Month: August 2007

When ezApologists Fall Out

| Richard

Ouch! One of the people running what appears to be a semi-official Yuku forum, Ben, has dared to question whether ezboard, Inc. should be continuing to release new features when the present Yuku software is so full of bugs.

It’s a very good point and immensely ironic given that the reason touted by ezboard, Inc. behind moving to a new platform from ezboard’s Smalltalk platform was that there were so many bugs in it and that fixing one bug would create another.

Maybe it’s not the development platform but the developers who are at fault?

So when Ben asks the developers to fix some of the long-standing bugs rather than reeasing new features, one of the long-term, sycophantic, happy-clappy ezApologists, “favafoyo” jumps in to say that users would be bored with the same feature set (even if it was working properly):

“if, for six months, nothing but bugs were fixed in pushes, users would become bored with the system”

Yes, you read that properly - users enjoy the excitement of buggy software!

When Ben calls them on this and worse still says “Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!”, the ezApologist comes right back saying:

“I don’t enter the bug forum often but I have personally never seen a bug last very long… I think based on yuku’s bug fixing history, we can be sure they will be fixed in time.

Having said that, if there are six months worth of bugs to be fixed, does anyone else find that concerning?!

I hope you are joking..”

Yes Ben! How dare you question the mighty ezboard, Inc.!

A pity then to let the facts get in the way of a good argument, but then Ben is easily able to point out that bugs are left unanswered in the forum for months and that occasional workarounds are noted much later that are buggy themselves.

More Excellent Yuku Customer Service

| Richard

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

So when one of the Yuku developers writes:

“You may have noticed slowness in the past few weeks. So many new people!”

…he is supposedly not blaming Yuku’s treacle performance on the number of people choosing to post messages on Yuku. Ah, right. Well he had me fooled (amongst other people too). Or at least, so says Yuku Customer Service [sic] person Alison “Let It Rip” Harrison. No, the reason for the slowness is … er…

“That’s not actually the explanation for the slowness. I believe that there are a few different reasons for the slowness, depending on what you’re experiencing. They are still looking into it.”

Ah right. Crystal clear!

But wait! She’s clearly on a roll. Yuku has been classified as a dating site for a while now by a large provider of enterprise gateway security solutions, no doubt because of the user profiles and all the dating site link adverts they inevitably generate. Despite customers raising this as an issue, Yuku’s half-hearted attempts at getting themselves re-classified - two e-mails in around 6 months it would appear - have accomplished nothing. So after throwing a hissy fit, she fails to answer another point raised in a message thread on this subject:

“Mind you, board owners were also once promised that we’d have the option to be able to back up board data to our home computers. It seems that the Big Man no longer thinks that’s necessary either.”

Alison doesn’t answer that point of course, but then backups have never been their strong point, have they?

In other news, Yuku’s image server has given up the ghost and it appears that Yuku servers crashing might be a regular occurence. I wonder how bad it’ll be when they import all the ezboards over? Maybe some more investment might not be a bad idea (other than requiring funds to pay for it).

Stopping the Leechers

| Richard

I was looking at the traffic for some of my sites the other day and spotted a lot of bandwidth (relatively) being used by one particular site. Now that site only really serves up a script to convert RSS feeds to JavaScript files so that I can them embed news items from selected sources into some client sites.

So I looked at the web stats. for that site and discovered that nearly all the traffic was coming from a site in China. I followed a couple of the referring links and found that the pages were basically just generating page after page of potential search terms with embedded news feeds presumably to serve ads. on those pages.

That does beg the question that if they are intelligent to code those pages or that system, why aren’t they intelligent enough to simply add the scripts to their own site and serve them from there?

Now my site is hosted on a regular Linux box running Apache Web Server, so it was a fairly straightforward task to simply block all traffic from that domain name using an .htaccess file with this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?baddomain\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

So the next day when I checked the stats., there were many thousands of Failed Referrer entries where the code was no longer being leeched by them. Job done!

But it did then appear that my site had some particular attraction to them because they then started running the scripts on a different domain! Now, my first thought was to simply amend the .htaccess file to read as follows:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?baddomain\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?anotherbadone\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

But I realised I could end up playing cat and mouse with them for life, so instead I have now set the .htaccess file to only allow specific referring domains access to the scripts by using this code:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?gooddomain\.co\.uk [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?anothergoodone\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

By adding the “!”, the expression now says “if the referrer is not gooddomain, then…”. The only difficulty for me then is making sure there are matching entries for all the legitimate referrers (trickier as one of the sites has multiple domain names).

We’ll see how we get on with this.

[edited to add]

And lo and behold! The blocking is working well, especially as the Leecher in question, hosted by NetEase.com, Inc., has now started doing it with a third domain name.

Re-arranging Deckchairs on the Titanic

| Richard

aka The ezboard Shuffle

It starts! Regular ezboard users will be aware of the ol’ ezboard shuffle: people complain about the slow speed of their ezboard and it gets shifted to a different server until that server slows right down and then boards are moved again, etc. ad infinitum.

So I suppose that the news that they’ve started doing this on Yuku already - and remember, kids, it’s still not finally released yet - should come as no surprise really. After all, they’ve been reeeeeaaaally slow over there for ages now, blaming users and indeed search engines for the treacle-like performance.

Hey ezboard! Here’s a thought: how about getting some servers and more connectivity instead? Oh yes, that would mean spending money…