TAG | upgrade
Can you feel the speed? Hopeful you’ve noticed something at soLinkable over these past few days: It’s running much faster.
The server loads in less than 2 seconds...
How far we’ve come
When I first started almost 2 years ago, soLinkable was merely a side project. It was a chance for me to play around with PHP, javascript, and web design. Since then it’s grown to over 17000 users, serving more than 10000 unique visitors and 55000 pageviews each month. And as we’ve grown in size, so have our needs – It’s no surprise then that soLinkable would be going through some growing pains and big changes.
One of the biggest projects, which has been in the works for the past month, has been the move from shared hosting to a private server.
Now, you may be surprised to learn that soLinkable has been on a shared host this whole time. I’ve got to give credit where it’s due: HostPapa has provided us with exceptional service at a very cheap price. Even with some daily spikes of 800+ users, our servers held strong and never flinched. They were well worth the price, no question. My only complaint out of otherwise great service: They charged me $26 to transfer a “free” domain to me after I told them I wouldn’t be renewing my service… But that’s it.
Our new servers
Our search for a VPS brought us to Linode. Throughout my search they seemed like the obvious choice: Constant praise from their users, numerous benchmarks declaring them the fastest VPS available, full root access, well written libraries, and, of course, the excellent price ($20/month for 360MBs RAM/16GBs space/200GBs transfer). No matter what metric was being rated, Linode came out on top. Now, after a month and a half, I can honestly say all these claims have been verified.
Setting up the servers was a breeze. Through their excellent libraries and the helpful people on their irc channel, I had the entire server set up and functioning in a single night. Using linux can be daunting if you only have little previous experience (like me), but with help like this, learning is easy.
And lets not forget the speed. The transfer rate is impressive and the website load time has noticeably decreased. But where I’ve noticed the greatest improvement has been in the submission process – I can’t believe how fast it moves through each step.
Looking forward
Full access and modular servers also allow for easier development and scalability in the future.
With Linode, we have the ability to add on memory when we need it without moving the physical server (just a quick restart). Is the mySQL server starting to struggle? With a few mouse clicks I can allocate more memory to it in seconds, and alleviate the bottleneck.
Full root access means we have complete control over our environment. We can tweak the PHP and apache variables or install a 3rd party program and easily integrate it into the website – Basically, we can tailor the server to perform the way we envision, free of any restraints.
I’m sure we’ll go through more growing pains in the future, but with this upgrade behind us we are stronger than we’ve ever been before.
Monty Python - Infamous spam sketch
Do you remember the “Spam” sketch from Monty Python?
You know the one I mean – Where Eric Idle and Graham Chapman are trying to order breakfast, but the waitress (Terry Jones) keeps pushing spam on them. It seems like every dish contains something they want, but covered with spam. Well, sometimes that’s how I feel about soLinkable.
I know there’s great content on here, but the spam overshadows everything. The Queued section typically looks like this:
*spam*, *spam*, *spam*, *spam*, *spam*, GREAT ARTICLE, *spam*, *spam*, *spam*, and *spam*.
For every few great submissions, I’ll delete almost 100 spammy ones. For every few great users, there are 100 spammy ones. It’s a constant battle, and if I don’t do something to gain the upper hand I’m going to need extra moderators. So, in an attempt to fight back, here are a few of the recent measures we’ve implemented at soLinkable:
1) Unverified users have restrictions on what they can do with soLinkable.
What is a verified user? A verified user is a user who has been with soLinkable for a few days, submitted some good links, voted a few times, and made a couple of legible, thoughtful comments. By this point, their Karma will have risen above a set threshold (25 points), making them verified users. Simple enough.
Until a user becomes verified, they’ll be bound by the following restrictions:
- Each link submission must pass a reCAPTCHA test – Pretty self-explanatory, this is to stop bots from submitting.
- One submission per 24 hours – Even if a link gets deleted, the user must wait 24 hours before a new submission can be made.
- NoFollow attribute to links on any submissions in the Queued section. If it gets promoted, the NoFollow tag will come off this link. Once the user becomes verified, all NoFollow tags will be completely removed for all links – promoted or queued (including links submitted before the user became verified).
- Each submission is checked against Askimet – Very similar to how Askimet is used for blog comments: If Askimet tells us it’s spammy, then we put it aside for a moderator to check. The moderator can then decide if the submission should be placed into the queue or simply deleted.
tl;dr: A verified user is anyone with more than 25 Karma, and has FULL use of the site with NO restrictions. Verified = No restrictions. Unverified = Restrictions.
2) Ghost Bans
This is similar to the ghost ban used by Reddit. It’s a little underhanded, but any legitimate user will never run into it. It’s used to keep a banned user thinking they’re still submitting content. So while they can view their content, nobody else will ever see it.
I think this is one of the most effective measures, and best of all it’s completely automatic. Too many submissions get deleted without offering anything valuable to the community? BAM! Ghost ban.
A few of you may be worried, thinking you could be banned and not even know it. As long as you’re an active, participating member, there’s nothing to worry about. Make a few comments, vote on a few stories, and you’ll never run into any problems.
3) Deleted stories are only viewable by the submitter
If a story gets down voted by a majority of users, it will eventually be deleted. Once this happens, it will no longer display for anyone except the original submitter – They will continue to still see it normally.
The idea is to hide that it has been deleted, so the spammer won’t realize and re-submit. It’s incredibly frustrating to delete the same “Cheap SEO Development India” link over and over, day after day. And even if they do realize, the link info is stored for 30 days so the system will tag the submission as a duplicate story.
Conclusion
Whew. That seems like a lot of restrictions and dirty tricks. Believe me, it was a tough decision to make. I don’t like limiting what people can do or heavy moderating, but unfortunately I don’t have any other choice. The fight will go on, and I’ll continue to delete as much spam as required to make soLinkable a better place.
And as I always point out, there’s a real person behind soLinkable – So if you feel as though you have been unfairly targeted, send us a quick email. I’ll continue to monitor how effective these measures are and make changes as necessary. I’m very open to any ideas or suggestions.
Finally, If there are any regular users who may be interested in a moderator role, send me an email through our contact form. I can’t offer monetary compensation (at least not yet), but I can offer a link on the “About Us” page (under your bio). And with constant use of soLinkable, you’ll also (hopefully) increase your readership and can easily make it into the “Top Karma” sidebar list, giving you a link on the main page.
Thanks again for your support – It’s all of you who make this fun and worth the effort.
Good news everyone! Two big updates have taken place at SoLinkable in the past few days. You may not have noticed, but we were busy working behind the scenes. The two main areas of focus were security and spam filters.
First off, SoLinkable has been upgraded to SWCMS v1.1. This update offers numerous security and stability fixes, but little in the way of increased features. So, as a user, you shouldn’t notice anything at all – SoLinkable should keep working as it was before. If you have noticed anything strange going on lately, be sure to notify us.
Though security hasn’t been an issue on SoLinkable as of yet, we like to remain proactive in this respect. With the recent high-profile hackings of other notable pligg sites (ie. Design Float), security around the pligg community has been of utmost concern. As a reminder (if anyone read my old blog post about it), security fixes were one of the most important factors in our decision to switch to the SWCMS system.
Secondly, we have implemented the Askimet wordpress plugin. We have high hopes for this one. It has become one of the leaders in comment spam prevention, and we hope that transfers to social bookmarking spam as well. It is still in testing, and not completely implemented as of yet. If we find that it’s catching spam, we will turn it on fully, allowing it to automatically hold back links which it deems spammy. This, combined with the submit anti-spam tool has the posibility to greatly reduce the number of spam submissions here on SoLinkable.
Thanks and keep up the linking!