Hi Everyone,
We have had a great week here at ActiveRain. We had four new team members start here at ActiveRain (Chelsea, Nick, Robert, and Sonja) and we are currently at the Brave Horse Tavern celebrating a great week with the team.
The Brave Horse Tavern is a great new bar and restaurant opened next to the Amazon headquarters by Seattle's own Tom Douglas. It has GREAT pretzels, a nice selection of beers, darts and shuffleboard.
Here is this week's technology update:
- Database: We continue to optimize and upgrade the database. This week removed a number of redundant indexes in the database that should increase stability of the site. There was a SNAFU on Thursday related to the database around 11am PST. We restarted the servers and we were back in business within 30 minutes. Some members experienced issues around saving blogs. We apologize for the inconvenience. Overall, site staibility is increasing and page loading is getting better everyday.
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A Small Deployment: On Monday June 6, we executed a small release of minor enhancements to ActiveRain. Two enhancements caused much indigestion in how they were rolled out.
- Spam Control: One of the major pieces of feedback we received at the RainCamp in Dallas was the need for enhanced spam control, due to an increasing amount of comment spam. We increased the security on this by requiring everyone to type in the CAPTCHA image to leave a comment. Many members felt that this requirements was too onerous. So we changed the implementation. NOW, logged in members are required to only type in the CAPTCHA image for the first comment per browsing session. Those who are not logged into ActiveRain are required to always use the CAPTCHA image. Most of the spam comes from individuals outside of ActiveRain. Hopefully we will see reduced amounts of comment spam in the near future. (One thing to note is that a number of people complained about the use of the CAPTCHA on every comment, but the number of aggregate comments actually stayed steady at roughly 7,000 per day on both days when we saw increased comment security, which is interesting.)
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Default to Draft: A number of members asked for the default visibility on new blog posts to be draft, rather than public. We implemented this change, but then rolled it back based on member feedback. The big issue was that the default visibility stayed on draft even when editing a previously public post. We are speaking internally about the right implementation and should be following up shortly.
- Product Development Process: The challenges that we ran into highlight the fact that we need a more systematic product development process. The team here is going to be sitting down to sketch out the right process to plan out our releases, test all the scenarios for the functionality, and smoothly deploy. It's work in process, but we are moving in the right direction.
Have a great and restful weekend. Next week is going to be a great week!
By the way, meet the newest ActiveRain team members HERE.
Niki
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