Niall Giggins's dashboard

Hey there.

This issue is due to the fact that your members are trying to use the twitter widget to connect to your network, when they already have an account there.

The twitter widget attempts to create a new account for them because it does not recognise the twitter ID yet. as part of a new account, they are asked for their e-mail address. SocialGO requires that there are no 2 identical e-mail addresses on a network, which is the cause of this message.

you will need to get your users to log in to SocialGO first using the SocialGO login as they would normal do, then they can link their account with their Twitter one from inside the network.

this only happens the first time that someone tries to log in when they already have an account and it does not affect new users at all. after an existing user has assoicate their twitter account from inside the network, they can use the Twitter Connect normally like everyone else.

The twitter widget is being changed to prevent this from happening anymore and an update will be in a future deploy of SocialGO. Until then, please let your users know that they need to log in first if they have an existing account.

Cheers
Niall

Hi there, what appears to be the bug?

it's no problem,

we're doing our best to keep everything running during this attack. its not over yet, and you might get some more outages, but we're hoping that they will not be as long as the ones so far.

We're making great progress and will continue working non-stop until things are back to normal.

hi Candy, what's the address of your network?

Malicious attacks happen all the time to a large number of services and companies that use the internet. there are hundreds, if not thousands of attacks happening every day and many of them are very hard to prevent against. you can see this just by the number of entries that a Google search will return on the subject.

There are a great number of ways to perform a Denial of Service attack on an internet platform, several of which look just like regular legitimate internet usage and the majority of attacks never use just one technique.

we have been attacked before, and we will be attacked again, that is the nature of being a porular service on the internet. But everytime this happens we have our full team working with our service providers, and our data providers to limit the damage and effects that such incidents have on our customers to find the best solution to the problem.

To say that we are covering somethign else up is a bit unfair to the fact that we operate on an open forum like this for dealing with our problems. many companies would pretend that nothing at all has been happening for the duration of any incident worth covering up. we feel that if we're building networks to help people communicate then we should at least be open to communicating ourselves, which is why we are here on Get Satisfaction.

As for why our service and bandwidth providers are not claming they are victims of an attack, well they are either global mega-services that have hundreds of these attacks on parts of their networks every week, or they just don't use open support forums like Get Satisfaction to make their announcements.

We are very sorry that these issues have affected you and your network, however we have managed to keep an 80% uptime across all our networks, which in our eyes is a great achievement considering the scale of the attack that we are currently under.

we will continue to fight this attack.

Just an update on this guys.

One of our widget developing partners is currently working on a Facebook Connect widget. SocialGo will be releasign more informatioon on this widget as it nears its realease.

It is currently a paid widget, and will only be avaliable to premium site owners. there are not currently any plans to make this widget avaliable as part of the standard non-premium networks.

For updates on this, and other upcoming widgets, please keep a watch on the SocialGO blog as well as the SocialGO owners website.

Regards
Niall

Just an update for our users.

there was a service outage with Amazon who provide some of the server capacity for our widgets. we used the outage as an excuse to perform some additional upgrades to the service to improve widget loading speeds.

we finished the updates shortly after Amazon returned to full service and we are seeing the expected widget loading speed increases.

Sorry for any inconvenience, outages at Amazon are very rare and we do not expect a reoccurance.

Regards
Niall

Hi shy. we're looking in to this now for you.

N

Hi Emanuele, this has been corrected now.

Sorry for the delay.

N

the full widget service should be back with you now. we had to replace a server due to a hardware fault and it took while to configure a new one, this was causing widget loading to be interupted.

i'm very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and for the delay in the fix, we had to be very careful that no data or widget settings were lost in the transfer process.

we'll be continuing to monitor the networks all night to be sure.

Regards
Niall

full service should be back with you now. we had to replace a server due to a hardware fault and it took while to configure a new one, then replace and verify the data.

i'm very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused, and for the delay in the fix, we had to be very careful that no data was lost in the transfer process.

we'll be continuing to monitor the networks all night to be sure.

Regards
Niall

we've found the cause of the problem,one of our servers has developed a fault. we're configuring a replacement at the moment, and it will be in service soon.

this problem should only be affection a fraction of our users.

Niall

we've found the cause of the problem,one of our servers has developed a fault. we're configuring a replacement at the moment, and it will be in service soon.

this problem should only be affection a fraction of our users.

Niall

we've found the cause of the problem,one of our servers has developed a fault. we're configuring a replacement at the moment, and it will be in service soon.

this problem should only be affection a fraction of our users.

Niall

we're experiencing some problems at the moment and are looking to them. we'll update once we've resolved them.

Niall

we're experiencing some problems at the moment and are looking to them. we'll update once we've resolved them.

Niall

Hi Darren ( and all others watching )

the Facebook Connect Widget is very close indeed and is currently residing on our development servers under full time development of one of our widget engineers.

progress is steady, this will be ready in a matter of weeks, not months, so expect an announcement soon.

Hey there

we're constantly monitoring the page load speeds and did have a high peak at the time the forum thread you mentioned was created.

on monday morning between 3 adn 4, we had a scheduled database backup going on on one of the servers. this backup acidentally started before we cleared a larger temporary table that we use in the database server. the end result was that around this time that particular server was under very heavy load, and slow page times would have been seen by a percentage of our users.

shortly after this was discovered, and the backup restarted, page speeds would have returned to normal. natrually page speeds are affected by all partsof the system, and we are constantly optimising to bring these times down to as low as possible.

as for distance, from the ping times that you have shown in that thread, 110ms is a very good response.

Regards
Niall

Hi guys, please do not use the header upload to bring your images back at the moment.

if you tell me your site names I will restore the headers for you manually while we work on the automated system. please comment on this message rather than add a new reply so i can keep track of everything while we work.

thanks.