Over the last couple of months I've been spending a lot of time fighting the comment spammers.
Two months ago, the comment spam was exploding and a good 20% of comments were ads for online poker or pharmaceuticals.
Our defense has evolved somewhat. At first I was just searching for and deleting the spam after it happened. This is why for a while, the comment count displayed on the profile page was incorrect.
Gradually we compiled a list of obvious spam and reworked the code to catch the spam before it goes into a comment or your guestbook. Also when I do go delete spam I find, the comment counts are updated properly.
We still have some improvements to make to the spam shield, but it looks like only about 1% of comments are spam now.
About a month ago we moved the search to a new server and performance has greatly improved. Now we'll be able to work on improving the search features instead of just trying to keep it running.
Emily has been working a various features including the improved favorites page. She's finishing up a similar feature that I think has the potential to be really useful, or at least fun.
My main project currently is improving overall site performance.
We're getting close to finally getting a serious database machine.
Lots of meetings recently with Sun, Oracle, providers, and banks to make it happen. The system we're looking at should be at least twice as powerful as the current machine and is expandable much beyond that.
Due to cash limitations, most of our main database machines have had around a year of life before they become overloaded. I expect this machine to have at least 3-5 years. During this I've been making lots of tiny effiency improvements, but things are still slow during peak hours.
Believe me, this causes us much pain since we know everyone viewing the site is frustrated. We're doing everything we can right now to solve this problem for good.
Meanwhile, I've also been working on things such as a much improved statistics system. You'll be able to see graphs of daily hitcounts on any individual image or gallery, as well as aggregate statistics. Some of you may remember seeing these graphs a couple years ago, but they never went public because they were far too much of a system hog.
Recently, I redesigned how the statistics are collected and with the new database machine on the way, they should be no problem.
-slug