Archive: December 2007
We have recently experienced greatly elevated levels of abuse on Zookoda.com. Zookoda is a fantastic service that provides you with a means to reach out to your blog readers with detailed and rich email newsletters. We offered the service completely for free and so, as is the way with all things Internet, a annoying minority decided to abuse the system. We found ourselves a few weeks ago facing a massive backlog of broadcasts many of which were spam related.
We hate spam. Honestly, I don't think I've ever met anyone that really enjoys spam. Some people hate spam even more than we hate spam and those people complained to our network hosting service. Our network hosting service REALLY hate spam. We implemented a manual review process earlier this week to catch the spammers on Zookoda and that worked. The problem though is that even our legitimate users have email addresses in their broadcast lists that are non-existant, or who have decided they no longer wish to receive the legitimate content our users provide. The end result is usually a spam complaint to our hosting service.
Unfortunately this has escalated to a point where it is effecting deliverability of email for our paid services and corporate email. We're not spammers, we don't support spammers and we do support everybody's freedom of choice when it comes to opting in and out email lists.
Today we're stopping Zookoda broadcasts. The system will remain live, but broadcasts will not be sent. We are going to be making some more changes to the infrastructure and will allow for broadcasts again in early January. In the meantime though this is a pain for our legitimate users and I can only offer my most sincere apologies to you guys for the disruption this is undoubtedly going to cause.
Rest assured though, Zookoda will be back soon, better, faster and far more reliable and spam free than ever before.
Just a quick update. We still have a couple of small issues with the new izearanks.com site that are delaying us sending out information to the people that responded to test it. Of course the whole idea of a test is to find issues, but the remaining problems with the site are related to internal security, so we've got to hold off for just a little while longer.
Jamie is working her tail off today to get the issues resolved and I'll post another update later today as to how far along she gets.
After today's hardware failures at our data center, we need to schedule some downtime for PayPerPost.com.
Tonight at midnight Eastern time, PayPerPost.com will be taken offline for about one hour. This is to rebuild our failover cluster with new hardware. The failover processes we have in place worked just fine earlier when we suffered the failures, and so now we need to rebuild that cluster so that we're fine the next time it happens as well.
Thanks for your patience.
PayPerPost.com is now live again. Once again, please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.
We have suffered a failure at our data center and as a result PayPerPost.com is currently offline. We expect to have it back online shortly.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Friday we very quietly rolled out a change to the RealRank calculation engine that we've been toying with for some time.
Many of you noticed that your RealRanks fluctuate a great deal from day to day. That's because it's a 'real' rank. As more blogs get added into the calculation there is a strong chance you will change position the next day. Similarly, if a few blogs above you have a bad day you can easily leap a number of places on the rank.
While this is all great for accurately showing a daily rank, it's not so great for continuity, spotting trends within your blog and so on. It also unfairly punishes great traffic blogs that just have a bad day.
Sitting underneath the rank is a score. Each night we calculate this score for every blog we're tracking. THe resulting scores are then sorted to assign each of you a unique rank. There is only ever 1 number 1 for example. It's the daily fluctuation of this score that causes ranks to jump and dive day to day.
The change we made fixes this. Daily scores are still calculated, but to get the ranks we take the previous 7 days scores for the blog, average them and then rank the results from 1 to n.
From the sites I've looked at in some detail, this works really well. It smoothes out the rank over time, and it also prevents great blogs getting slammed on a single bad day. We're going to stand up the real ranks site towards the end of the week where you'll be able to view and work with graphs of your site's ranks over time. When we do this you'll see how the changes make spotting trends in your rank very simple.
