The resolve of our great website is being tested. But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass the test.

Rattle and I are deleting a lot of spam from MemeStreams. A lot. Sometimes, as you may have seen, there are accounts that get created that we have trouble deciding whether or not to delete. We're doing too much of this, and the spammers are cutting the line too closely. Its time to raise the bar.

As you may know, links that get posted to MemeStreams by people with low reputations have nofollow tags that tell search engines not to add any value to those links. I discovered this evening that there was a location where links would not receive a nofollow tag. I patched it. I've also created a new script that will add all low reputation users to robots.txt.
Search engines should not index them at all.

Hopefully this will reduce the attractiveness of this site as a place to post spam.

The war rages on..

The War on MemeStreams Spam

From Decius:

I learned today that SonicWall filters MemeStreams under the category "Hacking/Proxy Avoidance." While these are certainly topics that have been discussed here, Slashdot is not banned under this category, nor is Security Focus, from which live exploits can be downloaded for most disclosed vulnerabilities.

BlueCoat also filters MemeStreams as "unavailable;Hacking;Forum/Bulletin Boards." I have no idea what "unavailable" means. I agree with the "Forum/Bulletin Board" categorization, but again the "Hacking" category raises questions. It only makes sense if its applied consistently. I don't have access to a BlueCoat proxy to check.

Have you seen MemeStreams banned by a web filter? Do you know the vendor and category?

Several people have brought this to our attention. It's already clear that this is effecting users.

If anyone has advice about appealing to the companies providing filtering solutions, chime in...

MemeStreams banned by Web Filters

We've made an update to MemeStreams that hopefully improves the look of the site. There are also some security fixes in here, as well as some new features which should help us fight spam more effectively going forward. In addition, Acidus contributed some improvements to the MemeBox to make it easier to sort and keep track of new messages. We'd also like to thank Eric White for some HTML input that helped us improve the look of the site and Terratogen for some graphics work.

As always, let us know if you discover anything that isn't working right...

(Safari users may find some color misalignment. We're going to address that in a future update. We wanted this out and we decided to optomize for FF and IE for the time being. Safair literally displays some colors differently in some contexts.)

MemeStreams Look and Feel update

When I woke up this morning none of my domains were resolving. My websites, including MemeStreams, and email, were down. Ironically, GoDaddy told IDG on Friday that they don't need to apply DST patches to their machines because they are located in Arizona. I'm not sure why lack of DST patches would cause such a total outage. Its possible that there is another explanation, but regardless, this outage adds to other concerns about the reliability of GoDaddy has an operator of critical infrastructure.

The above are Decius's comments.

I am now fed-up^2 with GoDaddy. What registrars are people currently switching to?

The time is now 1:16 PM Eastern Daylight Savings Time (newly adjusted), on Sunday, March 11, 2007 - and it appears to me that none of my dozens of domain names registered and/or served at GoDaddy.com are working.I strongly suspect the problem is related to today's change to Daylight Savings Time. A recent story in PCWorld described some concerns that had been raised about GoDaddy.com's readiness for the time switch.

Slashdot coverage of the outage.

Update: It appears this was a DoS attack.. Not an outage related to the time switch.

GoDaddy outage impacts MemeStreams

Rather than being a liability, however, social networks can be used to personalize and tailor information to individual users, and drive the development of new social search algorithms.... Digg can create personalized front pages for every user that are based on his or her friends’ readings. This will finally free individuals from “tyranny of the majority” which results from viewing a common global front page.

We've been doing that since 2001.

Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg

Our recent update went out with a bug that sometimes cropped up when replying to posts which resulted in a 500 server error. This bug has been addressed. Please let us know if you see anything odd with the site.

Reply bug fixed

Image posting has been re-enabled! Post away. We've tested on IE, Firefox, Safari, SideKick and Nintendo Wii, and the feature seems to work on all of these platforms. We still have some bugs we're still tracking with the most recent update, but we should have those cleared up over the course of Sunday...

Image Posting has been re-enabled!

Decius just posted a minor update to MemeStreams. There were a number of circles in MemeStreams that were broken. Many did not have names. These have all been deleted. If you did not have any circles before, you now have three: Co-Workers, Friends, and Interesting People, which are the same three that new users now get automatically. If you had circles before, your circles should not have changed. Please let us know if you observe any problems with these changes.

MemeStreams Update - Circle Changes

Decius just pointed out that MemeStreams turned five years old recently, and none of us remembered to say anything about it...

MemeStreams was first openned to the public on December 5th, 2001, so December 5th, 2006 was MemeStreams' 5th birthday. I'm sorry I didn't think of this until now. We're certainly not the media moguls that we thought we'd be when we started this thing, but its kept our attention and interest for a long time mostly because of all of the other people who hang out here who have interesting things to say and contribute. We thank all of you for being a part of it. Here's to another interesting 5 years!

We should have waited two days to go live with the site.. We could have made tasteless jokes about the day living in infamy.

However, according to Wikipedia, we do have some things we can use for bad jokes:

1848 - California Gold Rush: In a message before the U.S. Congress, US President James K. Polk confirms that large amounts of gold had been discovered in California.

1933 - Prohibition ends: Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to enact the amendment (this overturned the 18th Amendment which had outlawed alcohol in the United States).

1945 - Flight 19 is lost in the Bermuda Triangle.

Walt Disney was also born..

MemeStreams 5th Birthday

The MemeStreams user interface has gotten a much needed makeover. The navigation of the site has been greatly simplified. The posting process has been made more intuitive. The site logo has been updated. A box on pages showing site activity has been enabled.

More changes are on the way...

Big New Feature