Check this story for details - http://www.indianpad.com/ipad_news/113395
Getting tough with spam and fake users
11-Sep-07The spam situation on IndianPad is slowly coming under control as our filters learn from experience.
However, we have started noticing that some users are now creating duplicate accounts and posting links from forums that require registration before viewing content. From now on, all stories from such hosts will be disabled and marked as spam.
Also, starting immediately, all posts marked as spam will lose their outgoing links. This is thwart efforts by SEO pundits to use IndianPad for increasing their page rank, etc.
There may be some false positives who get caught in this and we encourage them to contact us. We go through each case individually before marking the sites as spam and will try to answer any questions that you may have.
We have been working on a UWA widget that would work on various sites. Currently, netvibes and google support this along with some desktop widget companies. However, we are pretty sure that this will be picked up by other sites pretty soon as well.
Our widget is still in beta and we will be adding more features, tabs and cleaning up the code in the coming days. All new features will be seamlessly updated into the widget even if you add it now.
Enough of this marketing talk, head over to this page to check it out for yourself - http://www.indianpad.com/api/nvibes/ipad_uwa.html
iPhone Calling iPadder of the Year
24-Aug-07Well, now that the iPhone has been hacked we can confirm that the top iPadder this year will get an iPhone (or a gPhone - if that ever comes out). We wanted to give it to everybody in the top 50 but our bank balance said otherwise :)
We are working on a calculation matrix for this but the guts will be pretty similar to the ‘iPadder of the Month‘ scheme…
What powers IndianPad?
09-Aug-07We get a lot of requests inquiring about our platform and traffic stats. Our architecture has evolved over the last year and is probably due for another upgrade!
Platform
Details
Our LAMP stack is pretty standard with some settings tweaked to match our hardware. We started on a shared server and moved to a dedicated server about 14 months ago. We added another server about a month ago for caching and testing purposes. So for all practical purposes the site still runs on ONE server.
This is made possible by the other 3 components in our architecture - lighttpd, apc and memcahe.
Conventional caching mechanism, which cache the whole page, are not feasible with a site such as IndianPad. Instead, we use apc and memcache to aggressively cached anything that moves on the site. The caching is handled within the code and not by timeouts so anytime something is changed, the cache is rebuilt. Both memcache and apc have been relatively stable and take some load off our overworked database.
Our lighttpd installation works behind apache and handles most of the images and other static content on the site. For e.g. we currently have over 400,000 images from about 18,000 sites. lighttpd has been very stable and takes a lot of load off our cpu and apache processes.
Conclusion
- caching mechanisms (memcache or similar) are a life saver and your database will thank you for using them
- lighttpd is a another god-send if you deal with a lot of static content (png, mp3, flv, etc)
What’s Coming Up?
10-Jul-07We have been recording all the feedback and suggestions that you guys have given on the site and we hope that our next update solves some of the most pressing problems you have been facing.
We plan to provide some beta previews over the next few weeks and will be releasing this update towards the end of this month. As always, any suggestions or concerns are welcome!
New Features
- Alternate Links - Submit alternate links for stories that users can vote on to replace the original link submitted with the story.
- Song Albums - No more submitting single mp3 links. Submit the whole album in one shot.
Audio
- New music uploader for Single mp3 links
- New uploader for Audio Albums that allows users to submit multiple mp3 links in one shot.
- More streamlined user playlists that can be shared as well. Currently, a users playlist cannot be seen or played by other users.
Categories
- We are adding new categories and sub categories that will make it easier to submit and look up stuff.
- The navigation system will be slightly modified to focus more on category based browsing.
Other
- New Search engine that should help in drilling down to find the exact story you are looking for.
- Fresh RSS feeds with lots of extra metadata which would allow users to create useful apps based on it.
- Ads will be moved out of your way to provide more viewing area for stories.
Spam Fighting - These will apply to all users with karma less than 10. Over 10, you have ‘nearly’ no restrictions!
- Restrict users from submitting more than 2 stories from the same site consecutively
- Restrict users from submitting more than 5 stories from the same site in an hour
- If your negative votes exceed positive votes in the previous 6 hrs then you will be restricted from posting any links
Users with karma less than 6.25 can only post 1 story every 5 mins (already implemented)- Google black list and ban list will be used more extensively to locate spam within comments
- Comments will also be passed through Akismet to generate a spam score
- Links that redirect will not be allowed (already implemented)
Any link that is submitted from now on will be filtered against the list provided by Google using the ‘Google Safe Browsing API’.
We may get some false positives but overall we hope that this will help us reduce spam on this site. More details and a guide to the implementation will be posted here in a couple of days.
You can test the list here - http://www.indianpad.com/googlist
New Ads on IndianPad
19-Jun-07You may have noticed the minor design changes along with some new ads on IndianPad.
We have moved things around a bit so that we don’t invade any of your reading spaces. To do that we have reduced the square ads on top to 4 and moved the right sidebar to the top of the page. The bookmarklet images were also removed and only one ad was added to the top of the right sidebar. Also, this ad is limited to a certain number of impressions and once that is crossed this ad will disappear as well.
Kindly let us know if you have any concerns or suggestions.
PS - We will NEVER have any pop-ups on this site. If you come across any pop-up windows and you think they may be from one of our advertisers please let us know immediately.
New precautions against Spam
12-Jun-07There have been a couple of incidents on IndianPad where a rogue user/script has dumped a large number of stories/comments. They are usually cleared up within an hour but it can be very frustrating for our regular users who have to vote on these.
This was brought up in this discussion and we have decided to implement the following limits for users who have karma under 6.25. All users on IndianPad start with a karma of 6 and 2-3 days of medium activity should take a user over 6.25.
- One story allowed every 2 mins
- One comment allowed every 2 mins
- No vote down option available
Kindly let us know if you have any suggestions…
Always Low Prices!
23-May-07Advertising option on IndianPad is now available to all users.
We are trying to follow Walmart’s advice of ‘Always Low Prices!’ In that spirit, we are starting the ads at a spectacularly low $1 CPM i.e. you pay only $1 for every 1,000 ad impressions. You may upload unlimited images under one campaign and will have control over the ads are shown.
Click here to start or to explore this option - http://www.indianpad.com/about/ads