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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While others are enjoying the hundreds of smileys that TagMe! has to offer, visiting from one TagMe! user to another, yarning happily, blissfully messages, but on the other side of it, TagMe! has sparked a brawl between 2 of my dear friends, who happened to be the user of TagMe! too.

How such a vulnerable and insecure IP address here has started the inferno between them. I do really hope the dispute between both of them will end soon.

I have listened the stories from the both side, but I guess I better stay put and not interfere with it as I may make it worst.

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There was a time when da Vinci painted Monalisa

There was a time when Romeo sang a beautiful song to Juliet

There was a rumour of UFO abducting human

TagMe! now with even more smilies:

There’s a smiley for you to use for every occasion, during your sunny day, and during your rainy day.

Don’t be sad Put a smile on your face and always say

With lots and lots of kisses from me

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After about a month that my tagboard is running, now I have 18 users. Previously, the registration is very manual. On those with guts did message me and ask me to create an account. Hehehehe.

I’ve been browing around others tagboard, and see a few people asking for it. And I also see the existing users of my tagboard did mention to get it by visiting my blog. But until now, I haven’t received any request from them. Guess they are too shy :D

Two annoucements that I would like to make today. First one, the tagboar, which I called M’re’s Tagboard previously has been rebranded to TagMe!

Secondly, good news for those who are shy to contact me to ask for an account. Registration is now automated, and can be made from the website. Yay!!!

Anyway, this registration link will be opened for a limited period only. I will close it when I think my server has more than enough accounts to serve (to avoid my hosting getting slow, or bandwidth running out pretty quick). Yeah yeah… My hosting really sux. So hurry….

I have so many other things that I would like TagMe! to have, and also some new ideas of new feature to add to it. Some of them are (in descending priority order)

• User preference page, to change every aspect of TagMe!, change password, change size, change look and feel, etc
• BBCode support
• A new cool feature that I didn’t see any tagboard out there has this. Can’t reveal much yet
• Using AJAX to feed messages to the tagboard

… and many more. So hang in there folks!

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It’s a smileys craze here. Starting with the “smiley”ish looking template header change and to adding 141 new smileys yesterday. I have done it again!! By visiting local forums, I managed to collect 28 more of new and fresh smileys. Here you go.

Now you have 185 smileys to choose from when leaving a message on my tagboard:

• 16 original smileys at the bottom part of the tagboard
• 141 new smileys added yesterday
• 28 new smileys just added today

That’s a lot of smileys to choose from.

I have grouped the smileys that I think have a common theme together. Below are how I group them together, from left to right, top to bottom.

• Smileys with happy theme
• Smileys with adoration theme
• Smileys with evil theme
• Smileys with gloomy theme
• Smileys with intoxicated them
• Smileys with hat and that have disposition
• Various symbols in smileys format
• Smileys holding signboard

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Two latest installements to the tagboard that I did last night as the result of being too bored at home (and end up sleeping at 2:30am. huhuhuhu):

• Announcement system
• More smileys

Announcement system is created to provide a centralized message sending to all of the tagboard users on any breaking news about M’re Tagboard. It can vary from announcing new features that just been deployed, upcoming enhancements and scheduled downtime.

Announcement thread will be using a different icon as follows, and it is not “delete”able and “reply”able (even if you login in to your tagboard).

Upcoming enhancement:
Announcement thread will be time based thread. This feature will be developed. When the announcement is made, a life time will be assigned, and it will disappear after the life time has expired. That way you won’t have those announcements keep clogging your tagboard.

In addition to this, 141 new and fresh smileys have been added. Happy smiling people ;)

Upcoming enhancement:
You can choose whether the window will auto click after a smiley has been selected, or the windows remains opened after the smiley has been selected and added (so that you can choose another)

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