mu.nu - "My Tamagotchi!" she said. "It has to poop."

November 24, 2005

Setting up forums

I know that using some combination of Fantastico and other assorted goodies I can set up a page that runs forums...my only question is how? Step by step from start to finish would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks and happy Thanksgiving.

Posted by: Simon at 08:49 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Snark!

Version 1.2 of Snark!™ - our new trackback filtering system - is up and running.

You can see real-time statistics here

Hooray for Snark!™

Update: Version 1.3 of Snark!™ is now up and running with a high score list in addition to the running totals.

Update: Version 1.4 of Snark!™ offers an automatically generated blacklist.

Update: Version 1.5 of Snark!™ tracks and lists IP addresses as well, though that's only been running for a few minutes so there aren't any addresses listed yet.

Update: Version 1.51 has the added feature of not crashing when there's no spam, a situation that never arose during testing.

Update: Version 1.6 of Snark!™ automatically and permanently blacklists anyone whose spam ranking goes over the magic number.

Update: Version 1.7 keeps track of the effectiveness of the various filters. Those stats are a bit screwy right now because of... Well, because. But they will improve over time.

Update: Version 1.71 fixes some bug or something. I've forgotten.

Update: Version 1.72 makes the decay algorithm fully adaptive. Basically, that means that high-volume spammers are considered particularly annoying. This makes no difference for our internal filtering, but I think makes the stats more reflective of the actual evilness level of particular spammers.

Update: Currently running version 1.84, which addresses all known bugs and inefficiencies. It's able to process 20,000 trackbacks per second, removing roughly 99.9% of spam and so far producing no false positives. It is a thing of beauty.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:53 AM | Comments (25) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 23, 2005

Once Upon A Time

I had a URL to a nifty site that would encode html, php, etc. with ASCII characters so that I could display it on a web page. I think Willie posted the original link, but I could be wrong. If anyone has the URL to that, could you post it in the comments please?

Thanks, Eric - http://grumbles.mu.nu/

Okay, never mind. But, just to make life easier now that I've found it:

http://centricle.com/tools/html-entities/

Posted by: EricC at 12:36 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 22, 2005

Nominate fellow MuNuvians right now

In case you hadn't noticed, it's time for the annual Weblog Awards, hosted by Kevin of Wizbang. The list of MuNu blogs is endless(okay, not really: I'm just oo lazy to type them all in) and there are plenty of categories for which you can nominate your fellow MuNuvians. Here are the categories:


Best Blog
Best New Blog (Established after November 19, 2004)
Best Group Blog
Best Humor/Comics Blog
Best Liberal Blog
Best Conservative Blog
Best Media/Journalist Blog
Best Technology Blog
Best Culture/Gossip Blog
Best Sports Blog
Best Photo Blog
Best LGBT Blog
Best Military Blog
Best Blog Design
Best Podcast ***
Best Video Blog ***
Best Religious Blog ***
Best Parenting Blog ***
Best Law Blog ***
Best Business Blog ***

International
Best Canadian Blog
Best UK Blog
Best European Blog (Non UK)
Best Asian Blog
Best Middle East or Africa Blog
Best Australia or New Zealand Blog
Best Latino, Caribbean, or South American Blog

Ecosystem Based (View the TTLB Ecosystem November 14th snapshot)
Best of the Top 250 Blogs
Best of the Top 251 - 500 Blogs
Best of the Top 501 - 1000 Blogs
Best of the Top 1001 - 1750 Blogs
Best of the Top 1751 - 2500 Blogs
Best of the Top 2501 - 3500 Blogs
Best of the Top 3501 - 5000 Blogs
Best of the Top 5001 - 6750 Blogs
Best of the Top 6751 - 8750 Blogs
Best of the Rest of the Blogs (8751+) ****

*** New categories for 2005.

Get those nominations in now!

Posted by: Physics Geek at 03:33 PM | Comments (18) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Back On Track

In case you found the notice below a little confusing, here's the news: Trackbacks are back in business!

I've just finished hacking together a triple-bypass for the Movable Type / MT Blacklist system we've been suffering from.

The new system isn't amazingly sophisticated, but it does have some useful features:

  • Trackback throttling - more than 5 pings from one place in a minute and they all go in the dumpster.
  • Fast mini-blacklist - stops them before they even go to MT Blacklist.
  • MuNu bypass - no throttling or blacklists for intra-munu pings.
  • Background processing - no waiting ages for pings to go through.
  • No errors, either. Well, them's the breaks.
  • Detailed logging. If we lose your ping, we can find it and fix it.
  • Did I mention fast? Fast fast fast!
  • Less work for Fluffy. Spam floods are a breeze now!
  • Which means that trackbacks don't get shut down!
  • Yay!

Downside? Well, pings can take up to a minute to appear. But then, they used to take a minute to post. Also, if your ping fails for some strange reason, you don't get an error. It just says "Okay!" and drops it down the toilet. So if you have any problems, let me know.

Go for it, Susie!

Update: Doesn't seem to work for trackbacks from Wordpress. I'm not sure why; it seems that Wordpress does something funny/different when it sends the ping. Investigating. I don't know how to use Wordpress.

Update: 30,322 trackbacks received by the new system. 238 were passed on to stage three, where they still need to get past MT Blacklist. There's still quite a bit of crap getting past stage two, but it is weeding out 99.5% of the spam while using 0.4% of the resources of the old system. I count that as a win.

I'll look at tweaking stage two further. That part is all my own code and written in Python, and since it's a generic trackback/comment filtering system, I can easily re-use it in Minx, so the effort won't be wasted. But I think it's good enough for now.

I've tried pinging from MT 2.6, MT 3.1 and Wordpress, and they all went through fine. If you are running something else, feel free to give this post a ping and we'll see how it goes. Remember that it can take up to a minute for your trackback to appear.

Update: New feature that will be going in tonight: Tunable throttling. Right now there's a hard limit: 5 pings from any one (non-munu) source in a batch (which represents one minute) and they all get deleted. But if some spammer sends us 10 pings in one minute and 4 the next minute, the 4 pings go through.

With the new system, it holds a grudge. So if you send 10 pings in one minute, the next minute it still counts you as having sent those pings - less a tunable percentage (currently 10%). So in minute one, you send 10 pings, they get dumped. Minute two, it considers you to have already sent 9 pings, so anything else you send gets dumped and bumps the counter up. At 90% grudge level, it would take 9 minutes before it would let them send even one ping through.

Any number less than 1 gets dropped completely, so people sending a ping here, a ping there, shouldn't have any problems. And as before, it doesn't affect intra-munu pings at all.

Update: Oh yeah, I'm going to expand I've expanded the intra-munu thingy to a more general whitelist, so we can unblock friendly but prolific pingers if need be.

Update: Version 1.1 of the Snark!™ Trackback Filtering System is up and running. When you need to protect a blog that's precious to you, go with the very best: Go Snark!™

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:23 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Trackbacks Are Down Up!

Due to astronomical levels of crappiness inherent in Apache, CGI, Perl and Movable Type.

All the hard work is done; all I have to do is get the script to return a valid XML repsonse. Not only will it not do this, it takes up two seconds of CPU time not doing it.

All it has to do is write one line to a log file, return a five-line XML reply, and quit.

Can it do it? No.

Does it even fail quickly? No.

I'm going to replace it with some Python code and hard-coded SQL.

I'm going to replace it with some direct calls to the Perl CGI library and a switch on request_method() because the trackback script has two functions.

Bah.

It now logs a trackback in 40 milliseconds. Still far slower than I'd like, but 50 times faster than it was. And you're just not going to get much faster with a Perl-based CGI application. To do better you need something like mod_perl, or PHP, or a persistent server. And I'm not going to hack MT to that degree, thanks.

Anyway, I'll let it accumulate trackbacks for a bit and then run program two, and if that works well I'll run program three, and if that works well, I'll set it all to run automagically.

It can't be worse than what we had.

Update:

P-I-N-G-O
P-I-N-G-O
P-I-N-G-O
And Pingo was his name-o!

It works!!!!!!!!!!!

Oops. The call from stage two to stage three bobbled it. Fixy fixy.

No oops - it worked, but the error log went to the wrong place. No problem.

A NEW TRACKBACK SYSTEM IS ARISING! ITS VICTORY IS AT HAND! THERE WILL BE NO DAWN... FOR SPAM!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:01 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Check this out

Check out my iPod version of my blog. I stole the code from someone some time ago. Feel free to steal it from me. Though I don't think it's really all that useful... just a toy...

Posted by: Daniel at 03:49 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 19, 2005

3 Issues

1. When I save a post, it kicks me out to the login screen. So I log back in, and my post is there, saved as a draft, and I have to re-save it.

2. I can not, for the life of me, get a trackback through to anyone running a version of MT higher than ours.

Those two are pre-new server issues, btw.

3. My skin-switcher thingie that Phin installed is broken.

Thanks in advance for any help. And double thanks a million to Pixy for all his hard work. Really, man, you need a tip jar.

UPDATE:

Okay, I figured out the outgoing t/b problem. For some reasons, the spam filters must not like Vince Aut Morire, because when I changed the name of my blog to the Vinnie Musings Pundit Report, the t/b went through to the blogs I'm having trouble with.

Sigh.

Posted by: Vinnie at 04:58 PM | Comments (27) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 18, 2005

New Trackback System

I'll be putting a new trackback system in place this weekend. It's a two-stage process. The original script will simply log the fact that a trackback has been requested and acknowledge it to the sender. Then a second script will come along periodically, read the log of requests, and process them.

How does this help?

Three ways: First, when we get hit by a spam flood, we can get fifteen trackbacks per second. The new script doesn't do any work; it just writes the trackback to a file, which takes a small fraction of a second. This means less work for Fluffy, less chance for trackbacks to get turned off, and so on.

Second, if we get 50 copies of the same trackback, it's certain to be spam, and we can just ignore it without doing any more processing. We don't even need to use the blacklist for this.

Third, there's only one copy of the script that actually applies the trackbacks ever running on the server. Since the server has two processors, no matter how many trackbacks we get, it can't overload the server. It might get behind in its processing, but that's pretty much the worst that can happen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:06 AM | Comments (21) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 17, 2005

OSMuNu

I read a comment over at Ace's from LauraW... she mentioned that it would 'more organic' for a host such as Pixy to sell ads via the MuNu blogger group... That got me to thinking... I would certainly not mind putting up ads over at Madfish Willie's and let the proceeds go to Pixy to help offset hosting costs such as server space, bandwidth, and his labor efforts... I know that some of you already have some sort of blog ads posted, but would the rest of us be willing to participate in some group thingy for Pixy (if he would even consider it)?

Just thinkin out loud is all....

Posted by: Madfish Willie at 07:34 PM | Comments (22) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Time After Time

When configuring the new servers I set them to Sydney time (AEST) because that meant I wouldn't have to keep mentally adding or subtracting 10 or 11 hours every time I looked at something.

Unfortunately, that's screwed things up for other people. So I've set the clock back to GMT.

If suddenly things go really screwy, I had nothing to do with it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:37 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Maybe I'm Just A Dork...

Well, actually I am a dork, but don't tell anyone, ok?

Anyhoo...I've been having some problems with the times on my posts and I was wondering if anyone else has been having the same issue. Since yesterday my blog posts are coming out as if I'd posted them in EST instead of CST---the time zone of discriminating conoisseurs everywhere and my personal favorite since I happen to live in it. I've gone in and resaved my configuration and rebuilt the site, and posts are still coming out stamped in East Coast time.

Anyone have any ideas on this one? Thanks in advance for any help.

Posted by: Kathy at 05:46 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Time Travel?

It seems that ever since the Mu Nu upgrade, the script I have for the daily Day by Day cartoon advances me ahead by about half a day - i.e. the cartoon for today (U.S. Eastern Standard Time) Wed, November 16th doesn't show, but tomorrow's 'toon for Thurs, November 17th shows up as today's strip. Which means there's nothing there because the Nov. 17th strip hasn't been published yet.

I have no idea if it's because the script is somehow set to Australian time. Has anyone else had this problem.

Posted by: Gary at 02:41 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

favicon

Hey Pixy and co. -- is there any way for you (or me) to add a favicon that'll appear in web browser address bars when people visit my site?

Posted by: Rhodey at 12:53 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 16, 2005

Image included on blog entry title

Hey all,

On my old blog (which used MT version 3.14) I figured out where to place the code for a small animated .gif right before the title of each new blog entry (for the main page). But I'll be damned if I can figure it out again on version 2.64!

Any help?

Posted by: Rhodey at 09:53 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Planned Maintenance

Our new hosting company, DedicatedNOW, blessed be their name, will be conducting some maintenance work this Friday.

Midnight to 2AM EDT: Network upgrades - adding new redundant links. They estimate that there will be no more than five minutes of downtime during that period.

2AM to 6AM EDT: Power maintenance. No downtime is expected during this work.

I'll keep an eye on things, but it shouldn't significantly affect us.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:36 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

LifeType Documentations

As I've mentioned, documentation for LifeType - at least, user documentation - is pretty patchy. There is a LifeType wiki, but it's mostly for developers, not users.

I've started putting up some documentation on the plugins on our new tech support forums. I'll add more as soon as I get a chance.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:22 AM | Comments (16) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

November 15, 2005

Um When did Snooze Change His

Everything?

He is now the Skeptics Society Forum. Which is cool, but I've a feeling that isn't exactly the home Jim envisioned. I've tried iit on my blog and on other's blogs. I haven't found any other weird transporter glitches, but I haven't checked everyone.


Posted by: Rachel Ann at 09:29 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

LifeType

Want to play with LifeType? Just browse on over to my.mu.nu and sign up for an account. Offer open only to Munuvians and friends of Munuvia. Spammers will be shot.

Oh yes: This is a test system, running on beta code. If we decided to go with it - which is a distinct possibility - it will be cleaned out and reinstalled, so don't get too carried away.

I'm interested in people's thoughts, particularly on the template system. It's based on the Smarty template engine, which is fast, flexible, and powerful, but yucky. It suffers from the Designed by programmers for programmers mindset.

There are a few other things I don't entirely like about LifeType, but it works, it is free (free of charge and open source), and it actually does what we need. There is no other open source system I know of that does. Most (Wordpress, Textpattern, Pivot) don't do multiple blogs at all. Those that do (Nucleus, b2evolution) don't sufficiently separate the blogs, so you don't get the level of control that you are used to with Movable Type.

Movable Type, and even more, Expression Engine, do what we want, but both are sold under licenses that preclude doing what we do.

The best solution would of course be Minx, which is still progressing (albeit very slowly). If I can jump-start things with LifeType, then even if we move to Minx in a year's time we will have had a year of running on a good system.

Oh yes: LifeType was called pLog until a couple of weeks ago, and they're still tidying up the new release of the code, so it kind of says "pLog" everywhere. Don't worry about it; there will be a new version out shortly and we will be installing that before we go live (if we go live).

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:27 AM | Comments (71) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

Doggone Gone and Done It

Hey, y'all. I have NO idea what happened, but I seem to have broken my blog. One minute it was up and running, and the next, just gibberish. I didn't touch it. I swear. Any pointers out there? Please keep in mind that I'm relatively HTML and EVERYTHING ELSE illiterate. Not like I needed to remind, but I'm just saying. Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Posted by: Alex at 12:55 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)

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