several different pages
- Fixed an issue that was causing the stats to be off for blogs on the Requests/Invites page. For advertisers, this is the page within the message center where bloggers that request a spot in your opportunity are displayed. This page now shows the correct traffic numbers for each blog that's made a request.
Please keep checking back with us here on the blog, as there's a number of much bigger things on the way!
Tonight at 10:00 PM EST, the site will be down for possibly up to 10 minutes while we deploy some changes and fixes to PayPerPost. The release will include the following changes:
- The two month limit on end dates for opportunities will be removed. When advertisers create opportunities, they'll now be able to set the end date far into the future.
- Two more blog hosts have been added to the Excluded Domains list that advertisers can choose from on opportunity creation
- In certain situations, PPP Direct offers were being automatically canceled for inactivity earlier than intended, this was a bug that's been fixed.
- More information has been added to bans. When a blogger receives a ban from an advertiser, the blogger's 'Bans and Benches' page will now display the url of their post that the advertiser banned, in addition to still showing the reason and date.
Please plan your post submissions around the 10 PM EST release time to avoid running into problems while the site is down briefly. Thanks!
Welcome to acronym heaven. PPP today suffered a DDOS attack. In case that's a term you've never heard before, it means Distributed Denial Of Service attack. With a DDOS attack, the social malcontent responsible usually has access to a few thousand, or even tens of thousands, of computers around the world that will do their bidding. They achieve this by sending out spam email with attachments that people unwittingly open (thereby installing nasty software on their machines) and by uploading files to web servers which again people unwittingly open.
When the ne'er-do-well decides to show the world how truly powerful they are (or, more likely, when they suddenly feel the need to rebel against their actually quite rightful feelings of social inadequacy, ineptitude and general worthlessness), they run up scripts that instruct their small army of compromised machines to simultaneously make requests of a web site. The idea of the game is to take the website down by flooding it with fake traffic.
This particular social dweeb has been attacking PayPerPost since around 4 this morning with a battery of machines all making a request for the same page on the site, over and over any over, many times a second.
Our own defenses have kicked in blocking out the various IP addresses the compromised machines are using, and in some cases even blocking access to entire networks. THis is in order to keep the site up and running. The downside of course is that there are a lot of innocent casualties and as this goes on it's quite likely you may find yourself unable to access PayPerPost.
Once the attack ends (usually when the muppet simply decides to attack someone else, often because the kids parents ground them for not doing the dishes or some other household chore) we'll start to relax the firewall rules again and you should all be able to get into the system with no problem.
Unfortunately these things are now a way of life for many businesses on the Internet and there's very little that can be done about it. So, please forgive the inconvenience while we wait for this particular adolescent with a staggering inferiority complex to proclaim himself victorious to the assorted posters of N-Sync staring down at him from his bedroom walls.
The boards at http://boards.izea.com/ will be down from 8:30 am to 9:30 am on Thursday for a hardware migration.
We've released several more bug fixes in this week's release. One of the ones we were receiving lots of feedback on was incorrect message counts, including some people with negative message counts. That issue has been resolved. There have also been several issues cleared up with opportunity creation where entering very long strings of text in several places could produce some visual problems. The blog rolls list page for advertisers has also been completely redone, and is far more user friendly.
The page now allows advertisers to search for blogs of certain categories within their blog rolls. Country codes and flags have also been added on the right-hand side, so advertisers can easily see the location of bloggers on their blog rolls.
We'll continue to address issues, and make improvements with every release. There's also some really big things in the works, so check back here on the blog and the site itself often!
In this release, we've addressed a few bugs that were causing problems for users, and made a number of behind the scenes improvements. We've fixed an issue with post resubmits, and now all posts should be able to be resubmitted within five days of their review for both initial and final post review. In conjunction with that, the separate Edit and Resubmit buttons on the Taken Opps page were unnecessarily creating an extra step in the process, so after successfully editing a post that needs to be resubmitted, it is automatically resubmitted now instead of having to also actually hit 'Resubmit'
The Benched Bloggers page within the Manage Advertiser Account page was messy, and has been cleaned up visually. On the blogs, opportunities, and users lists there were situations that could throw off the comment count that was displayed. Those issues have now also been resolved. Finally, advertisers were occasionally running into an error that would prevent them from making it beyond page five in Sponsored Post creation. This was being caused by a bug that could happen with the creation of the disclosure badge for their opportunity, and this has also been fixed.
As is our weekly custom, today we making an update to SocialSpark to address some bugs and other issues in the system. The release will require some downtime though (no more than 5 minutes) and so we are making the deployment happen around 23:00 Eastern this evening.
Thanks for your patience.
SocialSpark just went down. We're not seeing any traffic reaching the main application servers and the team are troubleshooting what the cause of that could be.
Update soon.
Update: there was a router failure on one of our cache servers. THis has now been resolved and the site is back online.
Today's release is highlighted by a new feature that gives users more control over comments, more useful information provided for advertisers in their My Campaigns page, and an upgrade to our global search feature.
When a user creates a blog, opportunity, or profile, there are now comment preference options for them to choose from. Users can disable comments altogether, or require that they approve each comment before it appears publicly.
The comments preferences can also be changed at any time in the Communications settings of the Message Center.
For advertisers, we've added a Details tab to the Opportunity Overview page within the My Campaigns section. This tab will allow advertisers to see the details that they chose for their opportunities at any time, without having to go through any edit screens.
For the My Campaigns page, another new addition is the Queue column. Advertisers can immediately see if an opportunity they created is overflowing with interest from bloggers, and can see exactly how many bloggers are lined up in queue to take their opp.
Finally, we've made a major change behind the scenes to the global search feature that can be found on every page of SocialSpark. Results that users receive through searching will now be more accurate and thorough. The global search feature can be used to find blogs, opportunities, other users, sparks, and even users that have expressed interest in a brand you've named in the search field.
