Spring Cleaning...

posted in Site News by swampgas on May 30th, 2001

Just taking care of some late spring cleaning...apparently there's so many people subscribed to our News Roundup service that our host is complaining...it takes over 10 minutes to email out the info and it was consuming 100% CPU resources. Not only that, but the SMTP server was being flooded with incoming mail and it couldn't handle it (which would explain why you may be missing an email or two occassionally). Wow. Over 500 people are subscribed. So, I recoded it to modernize it...even created a PHP class to handle the mail routines so it streams all the mail from 1 connection to the SMTP server (and so that the other apps that ZD uses can use the same mail code). Here's the problem. I work from 12am-5:30am. While I have access to a computer, I can't do much. So, I offer my apologies in advance if it should horribly foul up on tonight's round up (untested code is on the production server). And now time to address some email I've received over the last few months (even though I don't reply, I still read it and use your suggestions):
  • We're not using it as a mailing list. You get news. That's it.
  • We're not putting ads in it.
  • We're not going to do some lame promotion where you can win a free GBA by signing up. All those contests are bait-and-switch anyway.
  • We are going to fix the removal code so that addresses that become invalid are properly removed automatically. Right now the inbox for the daemon is 17 meg...as you can plainly see, it's becoming a problem.
  • You can still sign up - just go to the News Roundup page and enter your email.
  • You can easily remove yourself.
  • You can easily recover lost passwords.
  • You can easily choose which type of news you receive.
  • Someday I'll fix the breaking news feature so that it doesn't send you 500 copies in a single email. I believe I'm not destroying a variable and the data is being appended. ...so far that takes care of the news archive, and the News Roundup. Now, to get on the phone with the damn Anime supplier and get some DVDs flowing here. Incidently, it appears that there will not be a shortage of Gameboy Advances, so keep the orders coming...my supplier says we're good :)