Back again?

We haven't really been working on Web2Messenger for quite a while now, but it's been silently running in the background doing what it's supposed to do. The only real problem was that changing your passport or signing up wouldn't work, as the add-user routine in the bots were broken.
Initially I've just wanted to keep Web2Messenger running as both Andrew and I find it quite useful, but as people kept on bugging me about the aforementioned bug, I took some time yesterday to try and fix it.
For now it seems fixed, and in case it fails again I've added some event logging that should alert me to the exact place it's failing so I can pinpoint the problem easily.

Now, we aren't opening up Web2Messenger to the grand public yet, but I did drop off a few invites to a forum and a news site to generate some new buzz around it. Reason being both that I'd like to see my bugfix tested, and that I'd like to get some feedback on things.
Web2Messenger in it's current form has no real future. We're currently running into our maximum capacity, but making no real profit. We would like to add an extra server (think roughly 200$ per month), but we're simply unable to afford it.
We're hoping someone might have a good idea or opportunity to get some proper advertising income so we could put some more time into W2M.
So, if you have any ideas about how to generate some income, or have an idea for a sponsoring deal or something, please do not hesitate to reply to this forum thread or use the contact form.

Thanks,
TB

Posted at 26 Apr, 2008, 13:03:01 by theblasp. Comments: 26  

Mystery Downtime

I restarted all of the bots earlier after realising that they had been misbehaving for the past week or so.  I don't know exactly what was wrong with them, as they were still connected to the Messenger servers and communicating with our database to some extent, but they weren't updating your statuses or sending any messages.  Restarting them solved both of these issues.

Sorry for any inconvenience caused, and feel free to give me a prod if you notice an issue like this in future (they're automatically restarted if they stop communicating with our database, which they usually do when they stop working properly, but due to the specifics of this particular "crash", our restart script didn't see a need to restart them).

Posted at 25 Dec, 2007, 23:32:53 by Aziraphale. Comments: 0  

Facebook Application

In a forum topic adem_is suggested creating a Facebook application so that people viewing his Facebook profile could see his Messenger status.  I created a very basic version fairly quickly, but only just got around to adding Messenger Plus! formatting code support to it so I held off making any kind of announcement about it until now.

However, it's now in a state that I'm happy with, so if you have a Facebook profile, feel free to go and add the application and get a box on your profile displaying your Messenger status.

Your status is only updated every five minutes, but I think that's frequent enough for there not to be any real problems.

Supported features:

• Messenger Plus! personalised statuses are displayed as if they were normal statuses, just like they are in Messenger (with MsgPlus installed).
• Emoticons (although not custom emoticons) are converted to images in display names, personal messages and MsgPlus personalised statuses.
• All three "current media" formats in personal messages: Music, Games and Office.  Only music is supported (the option to "Show what I'm listening to") in Messenger normally, but add-ons are available that can set the others.
• Messenger Plus! formatting codes, both the IRC-style codes and the newer BBCode-style codes.
• Your Web2Messenger display picture is shown (this is the image that you can upload on our main site, not necessarily your Messenger display picture).

Note that the application does not currently support Messenger Plus! formatting gradients (background or foreground) - the start colour will be used for the entire block.  I intend to support them at a later date.

Links:
The Application's About Page
The Applications main page (which should prompt you to add it if you have not already done so).

As usual, report any bugs on the forums.  As far as I know, all MsgPlus formatting should work fine except gradients; all emoticons should be converted to images properly, but custom emoticons won't (nor are they in Messenger names/PSMs).  I've had intermittent issues with invalid characters (those not available in the current character set) appearing in the middle of names/PSMs when MsgPlus colours are used, but they stopped as quickly as they started, so I'm hoping it was an issue on Facebook's side that they've since fixed.

Also, feel free to make any comments/suggestions/bug reports on the Application's about page instead, if you wish.

I've attached a screenshot of the Web2Messenger box in my own Facebook profile to show roughly what it looks like, though I've over-used formatting codes to demonstrate them in this example:

Posted at 28 Oct, 2007, 21:18:53 by Aziraphale. Comments: 18  

reCAPTCHAs

I have just finished adding reCAPTCHAs to the "Contact Us" form at the bottom of the main site page, and the Send Message page.  The reCAPTCHA will only show on the Send Message page to people who are not logged in, though, as I really don't think we have a problem with spam from registered users.

Hopefully this will clear up the spam problem that we've had recently.  If issues persist, please let us know in this thread.

Update (2007-10-15): I've since added a CAPTCHA bypass code which you can add to your own contact forms if you're using such a form.  If this code is POSTed to our server and matches the one we have stored for your account, no CAPTCHA challenge will be presented to the sender.  If, however, that bypass code isn't present and the sender isn't logged into Web2Messenger, they will be asked to complete a reCAPTCHA challenge.  When they successfully do so, the message will be sent as normal and they will be returned to your site.  More information is available in our FAQs.

Posted at 14 Oct, 2007, 22:26:47 by Aziraphale. Comments: 5  

Greek gods totally suck

Alrighty, everything seems to be running ok now, so let's get you all updated on what's happened behind the scenes
First and foremost, I've fixed all known issues with the bots:

• Users are now properly added and deleted from the bots
• New bots will now be initialized properly
• Bots are now fully MSNP15 compatible, including the dreadful use of SOAP
• Forbidden words (.info, .pif, and about 120 others) are now replaced with (***) to prevent the messenger network to mess up our messages
• Some more things I forgot about

Furthermore we've added 14 new bots. We ran out of the greek alphabet, but to continue in a greek fashion, we've used the names of the so-called twelve olympian gods: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, Demeter, Aphrodite, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes and Dionysus. I know, I know, there are 14, not 12. Yes, I'm confused too. Blame wikipedia (bottom part, with the links). According to another article there are two more (Hebe and Persephone), but I got tired after adding the first 14, so we'll add those once we hit our limits again

So yeah, now we have space for about 9500 extra users (yay!), and a total capacity of 21000 (!!!11!!1oneoneoneeleven!!!) users
I suppose this means that we'll be opening up registrations again somewhere soon

Anyway, good luck, and keep reporting bugs,
TheBlasphemer

Posted at 1 Aug, 2007, 17:34:49 by theblasp. Comments: 9