Temporary rollback
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Posted:May 16, 2006 10:32 am
Last Updated:Jul 29, 2006 5:23 am
86778 Views
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As you might have noticed, we had to revert back to the older version of groups and friends network as the software over-powered the 2000 computers that run this site. We will work hard today to address the issues and hopefully upgrade it again as soon as possible. Just the fact that the software was up for many hours means that we are close
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21
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New Friends, Groups, and Blog upgrades live!
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Posted:May 16, 2006 12:13 am
Last Updated:Jul 30, 2006 1:55 am
87064 Views
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After weeks of development, we are finally live with upgrades to friends, groups, and blogs.
Friend network - If either side of a friendship removes the other, the "friendship" is over for both. - "Cool New People" will now show samples of members near you who are friendly. - Fixed testimonials so that they show up on your profile (bug). - Fixed friends presentation on profiles so a nice selection of your friends show up. - Friends can be sorted by Date Accepted , Last Visit, Handle, Age, Gender, Location, and Title. - Software optimized to greatly speed up the time needed to show pages of friends (for members with more then 500 friends). - Can remove pending and declined invites to others (sorted lots of ways including Date Sent)
Groups - All listings of people include links to their blogs - When viewing active members of a group, you'll only see the members who's profiles are on (you will still see posts made by them). - Very large groups should see considerably faster page loads of group members. - Can sort group members by Date Joined, Last Visit, Number of Posts, Handle, Thumbnail, Age, Sex, Profile Title and Location. - Banned members should be thwarted to quit and rejoin the group.
Blogs
Uploaded photos in your blogs can now be clicked on to view a larger version of it (only photos loaded since the upgrades).
Really want to thank you all for your support, feedback and patience during this process. The upgrades are the first step in improving the experience in these areas - expect improvements to continue!
As a note, we are currently working on improving site speed related to these changes (have to be live before can optimize distribution/etc).
Andrew
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17
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Launch attempt on Monday
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Posted:May 14, 2006 10:26 pm
Last Updated:Jul 29, 2006 6:27 pm
85144 Views
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After another week of testing, coding, and releasing on other sites, we are finally ready to launch the upgraded groups and friend network code early on Monday. Spent the last few days adding:
Friend network - If either side of a friendship removes the other, the "friendship" is over for both. - "Cool New People" will now show samples of members near you who are friendly. - Fixed testimonials so that they show up on your profile (bug). - Fixed friends presentation on profiles so a nice selection of your friends show up. - Friends can be sorted by Date Accepted , Last Visit, Handle, Age, Gender, Location, and Title. - Software optimized to greatly speed up the time needed to show pages of friends (for members with more then 500 friends). - Can remove pending and declined invites to others (sorted lots of ways including Date Sent)
Groups - All listings of people include links to their blogs - When viewing active members of a group, you'll only see the members who's profiles are on (you will still see posts made by them). - Very large groups should see considerably faster page loads of group members. - Can sort group members by Date Joined, Last Visit, Number of Posts, Handle, Thumbnail, Age, Sex, Profile Title and Location. - Banned members should be thwarted to quit and rejoin the group.
We've also added about $100K of extra computers to handle the extra processing. I'm confident that this launch will be successful!
Update - we did our first launch attempt at noon and noticed login problems so we rolled back, fixing a few performance bugs, and will launch again mid afternoon.
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16
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Status of upgrades to groups and friend network
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Posted:May 7, 2006 8:32 pm
Last Updated:May 14, 2006 2:28 am
87164 Views
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As you might have noticed, the much anticipated upgrades didn't go live last week. Here's what happened and the current status (for those who don't want to read the details, we are going to try to upgrade again Monday/Tuesday of this coming week)... starting with smaller sites.
Both: Currently, the site displays members of groups or friend networks regardless if that member's profile is available or if they are still a member of the site. Doing this makes it easier to get a count of members (b/c we don't have to check if each is active). The new code will check to see the status of each member before showing it to you. While it's fast for small groups and networks, those with 10,000+ members bog down. Much of our work this past week was to find ways to speed this up (the way databases work, if any pages are slow, it could slow down currently fast pages).
The new upgrades will let you sort groups and friends by last login, age, date joined network, handle, etc.
One thing people will notice right away is that the number of friends/members shown on main pages will be different than what they see on friends/member lists. This is because the larger number is the total number of candidates and the smaller is only the number of members who have an active profile. While we put text on the page to explain things, there will be people who freak out.
Group Changes: - Very large groups will automatically have activity requirements for members to be shown as active. This is helpful for groups with 100,000 "members" who don't contribute to the group as well as helps speed up the display of members. - The format of group members will also change and look more similar to search result listings (with links to view blogs, etc).
Friend Network Changes:
- We will only show the most recent 100 invites at a time. Some members get thousands of invites that they don't respond to. By requiring a decision on the first 100 before seeing more, members will know if their invites are accepted earlier. We will also delete invites that are older than 3 months.
- One delay has been in internal debate on how friend "links" are maintained. One-way verses Two-way. Currently, if either party of a friendship removes the other from his/her list, the removed person still sees the other in his/her list. Doing this enables people to keep track of "potential" friends but can get confusing. If we break both links when either member cuts the friend link, then friends would "disappear" from the member's list. I'm personally leaning towards making this change (feedback please?) but it will not be part of this release.
Friends and groups code has been around for over five years and had too many patches on patches added. Before fixing bugs and adding features, the goal is to simplify the software. This will make future improvements easier to do. We have reduced the size of the software by over 4,000 lines since this process started three weeks ago.
I share member's frustration that the improvements didn't make it live last week. We just want to ensure that the upgrades will be an improvement (faster, less buggy, and more capability). I'm not only the CEO, I'm a member too... will do all I can to help get upgrades live as soon as possible. Thanks so much for your patience.
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22
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Delays in groups and friends this weekend
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Posted:Apr 29, 2006 7:13 pm
Last Updated:Jul 1, 2007 10:39 am
86545 Views
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You might have noticed that when you join groups or add friends, they don't show up for a few hours. This is due to some database problems that we are working on. Turns out that updating the databases with more info in preparation of the updates next week is too much for the 40 database servers. We are currently upgrading the cluster with more servers as well as trying to optimize some software.
While this jepardizes launch on Tuesday, we will be working all weekend to make as much progress as possible.
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21
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Upgrade update
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Posted:Apr 27, 2006 10:09 pm
Last Updated:Apr 29, 2006 11:37 am
82817 Views
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We released the new software today for an hour and there were some problems on the site so we reverted back to previous version. Depending on how quickly we can determine the cause on Friday, we will attempt another push by 2pm. Otherwise, will push again next tuesday. If you want to see what the next look is for friends lists and group members, take a look at your account on Friendfinder.com's site.
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3
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Groups and friends network changes update
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Posted:Apr 24, 2006 10:25 pm
Last Updated:Apr 27, 2006 10:11 pm
81055 Views
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Just wanted to give a heads-up on upcoming changes to groups and friends network. Our first set of changes are to enable better sorting (e.g., by last visit) of member lists. To enable this, we had to make major changes to the structure of the databases which had grown to almost 100 million rows. Unfortunately, this will either be a very smooth and happy transition or very bumpy. We will be rolling out the changes on smaller sites on Wednesday, and if smooth roll out to this one on Thursday.Also, we've put several of the developers on "fix existing bugs" jobs for the next two weeks so the next release should address many issues. I really appreciate all the member feedback and support and exciting for the improvements to come.
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13
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Browsing blogs by keywords is now live
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Posted:Apr 10, 2006 10:00 am
Last Updated:Apr 11, 2006 7:40 pm
80911 Views
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While I posted about a sneak peak a few days ago, browsing blogs by keywords is now live. You can click the keyword link on the main page and on any blog and see which words/phrases are often used by bloggers. It's an interesting way to see what's in the mind of bloggers. They keyword database updates every night so it might take a while before new words are indexed.
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6
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Swapping out active poll table for something different
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Posted:Apr 9, 2006 9:06 pm
Last Updated:Apr 10, 2006 10:09 am
81571 Views
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As we moved the active polls table to magazine last week or so, I'm going to replace it with the more active posts that are less that 2 weeks old. As I don't know how the databases will hold up, the first version will sort based on the # of comments (later it will be the number of commentors). Hopefully, this will help people to more easily find the buzz on the site.
I *might* later add a way to view the most recently commented posts (but a new commentor) so we can see which are the posts that are getting the most post action.
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7
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Secret way to test new blog keyword browsing...
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Posted:Apr 5, 2006 7:01 am
Last Updated:Apr 6, 2006 12:32 pm
81604 Views
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Before I launch a new way to browse blogs by keywords, I'd like to pre-release it to people who read my blog. The way to test the two places where it works are:View your blog and change the URL "index.html" to "tags.html". You should see some of the more popular phrases that you use in your blog.Go the main blog page and change the URL "index.html" to "tags.html". You should see a list of the most popular keywords on the site.Please remember that the goal was just to provide a way to browse blogs in a way that is different that doing manual searches as well to get a different understanding about the things that people are blogging about. Will probably release it in general later this week or during the next release (next Wednesday).
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8
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Added ability to unban banned posters on your blog
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Posted:Mar 31, 2006 5:53 pm
Last Updated:Apr 5, 2006 7:43 pm
87172 Views
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Until today, you could permanently ban someone from posting on your blog. When you did, all their previous posts were deleted. Starting today, when you ban someone, only new posts are banned. Also, you can see who you've banned from posting in your blog - and unban them. When you unban them, new posts will show up.
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6
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Added ability to set activity limits in Groups
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Posted:Mar 31, 2006 11:24 am
Last Updated:Apr 12, 2006 3:17 pm
96046 Views
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We found that many group moderators wanted their group members to participate or leave (they would manually have to delete members who joined if they didn't post/etc). We added a way for the moderator to set the activity limits automatically (we simply move people to "associate" members if they don't meet the activity requirements). Group moderators set these in the group settings.
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57
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(Page:)
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Made it easier to vote on posts
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Posted:Mar 31, 2006 11:24 am
Last Updated:Mar 31, 2006 9:41 pm
84062 Views
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For those blogs who elected to let members post votes on each comment, we made it easier for people to vote. Before, the voter caused the entire page to reload for each vote. One of our new HTML people figured out a way to make the votes happen "instantly" and show up without reloading the page. We look forward to applying similar technology around the site where it improves the experience.
This change is across blogs, groups, and magazine advice lines and articles. Hopefully, this will also speed up the sites as pages don't need to reload.
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To link to this blog (andrew) use [blog andrew] in your messages.
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