The blog.co.uk Blog: News, tips and more.

Dear BCUK bloggers,

As most of you have noticed, there are currently problems with email notifications. These problems are due to the fact that the majority of the biggest email providers, i.e. yahoo, hotmail, and AOL, have blacklisted us as spam.

This is incredibly frustrating, both for all of you out there in blogland and us here in HQ. We are working very hard to get whitelisted again, but this is a very time-consuming process and unfortunately there is no easy short-term solution. We apologise most sincerely, but our hands are well and truly tied. We'll be sure to keep you updated if things change.

The best solution we can offer at the moment is either to change to gmail (the notifications go directly to the spam folder - just unmark it as spam and it should be fine again) or to a smaller email provider. It would be great if the users who are receiving notifications could let us know which providers are working well at the moment.

Also, we'd like to request that users stop posting about this in the HelpBlog - we are all too aware of the issue and the flood of posts about could cause us to react slowly to a new issue.

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Some users are also experiencing some slowness on BCUK. There's an FAQ about it and we'd appreciate it if those of you experiencing poor performance would have a look at it here.

Thanks for your patience thus far, we really appreciate it.

Your BCUK team.

Just for those who are sporadically being logged out. Please answer the following questions as specifically as you can - it should further help us to sort out the problem.

Please mail your answers to support@blog.co.uk when you are finished.

1. What operating system do you use (as specifically as possible)?
2. What browser and do you use, and which version is it?
3. Do you use browser extentions, for example Google Toolbar, etc?
4. Do you have many windows or tabs open at the same time when the logout occurs?
5. Are your username and password saved, do you use autologin or do you enter your details manually each time you log in?
6. Are you logged out after a particular length of time?
7. Please describe you 'clickroute' - where exactly you were when the logout occured, where you were going to, etc.
8. Are you logged out as you go from the new design areas to the old, or vice versa? (You can recognise the 'new' areas due to the fact that they have more space at the sides, eg 'myblog' is new, but 'blogs' is old.
9. If you are logged out when you click on a particular profile or blog, please let us know which one(s).

Thanks again for your help,
your BCUK team.

Dear bloggers,

Next week BCUK will be taking an enormous leap forward with the move to the new data centre. It's a move that we have been meticulously planning and preparing for for quite some time, and quite a hefty sum of money has been invested in it. The hardware will be provided by one single reputable provider. This new data centre in Nürnberg will finally allow us to plan, grow and develop on a much longer term basis than ever before.

For you bloggers, that means that you can come and anxiously wring your hands with us on the night of Tuesday, April 15th and Wednesday, April 16th. Our taskforce, comprising of the office admin, Oli and Felix, as well as the senior developers, Dominic, Florian and Alex, will be in the office all night, keeping things under control and listening vigilantly for alarm bells.

An internet move involves many factors, most of which cannot be simulated or tested. Can the new hardware carry the load? On the internet, there is a type of 'mail forwarding', just like when you move house. If this doesn't work properly, it could be that some of you might be seeing quite a bit of little blue mascot MO giving you nasty error messages...

Is everything where it should be? Everything has to be moved, terrabyte by terrabyte, data that would fill thousands upon thousands of CDs. Hopefully not even the tiniest bit of information will be broken or changed, let alone lost.

Sometime between 00:30 and 04:30 (British time), the team will be able to relax somewhat, but that does not mean that they can go to bed - Murphy's Law can strike even the most precisely made plans.

The new heart of BCUK will be one in which sixteen cores beat - twice as many as the current one. There will also be 33% more memory capacity, and the webservers will also be faster. As well as this, there will be more space for your media - five times more, to be specific. So soon we will be able to offer you more personal storage space.

All of us in the Mokono team would like to sincerely thank our business partners, who have supported and helped us immesurably in the recent months, especially IP Exchange, Dell, Connect, Coyote Point Systems, bismark technology GmbH and Manitu - our old provider with whom we worked closely for three years, and who always stood by us in times of crisis.

So we would like apologise and to ask for your understanding and patience, since the platform will be absolutely unusable between about 00:30 and 04:30 (BST) on Wednesday, April 16th. Rest assured that we will do everything in our power to have things up and running, even more smoothly than before, by 04:30.

Thanks for your support,
Your blog.co.uk team.

A few quick shots of our new home:
       

A quick message for all users who are still occasionally logged out (if you don't suffer from this problem, there's no need to read on).

In order to finally completely eliminate the logout problem, we have created a new user, teamservice. By adding this user to your friends list, we can trace your click route more easily and therefore more clearly define the criteria that cause you to be unexpectedly logged out.

Of course, adding teamservice is completely voluntary and can be deleted whenever you want.

A big thank you for all your help so far,

your BCUK team.