Holy Cow Dude! This will be big!

OK, I can't say too much more about this for now but Vladimir and I have two projects coming up that promise to be our biggest yet. We have one almost done and the other is just getting going. These are both way more ambitious than anything we have done before. Stay tuned. :-)

On another note, this has been a very interesting week. We had some problems with Pingoat this week. These problems were mostly caused by too much traffic using the offsite RPC system we have. This and the new increased traffic we had onsite which was the result of good SEO work and problems with our main competitor which was down because of simular reasons.

What we first decided to do was to eliminate the RPC altogether. This is something we had talked about for a couple months. Well, I say eliminate but that is unclear. We may bring it back in some other form. Anyways, when we stopped the off site pinging, that still used our servers, the users came to pingoat and pinged onsite.

What happened then was hundreds of people became blacklisted, meaning they couldn't use pingaot because the spam filters determined the blog was spam. The thing we didn't realize was how much more strict the filters were when pinging on site. These were people who had been using the service and weren't considered spam. So it was surprising for both us and the users. The users were not happy either. :-(

So what happened was the blacklisted users were told to go to the goat forum and get whitelisted so they could use pingoat again.

The reason for the spam filters is to try to stop auto blogging software from using pingoat. Or bots. So Vladimir came up with a solution: when someone is blacklisted, instead of having to go to the forum to get whitelisted, which can take time, the user could immediately whitelist themselves by using an image verification system. Smart. I said OK, lets do it. And it was done fairly quickly and for the most part people were very understanding (Thanks to a good post by Vladimir in the goatlog)

Ipings.com continues to grow and it will be involved in one of our new sites.

Tim