Spam, Diary Circles, and the long road back (part 1)

Hi everybody!

Spam

(if you’re of the generation I am, and a certain type of person, you can’t see that without thinking of Monty Python)

I think many of you have probably seen that there have been a lot of spam posts appearing on the site this week, especially in the late night/early morning hours here in the U.S. It’s a lot of ridiculous stuff, like the supposed support number for cancelling your Amazon prime membership, or buying cheap cellphones in the UK.

I first want to reassure everybody that this is not dangerous to the site, it’s just supremely annoying. The staff and I have been fighting them hand-to-hand the last few days, deleting posts and user accounts as quickly as possible. We’ve added a number of anti-spam measures, but we also don’t want to prevent “normal” people from registering or posting – so we are always walking a fine line of where to set the protection limit. There are additional measures coming from Engineering that will also help this while remaining invisible to our regular users.

If you see a spam post on the site, don’t worry about reporting it – if we haven’t already seen it, we will shortly. The one thing that you should definitely not do is click any links that you see in one of these entries. They almost never link to what they say they are, and could take you off OD to a site that is not safe for you.

Diary Circles

We’ve been regularly adding new Circles, including Gardening and Marriage just last night – so if you haven’t visited the Circles page yet, make sure to check it out. Better yet, find some that you like to join and add posts too! It’s on the main menu, under Circles.

Music Interruption

This song just came on Spotify as I was typing – since it seems to be YouTube day in my diary, I had to go find the video:

I don’t know where or when this video footage was recorded, but the audio came from a series of concerts that I was at, in-person. Loved this band when I was a youth.

I’m thinking next week’s theme might have to be about concert memories 🙂

The long road back (part 1)

I thought I had it in me this morning to start writing the story of how Open Diary came back from the dead, but now that my fingers are on the keyboard I’ve lost the oomph. There’s a whole other story about why Open Diary went away at all, I definitely don’t have it in me for that one on a Friday morning, and I may never, honestly.

I was staring at this on my desk yesterday, however – and it had a very important role in the long way back:

It’s a Seagate 2TB external hard drive. For quite a long time, it was the repository of the OD backup files after the first version of the site shut down and was taken offline. After everything was removed from the Internet, the magic connecting tissue to the rest of the world, there was still this black box.

You see, there are laws in many of the countries that Open Diary operates in – laws that require that content that is created by users be retained in at least some backup form for seven years (or longer) in case of police action or other legal proceedings that would require that data. But I don’t think that’s why I kept it. Looking back, I think I was listening to that box almost from the day files were put onto it – there were voices in it. (not like I was hearing voices in my head 🙂 )

Open Diary has always been about the stories of our lives, and there were hundreds of thousands, millions of stories, in that box. For quite a long time, it became the talisman of OD, the thing at the nexus of all those reflections and dreams and hopes and heartbreak that had been poured into OD.

Sometimes, I would look at it and think of this:

(again, sorry, apparently it’s YouTube day here)

Anyway, in retrospect, it wasn’t long after the stories entered that box, that I started to understand that they couldn’t stay there. There was too much to be lost. OD wasn’t about me, or my family, or my career – it was about the words and pictures in that memory box, sure – but so more than that, it was about the people who had created it. I didn’t create OD, I created the mechanism and the programming that enabled it – the hundreds of thousands of people who put their hearts in it, they were the ones who made it live. I was just a shepherd.

So that’s when the work began. We are almost two years past when the team that rebuilt OD started to come together – but that, I think, is a story for another time. It’s a pretty geeky story of ancient SQL Server file formats, and nosql database transitions, and evolving codebases, and mobile-responsive frameworks, and a talented group of engineers who all played a part.

But like I said, a story for another time.

Happy Friday everybody!