For those that want to know how to get RSS, just add ?xml=rss to the end of your forum URL. For example: This site's URL is http://www.network54.com/Forum/62534 thus its RSS feed is http://www.network54.com/Forum/62534?xml=rss. In version 2 (the big site redesign that is totally remaking the forums service) we will have more up-to-date versions of RSS as well as ATOM.

Years and years ago we also had an XML-RPC API setup for a couple clients that was then changed into a SOAP based web service. We are also looking at reworking that again for Premier clients. We'll have to see what the demand is for that. It may slip toward version 2.1.

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Well, the Chinese are not back (see previous post about China). The Great FireWall of China seemed to notice our change of IP address rather quickly. That got us thinking about how they make it work. Do they block the domain name in DNS? Do they reload the DNS names all the time and block other IPs that the DNS resolves to? If so, does that mean if we changed our DNS to resolve to the same IPs as, say cn.yahoo.com that the chinese yahoo site would get blocked by China? And if so, what would happen if we (or any site that was censored) resolved to the private IPs of WalMart's corporate offices? Could then no one in China communicate with WalMart?

Anyone in China that could shed some light on this? Well, since no one in China (except for those in Hong Kong) can read this, I guess the proper question is: does anyone know someone in China that they can ask?

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Chris and I have such public email addresses that I think we get more spam than 99% of the general population. Last week Chris was going through the spam, inspecting it headers, message, etc. The one thing about spam is that they all have a link. To get a response, they try to get you to a website. Well, at least from our own set of spam messages, it seems that a majority of the email either comes from or goes to China.

So we were thinking about quick ways to eliminate half our spam with this information. One idea is to scan messages and resolve the domain names of the links inside. If they go to China, then delete. We have the ability to convert IP addresses to geographic locations (post in the admin forum to see an example, or if you have a forum, your can check out your stats with the flash-based world map that plots it for you).

Then today, when using that same statistical plot of country data on a world map, we noticed that we have hardly any Chinese traffic this month. We have been officially censored and blocked! Yet the damn spam keeps coming! Just when our blood was about to boil, we got an idea. The block is on just an IP address. So we revered the IP address of our web and email servers.

Guess what? Now the half million Chinese can talk about whatever they want again. And China blocked a large chuck of our spam. Not the zombies across the USA, but a good chunk that actually came from China.

Now who want to write a Spamassassin 3.0 module that will delete messages with links that point to China (or anywhere else of your choosing)?

Welcome back our Chinese friends!

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If I didn't have to think about advertising so much, we would have so many more features done so much faster. Well, not really, since I would be out on the street. At that point, nothing would be done.

If only...

If only deals lasted longer. A good paying long lasting deal (say a year). Then we would have many uninterrupted months of concentrating on other things. New features. Stickies (which works but is not fast enough to make live – yet).

If only we had a much larger uptake of select accounts. For $1/mo they get no ads, custom pictures, etc. I’d like for them to get more too. Like being able to search non-premier forums (though that is a costly feature to do). Then we could add even more things like new styles.

Well, we are doing all these things anyhow, just slower than we would like.

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I've been revisiting the new design for users, groups, and privileges. Users are logins but might include email addresses as identifiers in order to do something more evite-esque. That part may very well wait until v2.5 or v3 when we do multiple-ids. More importantly, groups can now have three different kinds of members: users (logins right now), IP addresses (with subnet range?), and geographic areas (like only people in California/USA or only people with known anonymisers). Groups will get better breakdown of privileges and in v2 there will be a block group. Still have yet to figure out what to do when people belong to several groups with varying privileges...

I am very inclined to show the header and footer when people are blocked so they can login to get past it, but this will be different than it works now, so some people will be unhappy. On the flip side, other people have been asking for this. We'll have to see how this plays out...

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Is is so annoying to find your own errors. I found one security bug today and one other bug that prevented some threads from showing their locked icon on forum index pages. This code cleanup and auding is bearing fruit. I thought it might just be a lot of work, but it is helping quite a bit. Everything is coming along really nice. The new styles are exciting; I keep seeing the improvements when I update and commit my changes. Need to have better blog styles though...

Steven Roussey
N54

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I've queued up the server to add a proxy ip field in the database for all posts. I'll have to look around elsewhere for IP numbers being stored, I can't think of any off the top of my head right now though. This will be helpful for when we add searching a forum by ip that it checks both, for displaying in the message/thread pages, and for use in the new group/blocking system.

I'm not sure if I will backport it into the live site's source tree or not. Trying to stay focuesed on v2...

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