Couple of Updates on the Spam Front

Our Russian script kiddie friend has spurred us into adding a few tools we should have had a while ago. We've added a Captcha for new registrations in order to filter out some of the non-humans who have been joining (and spamming) recently, and we've also added a lightweight IP banning tool to our admin site that allows admins to block troublemaker IP addresses from hitting the site (before we had to go directly through our firewall software, which was a pain).

As annoying as our bored little friend was, at least he/she spurred us to build some useful tools.

Under a mild (Russian) spam attack

Someone in Russia has been attacking us the last few nights with a rating script from various IP addresses. We're aware of the issue and are working on it.

Can't we all just be friends?

FB Filter

Guys, the FB filter is live on the recent reviews page. The default is "RateItAll.com" which shows you only reviews posted to RateItAll. Clicking RateItAll network will show you reviews from everywhere - which for now, means RateItAll AND Facebook. We'll be adding other sites over time as well.

Invasion of the FB'ers

The RateItAll Facebook application is starting to get a little traction. The swarm of new members with nicknames starting with "FB" are all using RateItAll for Facebook.

I think what we're seeing is a glimpse of what RateItAll would be like if it were a mainstream site with hundreds of new reviews posted per minute.

If you play this out, it would seem that the ability to filter the recent reviews page by your trusted network would be an important feature.

Time Stamps

It seems that one of hour servers thought the time was an hour ahead of the others, and another was off by 3 minutes or so.

This resulted in the order of reviews on the recent reviews page to be all screwed up, with newer reviews sometimes appearing under older reviews.

This should be fixed now.

(we'll put this one in the "only if you're REALLY paying attention category.)

Behind the Scenes Stuff

Over the last ten days we've made a couple of important changes to the backend of the site. The result is that RIA pages are loading as fast as I've ever seen them load.

I hired the best database guy I knew to come in and optimize our 1) topic pages; 2) profile pages; 3) item pages; and 4) recent comment pages.

Previously, large user profile pages (no offense GTH) and long topic pages were taking a long time to load. Now they're popping up in under three seconds (and much faster than that on the server side).

Also, we've finally fixed our mail server so that submitting a review doesn't hang while it waits to send out any related alerts.

The site is humming right now - I hope you guys notice :)