-
The discussion forums are back!
In May 2017, after 9 years of lively activity, we had to shut down our discussion forums due to massive spam problems. It was just some simple code I had written in literally one day in 2008 to add a sense of community to the site, and it was great until the last year or two when spammers arrived en masse. The code was pretty old and crusty and I didn't want to deal with updating it, so I just decided to close it down, if only temporarily.
We definitely lose a sense of community when that shut down though. I really enjoyed seeing our users talk to each other and help each other out with problems and ideas and things like that. So I was happy in the short term to be done with the spam, but long term I'm really unhappy about losing that.
-
Bug fixes for IP address tags & filters when anonymization is enabled
Since GDPR became law in May 2018, one of the things we did was make IP address anonymization the default. It took a few bug reports that very slowly rolled in before we realized this broke existing IP tags and filters unless they were also updated or were already using wildcards. I'm guessing most people already use wildcards because even after we knew about the problem, very rarely would anyone contact us about it.
Good news, we just pushed up a fix. What happens now is if you have IP anonymization enabled, then at run time (in both Spy and in the script that processes traffic in batches every 20 seconds), we dynamically convert all IP tags and filters to wildcards, which will then match anonymized IPs as they roll in. It sounds simple but we took the time to rewrite a bunch of related legacy code that hadn't been touched for a while, that always adds in some unexpected fun.
-
5 Exciting Design Trends in Mobile App Design (and How They Impact Your Online Business)
One of the fastest-evolving mediums for putting our business ideas into action is mobile technology.
Mobile technology allows businesses to form relationships with customers on an individual level, to forge stronger brand relationships, and to become more relevant in today’s digital world. As a result, it’s becoming less of an option for businesses to have a mobile app and more of a necessity.
-
Suspended Twitter account [Update: we're back]
Our Twitter account, @clicky, was suspended for unknown reasons on June 24. Tomorrow will be 1 month since that happened.
UPDATE AUGUST 10 2020: After 5 appeals and 47 days, Twitter finally responded re: our account suspension and informed us that it was in fact to do with our search API usage, as we surmise at the very bottom of this post. So that feature is disabled for now. 😩 /UPDATE
-
California Consumer Privacy Act (and a note about Twitter)
Just wanted to briefly get this out of the way. On June 24, our Twitter account, @clicky, was suspended for reasons unknown. I'm stunned that they would suspend an account without notification or reason. It just suddenly…gone. We've submitted two appeals and heard nothing back. Hopefully it will be sorted out soon. Twitter is where we post the most updates, in particular we have many things to say that don't warrant a full blog post and often enough that Twitter is the perfect place to do that, so having this cutoff is painful.
Anyways… on to the meat and potatoes: