Opera community blog

As we said yesterday, we found out the reason the site was so slow last weekend, and some parts of Monday.
And the reason was that we got kindly hammered by some proxy servers that seem to be located in Vietnam,
requesting lots of "fake", as in "non existing" pages, always referring to the same user (that was already banned, don't know when).

These strange requests were referred to this user's blog, but they were totally fake, containing unusually long paths and as far as we know, they always resulted in the "banned user" page (or timeouts/proxy errors).

When we found this, we just temporarily disallowed requests having that strange pattern, and, voila', everything was working again.
They could be denial of service attacks (?), or just fake traffic thrown at us for some reason... who knows?

Anyway, we're at work now to implement a "throttling" mechanism, that will hopefully help stopping these strange guys from harming the site while improving overall stability of MyOpera. We're growing up...

Lately we have been targeted by some bad spammers that fill their "wonderful" blogs with hundreds of posts about pharmacy, nurse schools and other crappy stuff. They probably use semi-automated tools, and for several reasons, this drains server and database power for "the good guys".
This is the reason for so many proxy errors and site slowdown...

But don't despair! We have just sent live an optimization regarding new blog posts that should hopefully help the database a bit when these spammers hammer us.

We're also working to some sort of throttling that should slowdown people from posting in their blogs if the frequency of post is like 1000/minute or something :-)

I think no legit user, apart maybe from Tamil, is able to do that... :-)

Hi to all "devblog" friends,

after some time spent on backend optimization, stress testing, and lately on a new file storage architecture (seen the new avatar paths?) and on MyOpera internationalization support, yes, that's a lot of stuff, I'm back to regular bug fixing.

There are lots of open bugs, some of them have been there for a loooong time. We know, but we had some structural problems and various urgencies that called for immediate action. Anyway... I started friday on this "intensive" bug fixing, and seems I already managed to fix a few long standing, annoying bugs:

• #1719: When saving events(countdowns) in a group you get redirected back to your personal page.
• #1650: Use less compression on JPEG user pictures. Now JPEG images are saved with quality setting to 95, which should be pretty good, and also, no more ugly black borders. Now images are scaled and automatically cropped. :-)
• #1970: Sometimes a blog RSS feed was displayed differenly whether the URL ended with '/' or not.
• #1783: User privacy settings are not saved properly. This means that in your personal account page, if you chose to show your login status only to 'Friends', it didn't save the preference correctly. Now it does.
• Other random tickets, mostly not relevant for users.

All of this is now fixed in the development version of MyOpera. Will go out with the regularly scheduled release cycle. Thanks for listening and stay tuned.