January 1st 2006
Free Image hosting Launched
We're very pleased to be able to offer customers free image hosting (jpg, gif, png) up to 2mb per file with no limit on the number of images you can host.

The service is available from Free Image Space

January 19th 2005
Google Initiative
The clever peeps at Google have experimented with a new html tag which it is hoped will reduce the value of comment spamming. We should have modified code available for release within the next 24 hours. While it will not stop the spam it will reduce the ability of the spammers to have their URL's gain page rank and significance within the search engines. The full details are available directly from google

January 7th 2005
Spam Update
More anti spam code has been added to the system today to filter out messages containing spam keywords. There should be no reason for genuine posts to contain the words that we are filtering on but should anyone find that the list is too restrictive please let us know via the forums and we will modify the search terms whereever possible.

January 2nd 2005
Happy New Year, to all of our users.
We have just completed the first upgrade to the long awaited spam filtering which should reduce the volume of spam mail considerably. We will be monitoring the spam reports from pro users over the next few days to see how effective the changes have been. We still have some fairly major spam control features that need to be added but we hope that they will be completed within the next week or two.

November 9th 2004
Pro users should now find a new link 'Block Spam' on their comment pages when they are logged in. By using this link rather than the delete link we will be able to train our spam database to recognise spam as it arrives and take corrective action.
Every spam report made by users by this method will bring us one step closer to being able to eliminate all spam comments before they have a chance to appear on your comment pages.
At the moment the spam comments will still appear on your 'logged in' comment pages however for the next update we will remove the spam comments from view.

June 19th 2004
We have just completed the first stage of our upgrades to a new server cluster. All of the standard user comment pages are now served from a load balanced LVS cluster of 4 servers. Over the next few weeks we will migrate the pro and user.php systems to the cluster and add 2 more servers. The system is fully fault tolerant and is able to withstand the failure of any single server.

Feb 27th 2004 (08:36AM)
Done, i'm going to bed. Average query time is now under a tenth of a second, all the indexes work fine and it should be as quick as you can query it, any problems, see the forums for my email address.

Goodnight.

Feb 27th 2004 (04:55AM)
Table maintenance:
Well after doing extensive work with the tables i have found a few problems which may be causing slowdowns, so in a few minutes I will be breifly stopping the mysql daemon running the comments in order to repair said tables, they've already been backed up so no worries about losing your oomments, however this should speed up comments coming back to anyone on the original database by quite a way. This particular table currently has over 2 million comments in it from over 64,000 users, meaning that to get this far with no huge problems is pretty good going.

Oh and i'm Paul by the way, you can find me under 'Winkie' in the forums, if you have any specific problems I definately want to hear about them, otherwise I can't fix them.

Maintainance should last no longer than 1 hour, apologies for the sudden notice, i'll try to schedule downtime in the future.

Paul

Feb 13th 2004
3 News items in 4 days - a record! :-) We're just catching up after 2 months of no news.
The database errors that have been popping up when entering new comments over the last few weeks should have been eliminated by the code update made this evening. Feedback in the forums on whether the changes are working is always helpful.

A small number of users are still unable to view the edit and delete links when browsing their comments. Users must be logged in at the time for this feature to work. Current thinking on the subject is pointing towards the privacy settings on Internet Explorer 6. We would be very interested to hear (via http://forum.enetation.co.uk) from any users not able to see the edit/delete link who do not use IE6.

Feb 10th 2004
Bug fix :- The cookie problem that has prevented a small number of users from being able to edit comments appears to have been resolved. Users should find an edit link at the foot of the comment pages which will give them access to the main comment server.

Interesting facts - Enetation currently has over 85,000 users with more than 5 million comments and uses over 400Gb of network traffic per month.

Feb 9th 2004
It has been a reasonably quiet month or two for new development as we have been trying to focus on maintaining reliability and planning development for 2004. I'm pleased to say that the emails we've had and forum posts tend to suggest that we are making progress in that area.
We would like to welcome Paul onto the development team who started with us this week. Paul is an expert in all things linux and is currently laying out a strategy for the next major code updates which includes a very smart load balanced web server cluster.

Interesting facts - Enetation is currently using 6 servers which can only be supported by your generous donations!

Nov 28th 2003
We've had a busy few weeks but are pleased to report that two new comment servers were installed last week. The new servers have been running well over the course of the week and feedback from users suggests that the improvement in speed and reliability has been significant.
We have made some modifications to the underlying code which will allow us to add more new servers in future with mimimal effort and at very short notice.
Please remember that enetation needs your support with our advertisers and via donations!

Sept 6th 2003
We have spent today installing new servers and upgrading the hardware on the current enetation servers.
There were a number of short outages for various parts of the system between 11am and 1pm GMT as each server was taken out of service for upgrade.

For the users who like seeing pictures of computers there will be some photos of the new servers available shortly.

August 23rd 2003
The upgrade of our server code to version three has begun. Full details with regular updates over the weekend are available from www.enetation.co.uk/forum/

The work required to upgrade the first two servers to the latest code has been completed. At the moment the loads look very good and there are no reports of problems. We will monitor the servers closely over the next 24 hours. Please email support @ enetation.co.uk if you notice a problem which you think may have been caused by the upgrade.

Older news messages are available here