I'm tagging this post as a "bug fix" because the search results that we had before were kind of hit-or-miss. But now things are smoking! Not only is search fast, it's also much more accurate. We search across several fields:

• Members - screen name, nickname, member ID, and tags
• Communities - display name, site name, site ID, site URL, and tags

The index supports alternate spelling (color and colour) so you can be sure to get both results.

We'll be adding more features (including support for UTF8) over the next week so stay tuned. As always, let us know via the Contact Form if you see anything out of whack.

The number one requested feature on our Suggestion Board is a site redesign. We readily admit that our engineering roots show through, emphasis on new features and performance leave us short in the rounded corners and cute animation department.

Today we're pleased to announce that we're launching a new design based on extensive research and field testing on live bunnies. We've settled on a look that is both pleasing to the eye yet does not sacrifice functionality. It also goes great with a pair of khaki dress pants or thick corduroys if that's how you roll.

A couple of us are active members in the Great Color Wars of 2008 and I'd love to say that was the inspiration but Todd actually hatched this plan several days before the Great Call Up. When word of a Plaid Team broke out on Twitter, we took it as a sign.

And now a challenge to you, my dear reader. See if you can find the Easter Egg on the site that leads to the deeper meaning and significance of our gesture. First person to leave a comment on this post with the correct answer wins a small token of our appreciation.

UPDATE: In case you missed it, here's what our pages looked like today. Clicking on the MyBlogLog logo took you to the Prepare Ship for Lightspeed clip from the movie, Spaceballs.

(photo borrowed from Environmental tip of the week)

Over the next week we are upgrading hardware in our datacenters. We do not anticipate any downtime but some of you may experience 'less-than-snappy' (yes, that's the technical term) response times for our widgets and web site while we shuffle data around. Here's the deal:

First - upgrade West coast datacenter and copy mass quantities of data from East coast to the West coast. During this time, anyone that normally would hit our West coast datacenter will be  re-directed to the East coast.

Second - upgrade East coast datacenter and copy mass quantities of data from
West coast to the East coast. During this time, anyone that normally
would hit our East coast datacenter will be re-directed to the West coast.

I'll update this blog post as we work our way through so come back here for the latest status.

UPDATE: 2/1 4pm PST - so we've finished everything on the West coast and are bringing these servers back online. Moving on to the East coast so we'll be redirecting everyone that normally hits our East coast colo over to the West coast while we peer under the hood.

UPDATE: 2/5 Noon PST - all done! We'll now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

1. Login to MyBlogLog.com (if you haven't already merged your account with a YahooID, this will be your chance to get that out of the way)
2. Click Edit Profile
3. Click Change Image
4. Upload your new image, crop, and save

Sweetness!

Shoemoney's picture is now featured on our Members page, we unbanned his
IP address, and we at MyBlogLog hope to return to the constructive
dialog that we once had.  Like others who have apologized for their
contribution to this controversy, we believe in redemption and hope
ShoeMoney does as well.

But first, I owe everyone who was affected a massive apology.  All the success that has come to MyBlogLog has been because of your passion for our service and I hate when something happens that causes that love to diminish.  We left a hole in the code and a lot of people received a bunch of irrelevant email notifications because of it.  Our bad.

In order to describe what happened this weekend, it's worth laying out a few pieces of context.  First, in the States it was a three day weekend, so everyone was basking in the thought of staying offline for a few days and coming back recharged.  Todd and John were back in Orlando at a wedding and Steve, who just moved out here, is busy looking for a place to live.  And I'm splitting my free time between unpacking and giving my wife time off from watching our 16-month-old.  No one was looking online.

Saturday evening, a member discovered an exploit where you could send someone a request to join their community as a co-author and then automatically approve the request.  In other words, someone (dare I call them a jackass) could force you to be a co-author of their community.  I have no idea why they would do this, other than a negligible bump in marketing, but who ever said jackasses made sense?

Early Sunday evening we were alerted to the problem.  Unfortunately, we didn't grok the problem initially.  We just thought that someone had used a script to send out thousands of requests for co-authors, which we promptly shuttered.  It wasn't until almost midnight, when Steve had gotten back home and Todd had just landed from a cross-country flight, that we understood the bigger exploit, which we also promptly shut down.  But it was too late by then, because the flood of emails had already struck.

This grief probably belongs in some frickin' griefing hall of fame (with jackasses on both sides of the entrance, mind you):

1. Send out thousands of emails to random people requesting that they co-author your community
2. Force-join them all as co-authors
3. Someone gets upset about being force-joined and leaves an angry message on the community, and EVERY single person gets an email alert that there's a message waiting for them (because they're all co-authors)
4. Now you have dozens of angry people, all leaving angry messages on the community page, resulting in DOZENS of emails alerts being sent out to each victim
5. And so on...

If you were one of the people that received a couple dozen email alerts about new messages, I am really sorry.  It has all been fixed and no one should be able to force join anyone else again.  We've rolled back all the new co-authors since Friday night so no one should find themselves co-author of something random.  And while we can't pull all of those emails back into the server, we've deactivated them, so even if you mistakenly click on the approval link, you still won't become a co-author.

But we're not stopping there.  As members who read this blog regularly know, we've been trying to figure out how to reduce the "friend" and "join" and "message" spam for weeks now.  Pretty much since last November.  What's tough is that a lot of the behaviors that tech-savvy members find infuriating (such as people sending messages to random recipients asking them to check out their community) are actually enjoyed by casual members.  So we have to find a balance.

The team has spent the bulk of their holiday working out a plan of action for the next couple of weeks based upon feedback from a lot of users.  I invite you to comment on the plan below and let us know if you think we've gone too far anywhere and if we've missed something that you think is vital.

MyBlogLog's Six Point Plan to Spiritual Nirvana:

1) We're going to post an official Terms of Service (ToS) and hold people accountable.  It's hard kicking people's asses for breaking the rules when the rules aren't posted anywhere.  That will change.  Things like blatant advertising in profiles will not be tolerated.

2) By default, you now see only message from your own contacts. You'll be able to click a radio button to see messages from everyone else.  Further, you'll only receive an email alert when a contact leaves you a message.  Lastly, public views of your profile will reflect your message view setting, so other people viewing your profile won't see random requests to visit their community or site.

3) We will include the text of the comment and associated controls (delete,reply, etc) in the alert email.  You won't have to go to MyBlogLog to manage comments on your profile or community page any more.

4) We will limit users to only five requests for co-authors a day.  If you want to request more co-authors, come back tomorrow.

5) We will limit users to join 15 communities and add 15 contacts during any day.  The others will still be here tomorrow.

6) After the first five are complete, we will set up a comment approval system where community members can automatically post messages and everyone else's comments gets queued for approved (a la Typepad comments).

I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect.  Some of it feels a little arbitrary (15 joins per day) but it's the best that we've got for now.  Of course, we'll continue to listen to feedback after these new measures are deployed and if something is too strict or too lenient, we'll make more changes.

Here's hoping the next three-day weekend is nothing but pleasant messages and happy surfers.

Eric

But first, I owe everyone who was affected a massive apology.  All the success that has come to MyBlogLog has been because of your passion for our service and I hate when something happens that causes that love to diminish.  We left a hole in the code and a lot of people received a bunch of irrelevant email notifications because of it.  Our bad.

In order to describe what happened this weekend, it's worth laying out a few pieces of context.  First, in the States it was a three day weekend, so everyone was basking in the thought of staying offline for a few days and coming back recharged.  Todd and John were back in Orlando at a wedding and Steve, who just moved out here, is busy looking for a place to live.  And I'm splitting my free time between unpacking and giving my wife time off from watching our 16-month-old.  No one was looking online.

Saturday evening, a member discovered an exploit where you could send someone a request to join their community as a co-author and then automatically approve the request.  In other words, someone (dare I call them a jackass) could force you to be a co-author of their community.  I have no idea why they would do this, other than a negligible bump in marketing, but who ever said jackasses made sense?

Early Sunday evening we were alerted to the problem.  Unfortunately, we didn't grok the problem initially.  We just thought that someone had used a script to send out thousands of requests for co-authors, which we promptly shuttered.  It wasn't until almost midnight, when Steve had gotten back home and Todd had just landed from a cross-country flight, that we understood the bigger exploit, which we also promptly shut down.  But it was too late by then, because the flood of emails had already struck.

This grief probably belongs in some frickin' griefing hall of fame (with jackasses on both sides of the entrance, mind you):

1. Send out thousands of emails to random people requesting that they co-author your community
2. Force-join them all as co-authors
3. Someone gets upset about being force-joined and leaves an angry message on the community, and EVERY single person gets an email alert that there's a message waiting for them (because they're all co-authors)
4. Now you have dozens of angry people, all leaving angry messages on the community page, resulting in DOZENS of emails alerts being sent out to each victim
5. And so on...

If you were one of the people that received a couple dozen email alerts about new messages, I am really sorry.  It has all been fixed and no one should be able to force join anyone else again.  We've rolled back all the new co-authors since Friday night so no one should find themselves co-author of something random.  And while we can't pull all of those emails back into the server, we've deactivated them, so even if you mistakenly click on the approval link, you still won't become a co-author.

But we're not stopping there.  As members who read this blog regularly know, we've been trying to figure out how to reduce the "friend" and "join" and "message" spam for weeks now.  Pretty much since last November.  What's tough is that a lot of the behaviors that tech-savvy members find infuriating (such as people sending messages to random recipients asking them to check out their community) are actually enjoyed by casual members.  So we have to find a balance.

The team has spent the bulk of their holiday working out a plan of action for the next couple of weeks based upon feedback from a lot of users.  I invite you to comment on the plan below and let us know if you think we've gone too far anywhere and if we've missed something that you think is vital.

MyBlogLog's Six Point Plan to Spiritual Nirvana:

1) We're going to post an official Terms of Service (ToS) and hold people accountable.  It's hard kicking people's asses for breaking the rules when the rules aren't posted anywhere.  That will change.  Things like blatant advertising in profiles will not be tolerated.

2) By default, you now see only message from your own contacts. You'll be able to click a radio button to see messages from everyone else.  Further, you'll only receive an email alert when a contact leaves you a message.  Lastly, public views of your profile will reflect your message view setting, so other people viewing your profile won't see random requests to visit their community or site.

3) We will include the text of the comment and associated controls (delete,reply, etc) in the alert email.  You won't have to go to MyBlogLog to manage comments on your profile or community page any more.

4) We will limit users to only five requests for co-authors a day.  If you want to request more co-authors, come back tomorrow.

5) We will limit users to join 15 communities and add 15 contacts during any day.  The others will still be here tomorrow.

6) After the first five are complete, we will set up a comment approval system where community members can automatically post messages and everyone else's comments gets queued for approved (a la Typepad comments).

I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect.  Some of it feels a little arbitrary (15 joins per day) but it's the best that we've got for now.  Of course, we'll continue to listen to feedback after these new measures are deployed and if something is too strict or too lenient, we'll make more changes.

Here's hoping the next three-day weekend is nothing but pleasant messages and happy surfers.

Eric

For the moment, if you want to know who has added you as a friend without you responding, check out your page. If you have any unrequited contacts, there's a section called "My Admirers." Just click on the photos there and you can make those people your contacts too.

If there are replacement Friending notifications that you'd like us to add, please let us know.

For the moment, if you want to know who has added you as a friend without you responding, check out your page. If you have any unrequited contacts, there's a section called "My Admirers." Just click on the photos there and you can make those people your contacts too.

If there are replacement Friending notifications that you'd like us to add, please let us know.