Now since it’s been fixed:

Nothing more to say on this.

The spam problem on this blog is a never ending cycle. It just comes and comes with no breaks!

Since I added the marvelous Akismet plugin  more than a year ago it has blocked 13,000+ comments. It with that, it’s hard to tell if there was any legitimate comments in there, but I am not willing to go though as many. The content within the spam replies is rather funny at times, but is a massive pest more than anything.

Also, most of it comes from Russia by the looks of it.

My profile with usually white background now has a combination of white and grey. It does look rather odd and seems to be a placeholder for some future updates. For example, profilepages now appear like below: (first profile link on bebo homepage)

As for the homepage I seemed to have caught the site during the middle of an update. The page appeared the same as the profile page above did, with the white and grey but has now changed again. The screenshot I took of the home page appeared as such:

Thats all!

I guess eventually I and most others will get used to it and probably end up preferring it, but why couldn’t they just leave the original as an option?

The new wall/feed is to overpowering on the page. I feel that if I want to see the crappy news stuff I’d go directly to it. Besides that as well, my comment count is gone!

That is all.

</end rant>

One other improvement of significance I have noticed is the faster loading times of profiles as the profile application infestation seems to have ceased. There still is a few which appear on the profiles, but no way near as what there previously was on profiles.

Other things also include tabs separating key areas of your profile such as the Wall, Info and Photos, and quicker access to posting photos onto yours or other profiles.

There is still alot which I have yet to see so i’ll most likely be posting again when I actually have a decent amount of stuff to mention.

The reason for the move is because the framework I was using just doesn’t seem to function so well. There are various methods in the classes which could be reused but aren’t because of the initial way I coded it. Information on previous versions can be found in my post about the projects history.

Within the next few weeks i’ll be testing a basic implementation of the site as alot of it can quickly be moved over. The current features will just be the homepage, profile, user control panel and account areas. If all is well then after that move i’ll move the rest of it over, otherwise i’ll do some more testing to iron out any problems which may occur. All in all it may be a while before the site is running to a useable standard again.

Stay tuned…

The Top Friends application has now been enabled and the privacy changes have been implemented. Basically now it seems that you can only view a persons Top Friends profile if you are friends with them, otherwise you are now redirected to your own profile. If the person you visits had Top Friends installed and a public profile you still will not be able to view their profile unless you become their friends.

One less privacy hole on Facebook.

On the 26th of June the Top Friends application was suspended due to a security and privacy breach. A week prior to it’s suspension I actually took some time to look into it and how it functioned and actually found it to be quite an interesting application. Although like many others it did strike me as odd when you could see the relationship status, interests and some other profile information of people who were set to private and didn’t have myself as a friend. This of course wasn’t on their actual profile instead on a sub-profile which was attached to the application where it would display basic information, the users display picture and other applications.

After looking around on the internet and news sites it seems that it will not be re-enabled until the security and privacy breach is fixed. I can’t yet find a place which states when this actually will be fixed.

Cnet Article:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9977762-7.html

Mashable Article:

http://mashable.com/2008/06/26/top-friends-disappear-facebook/

Looking at it all it seemed pointless with the current size of the site and the realistic size of it in the future to separate the comment tables in such a manner. If in the future something needs to be done then MySQL partitioning should be available for me to use when taht change is needed. Until then the current method should work fine for a few million comments, maybe even the 10’s of millions depending on the database server I have.

As this change is quite major there are a lot of things which have now been broken, so they are being fixed as they are found.

Current Lines of Code: 22,000+ (approx)
Current Version: 3.0.8a (Alpha)

The displayed message:

Network Pages will be discontinued soon

Facebook will soon be removing Network Pages from the site. Please keep this in mind when communicating with others on the Wall and on the discussion board. You can use Groups to connect with the people around you.

Having to resort back to just using groups is a mistake in my opinion but I guess the administrators think thats the right thing to do as they actually chose to do so.

I did though notice that a while back Facebook removed the networks link from the top area of the page. I guess by that then, this has been something that has been coming for a while now. I wonder how long it’ll be before it disappears.