It has been a while since there are any changes being done to TagMe! the last time was the introduction of CAPTHCA to combat severe spam attack on TagMe!, which happened end of October 2008. That’s 1 year ago!

Before any other thing can happen, I’ve been doing a lot of internal changes and refinement to support the new enhancements that I have in mind. For a start, I need to clean out the database first. I noticed that there are quite a lot of inactive accounts. Reminder email has been sent out, and perhaps I will reopen the registration to TagMe! for a brief period of time in the nearest future.

And just for the sake of having something new for the front-end as well, I did a little makeover to the icons section of TagMe!. Now it looks cleaner. Thanks Marts for liking it ;)

So stay tuned for more new things with TagMe!

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Introduction
TagMe! has been running without problem since the last downtime for the server migration in February 2006. That is quite an impresive record for TagMe! to run without problem for almost 3 years now.

What happened?
I first received a report about TagMe! won’t be able to reply message on 25th October. Thanks to Mata and Marts for reporting that. But since I’m on leave for the past few days, I only able to look at the matter last night. Upon diagnosing the problem. I came to a suprise that TagMe! suffers a severe spam attack. I spent hours last night, cleaning approximately 50,000 spam messages. There is somehow a bot that’s been created to post a message to TagMe! on 10 secs interval. That makes TagMe! to run really slow, and the reply function not working.

What does this mean?
Well, there is good thing and bad thing here. The good thing is, does it mean that TagMe! is getting popular? Come to think of it, people won’t go into the hassle of creating spam sending bot to attack a non-popular tagboard. But the bad thing is, now I know that TagMe! is vulnerable to that kind of attack, and other people might be doing the same kind of attack again.

Temporary solution?
I detected that 2 TagMe! accounts have been targeted for spam attack. As temporary solution, those account has been disabled temporarily. I will personally send email to those 2 person explaining the problem.

What’s next?
Guess I need to start doing more R&D to my baby TagMe! again – anti spam feature. CAPTCHA is what I have in mind.

TagMe? Never heard of it. Tell me more!
I guess you can read all of the past entries about TagMe!, and you will know what it is

• Alpha version – only for personal use
• Opened for beta testers
• Announcement System & More Smileys
• Even more Smileys
• Opened for public
• Control Panel sneak preview
• System down

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Due to several good things that happened in my life recently, I decided to reopened the registration to TagMe!.

Hurry up. Register one yourself, or if you already using TagMe! and know some other people need one, tell him/her that registration has been reopened. Act fast (and I mean it).

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TagMe! is getting popular (signups keep growing), and that’s really a bad news. Why? Shouldn’t I be happy that more and more people is using it.

There’s one phone call that ruins my lunch today, just after I received my lunch order, and just before I have my first mouth. The guy introduce himself as Mr X (didn’t quite his name) from Mesrahosting.net. The first thing that came into my mind – this can’t be good.

And the story unfolds. He said that he’s been monitoring www.mohdimran.com for so long, and he claimed that my website alone has used up 80% of the server resources. Don’t quite sure it is true or he is just exaggerating the matter. And then he said that tagboard is the one that give the problem, and it received a hit every 3 seconds.

Looking at my hosting stats, it is true that my domain received quite a number of hits. For last month alone it is 2.2 million hits. But it can’t be that bad.

Shouthuns.com is serving 2039 tagboards. The load on the server has to be way much higher that what mine is giving. And I believe our another Malaysian produced tagboard, MsjBox.com have more tagboard served compared to mine.

Well, the guy actually ask me, what sort of thing that I run on my hosting. Well. Basically I tell the truth. I run tagboard, some sort of a messaging serviced used by others in blog/webpage, and I have several hundreds users using it. I hope that I don’t voilate any of their terms

• I don’t use it for profit. TagMe! doesn’t have AdSense or anything of that kind
• I didn’t put any copyrighted material on my hosting. Flash video? I host the video files somewhere else, and not on this hosting
• My monthly bandwidth usage is within the allowed quota that they give

Finally, he ask me, please do something about it. Well. I just have something that I will do. Remember I have a thought of switching hosting before? That is what I will do.

As an immediate action, new registration to TagMe! has been closed. Sob! Sob!

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To my all dearest TagMe! users. I share your frustation of not being able to perform the most basic admin task like changing the size of the tagboard, changing colour, retrieve lost code etc etc.

I keep telling people for so long already, for the time being, this has to be done manually by me, and I guess I upset many of the users with the really long time taken before I get back to them.

Fear not my dearest TagMe! users. The very own control panel for TagMe! is being programmed now. And here is the sneak peak of it if you are interested to know how it will look like.

Stay tuned folks! Coming soon to TagMe! near you.

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