If you attempted to use the system most of today, you saw a message from Decius explaining that the system was broke...

Immediately after my earlier post explaining the situation with the OIDs Rattle and I leapt into action with a major overhaul of the database schema and software. Oh how this brought back memories of being an admin. Totally unexpected computer work when you're supposed to have the day off and you have to get it done before you can do anything else. Waiting on development systems to reload while sitting on a speaker phone.... that disconnected manner of teleconferences that span hours while work is getting done.... Random breaks to grab coffee, or dinner, without hanging up the phone... Your eyes getting heavy as you strain your ears to make out the details of the television news which the party on the other end of the line is using for background noise...

We got it done. About 200 lines of new code written and 650 modified. Rattle even managed to work a fix in for the redirection on login and some problems with creating a new account, and I cleaned up some annoyances with the circle interface.

MemeStreams is back. Thank you for your patience, and please let us know if you notice anything strange about the way the site works (or doesn't work) over the next few days.

Things should be back to working normally, and in some places a little better than normal.

Everyone will need to log into the system again. If there are any problems with login, let us know. Since we were trying to push this fix out as soon as possible, it's entirely possible bugs have been missed.

MemeStreams is OK again

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

Contextual searching has been fixed. Whenever you preform a search using the upper right hand search bar, it should be limited to the section of the site you are using. Limited to topic, user, user and topic, circle, et cetera.

MemeStreams now automatically embeds linked videos from iFilm the same way as it does for YouTube, Google Video, and Revver.

However, it is quite annoying that iFilm does not support embedding for all of it's videos. I wanted to post Kaki King, because she is amazing.. But I just get this:

Instead, you are getting Iggy Pop.. And you will be happy about it.

Life is short for a meme, it seems, and unpredictable, to boot.

Unlike baby mammals, a meme cannot expect to go from conception to birth in a standard, more or less fixed period of time. Some memes are born immediately, whereas others may linger in gestation for years on end. Because prenatal care is so poor in the meme world, miscarriage, stillbirth, and infant mortality rates are quite high. Even worse, abortion and infanticide of new memes are commonplace in some quarters.

However, also unlike mammals -- and in fact most higher organisms -- a meme reaches reproductive age only moments after its birth. If it only manages to find its way to a target-rich environment, growth opportunities abound.

Yet even the most successful families of memes can go from pauperdom to dynasty to death to dust, all in the span of a few days.

Fortunately, here at MemeStreams, they don't bury or incinerate our beloved memes of yore. Instead, the crack team of scientists at the Industrial Memetics Institute has developed a highly advanced cryopreservation service. Unlike similar services for humans and other mammals, the service provided by MemeStreams is active today. It allows you -- in fact, anyone -- to reanimate a suspended meme of your choosing, and then to deposit it in the memetic meat market that is your blog.

Sadly, I have found that most MemeStreams users only rarely -- if ever -- avail themselves of the benefits of these remarkable cryorestoration services. As an independent profit center with no annual allocation from the IMI budget, the cryo unit is perpetually at risk of closure. For months now, the unit has been unable to hire staff to replace three of its senior technicians lost to headhunters in Q4FY06.

As part of the upcoming "Reanimemer" promotional campaign aimed at a Q3FY07 turn-around for the ailing cryo unit, I have scoured their voluminous records to provide you with a small sampling of what is presently on offer. I encourage you to plan your own visit soon.

Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised (now, archived here by wayback, and here)

Terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists terrorists. (now at YouTube) -- This video still amazes me.

A business model for MemeStreams

Neurodiversity Forever

... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

The Short Life and Long Death of Memes

Several people have been having problems with posts that contain unicode characters. It turns out that I broke unicode support in the UI update. Forms were passing bad data back to the system when submitted. In our HTML code, this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf=8" />

Should have been this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Oops! My bad. :)

I didn't catch the typo when proof reading the diffs. The problems should go away now. If they don't, let me know...

On the bright side, in the process of debugging the problem we added in better logging capabilities for tracking situations where the code errors out.

There still appear to be problems with some posts when forwarding to multiple users. Those problems have been around for awhile.. They are going to be worked out in a forthcoming update to the posting interface.

We are doing a test of Google Ads on the site. These are only going to stick around if they generate enough revenue to be worth it.

Feedback is welcome.

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