All Consuming down for a short spell

We’re transferring the DNS settings for All Consuming this morning and that means it’ll be down for a little bit. The back story on this one is that allconsuming.net was registered by Buster long before the Robot Co-op was around. He and I spent many hours over the last 3 years trying to transfer the domain from Gandi to Joker (where we have 43T, 43P, 43Peeps, LOB, etc. registered). This was not easy. In fact, it was a total pain in the ass (damn you Gandi!).

But the good news is the transfer has occurred and we’re yanking the band-aid off the DNS settings today. Soon (hopefully later today) All Consuming will be humming again.

 UPDATE (Aug 8): All Consuming is back up as of a couple days ago.

Did you miss us?

You may have noticed two missing sites the last few days:

• robotcoop.com was down as we swapped the blog over to WordPress — it should be a stable experience now. No more multiple posts and comments or application errors. Phew.
• All Consuming was down for about 16 hours — this stemmed from trying to renew the domain and incorrectly having the credit card denied. The credit card has now been accepted and we’re back in business!

Hope you enjoy the new blog.

Oops … oops … oo …

7/26 UPDATE: we’ve added more RAM to the slave database and are adding 4GB more RAM to the master database on Monday.  Are people feeling things are zippier?

UPDATE: sites are back up—and things are better than before. This is game of inches on the performance front but I think we gained about 2 inches with the last buffer move. Okay, back to goaling!

UPDATE: we’re taking the sites down for 5 minutes to increase some mysql buffers—that’s a fancy way of saying hold on for just a sec and things should get much better.

Are you getting a lot of Oops pages in the last few days? You are not alone. I could make up an elaborate explanation, or simply say: we’re working on it. More specifically, we should have two new boxes (aka webservers) up by the end of the week. That may help things hum along. In addition we’re looking into other database efficiencies to deliver us from Oopsland to the promise land.

In other news I was lucky enough to make it this weekend to the Bay Area 43T Meetup in San Francisco and met some great folks. It was rewarding as a user of 43T to meet up with a bunch of smart, insightful 43T’ers. I highly recommend attending and/or organizing a 43T meetup of your own. If you do, let us know how it goes.

P.S. If you’d like to lodge your frustration about Oops-ness, feel free to do so here in the comments. You’ll feel better if you get it off your chest.

Lists of Bests … working on performance issues

Thanks for all the email reports regarding performance issues with Lists of Bests in the last couple days. We’re making some tweaks now that should stabilize performance—and we’ll continue to work on getting the site healthy again.

Sorry for the hassle but thanks for your detailed feedback. It’s helpful to us.

The “Fan”

As you may know we regularly eat lunch together and play Credit Card Roulette when the bill comes round. Quick recap: we shuffle our credit cards and randomly pick one. The “winner” pays the bill. Over the years we’ve played this game folks have had losing streaks. Painful streaks where you secretly wish you’d lose just to not see Todd lose for the 4th time in a week. But until now the longest straight losing streak has been 4 times in a row. Here’s what we call it when you lose …

• 2 times in a row = 2 times in a row
• 3 times in a row = a Turkey
• 4 times in a row = an Ostrich
• 5 times in a row? Inconceivable!

Until now. Losing 5 times in a row is no longer an inconceivable truth. Thanks to Laurel’s loss today we’ve now coined the “Fan” or losing 5 times in a row. Congratulations, Laurel Fan. Lunch was delicious.

Sensitive Goals

Since we launched 43 Things we have seen some content on the site that we would have never anticipated. We meant for the site to be about people’s goals and a group of users found ways to put it to uses we do not support. Over the years, we’ve tried to cohabitate with some of this content, seeing the benefit in the community that grew around them.

However, in recent months there’s been a lot of activity on 43 Things around self-harm goals. Most of the action has been around eating disorders, suicide, and other self harm topics. We began by adding warning boxes at the top with resource material for people struggling with these issues. Unfortunately the problem grew.

Today we rolled out new pages for many of these goals that simply leave the warnings and take away the entries and ability to interact with the goal. We still stand by our community guidelines when it comes to allowing a varied range of content on the site. However, the self-harm goals were a misuse of 43 Things.

If you see truly sensitive goals please let us know. Please note that we reserve the sensitive goal feature for only the most egregious goals (typically self-harm related). Thanks.

The Petri Project

We’ve talked for a while about creating a companion blog to 43 Things. This here Robot blog is good for site outage updates, feature announcements and broadcasting our lunch discussions but we wanted a clean slate for this experiment. Enter The Petri Project and Brangien. Brangien is a friend and freelance writer who has taken on the task of dissecting, learning about and propelling along this thing we call 43 Things. You should try out her first assignment: write a note to my younger self about something I know now that I didn’t know then.

Brangien says it best …

As a companion site to 43 Things, The Petri Project aims to discuss (observe, chart) what it looks and feels like to be an individual trying to make a change.

Things & Places are still up — site outages

We’re working on 43 People, All Consuming & Lists of Bests right now—they may be down for a few minutes to an hour as we work on some database issues. Hope to have things up before lunch!

43 Things goes Platinum!

Today we cross the 1,000,000 registered users mark. In album sales that’s a platinum record, an apt analogy as we often talk about Motown, Subpop and being in a band in relation to what we do here at the Co-op. 43 Things began as an experiment between friends with less than 10 registered users before the design polish (thank you 37 Signals) was in place. We simultaneously built the site while wrestling with the ever unfolding riddle “What Do You Want To Do With Your Life?”. I feel my life is richer for simply having entertained the question and look forward to finding another 1,000,000 users that have a similar desire to find their way through the art of self-directed self-improvement amongst friends. Cheers!

Fighting Spam With Neighborhood Watch

I thought I’d update folks on the progress of Neighborhood Watch and the state of spam on 43 Things. A little history is likely in order.

Neighborhood Watch was born when we realized that the vibrant internet community of 43 Things users working on goals and communing with one another in a non-commerical, non-spammy way was in jeopardy. Todd and I were spending our weekends closing hundreds of spam and commercial accounts. It started as a few per day and ended up being over a hundred a day and was on an ever increasing growth pattern. This became an unmanageable task and threatened to erode the spirit and community of the site. We even found a search engine optimization company (aimed at gaming internet search results) selling reports on how to spam 43 Things. This clearly had to stop.

In attacking a problem of this scale, we knew we’d have to turn to our community of users and a few automated tools. Enter Neighborhood Watch and automated spam-catching scripts such as Robotcop and Robotscout. Since Neighborhood Watch debuted, we’ve defeated more than 3,000 spam accounts set up to prey on 43 Things. We’ve also nuked a few dozen creeps and miscreants. Along the way, we’ve had just 2 errors – which happened to the same account. This problem was a result of another user misusing the tools, not a problem with the system itself. Since then, we’ve added additional controls to avoid user abuse of the tool.

Yesterday we ran into another error in the Robotcop and Robotscout spam-catching scripts. This error mistakenly flagged lots of good, long standing users. We fixed the bug this morning (although we do expect false positives to continue). But that error seems to have raised a number of questions, so here are some more details about Neighborhood Watch:

• When a user is flagged in Neighborhood Watch, it is not a guilty sentence. Instead, Neighborhood Watch is designed to let the community vote on these things. So while upsetting that this bug flagged good users, the system worked in that not a single good account was suspended. Go team!

• The system is not a simple thumbs up or down vote. It uses a voting algorithm coupled with voter reputation to determine whether or not to suspend accounts. Again, we’ve now suspended over 3,000 accounts with a very low error rate (1 account, wrongly suspended by another user).

• The Neighborhood Watch tool allows a mistakenly suspended account to be quickly revived.

Hopefully this background frames how we arrived here and the overall benefit of Neighborhood Watch. Rolling out any new feature has some bumps and in this case we realize that these bumps were felt by many established users of the site. Sorry about that folks! I’d also like to thank everyone for helping make 43 Things a great place to improve your life and thanks for keeping the spam and creeps away from the site. We appreciate all your feedback.