Webmastering

I’m still on a little bit of a rush from how successful Stencyl’s first Project Address was. The key part of tonight’s presentation was Stencyl’s Soapbox site, where Jon (and I, for a section) presented a powerpoint, basically, of new and exciting developments. We would write our narration on IRC in the #stencyl channel, and as we went along, the effect was that we were talking to every one of the users in a live fashion. Together with Jon’s awesome slides and the great turnout we had, the presentation shattered my expectations, but not for the reasons others are so excited.

<– A screenshot of the application

To give a little bit of background on the soapbox application, I wrote all the core code over the course of a single week - I had to, as Jon already had announced that we would have a visual component :). It was not based on any existing external codebase, except for the IRC end; I also did not receive programming help from anyone. The program’s main features were:

• Support for an unlimited number of slides
• Very simple and clean user-facing interface
• Chat integration with IRC
• Administration integration with IRC
• No downloaded software required
• No user-taken refreshes necessary - a completely guided experience

The fact that I managed to write the entire application in the course of literally 7 days astonishes me. It’s by no means my cleanest work, and in fact it had a minor failure on the administration end, but it is relatively well-structured and I’m not ashamed of any of the code. To me, the fact that my application kept running in the face of at least 50 users relying on it amazes me. I am proud of the fact that my application survived its trial by fire, and that my programming skills are apparently good enough to create this to the degree that it works, in one single week.

The presentation, publicly, went off without even a single hitch: the application, as I said, ran very well; Jon presented amazingly well; our turnout exceeded expectations; the users even had great questions for us to answer.

Of course, I have to give credit to those that helped me along the way:

• To Jon, for his expertise, slides, and presentation skills - without you, there would be no presentation and no reason for me to be happy right now. Also, thanks for the whole “getting me into programming” bit of things back in the day, if I haven’t thanked you already.
• To Sephiroth, for his design and cross-browser skills that made the UI the best it could be while I was worried about Javascript.
• To Justin and Cyclone, for the great Q&A we had.
• To Stencyl’s server, for holding up (we got to 32% load about 5 seconds after I opened the floodgates)
• To the makers of Net_SmartIRC, which powered the IRC end of things. Update your program for PHP5!
• To the whole Stencyl Staff for making this possible. Here’s to the happy days ahead!

Back in April, we got a nice influx of users and thought we were pretty hot stuff.

To complete this narrative, well, I can’t say anything that this below image doesn’t.

<– click here for large version.

If I know my Perl regex syntax, that will search and destroy all spam and spambots using a high-powered rifle. Unfortunately, I get the sense that my Perl regex syntax is a little off, as I learned in the past few weeks. We had a spambot infestation on of our development resources, our “pastebin” (a simple webform -> formatted post application that allows you to post, for instance, long error logs that would be unsuitable for an IRC chatroom.)

At first, the spam wasn’t so bad. A few ads for watches and “excellent vacation stock deals enhancement” about par for my email spam filter. However, the attacks became more prominent in the last few weeks, to the point where, last Saturday, our (dedicated) server choked on the load and gave up at about 2:00 AM. According to chatlogs, after it came back up, it was at a 1-minute load average of 16.47, meaning that over the past minute, the server was working at 1647% maximum capacity.

Naturally, this was a bad sign, and a sign that it was time to put on my Sherlock Holmes hat and determine why exactly my server was crashing at 2AM. Had I known the server was dying due to spambots, it would have been a simple process, but alas, I held hope that real humans were posting things into MySQL to the extent that the server was strained under the load, which would have been an OK problem to have.

I closed the pastebin and deleted its database, which held a single table with 1567 rows. We probably posted there 50 times or so.

Crazy spambots with their concentrated spam attacks…