This marks the release of AdRotate Professional 5.7.3. An important update which changes quite a few things under the hood. Most notably all new API’ and less dashboard notifications. All non-essential fluff has been removed. And equally important the update process has been streamlined a bit further based on user feedback.
Over the last few months updating AdRotate Professional has not been as easy as it should be.
A ton of things have been going wrong with the update routine for many users. While for others it worked without a hitch. I’m one of those people where it usually works. So it’s a bit hard to find the problem. But here goes.
I took some more drastic measures to actually improve things and not just patch stuff up.
3 Major issues have come to light and have been fixed or will be fixed over the next few weeks.
This update focuses on streamlining the license and geo targeting experience and includes a number of bugfixes and tweaks related to those 2 functions. License notifications should now work more clear and reliable.
Geo Targeting has recently moved from using Cookies to Sessions. A number of fixes makes that more reliable and robust.
Another important, albeit smaller than the last. This update fixes a number of quirks and silly bugs including the false message that certain licenses are expired.
Geo Targeting Cookies have been replaced with actual sessions which caused another bug for the recently included duplicate advert feature, and that got fixed too.
This started as a quick patch for deleting Adverts, but once I got going and dove into the code a bit deeper to fix the renaming mistake I made in an earlier update I found a bunch more quirks. AdRotate Geo was acting up again and generally what was going to be a small patch turned into a full update with many tweaks and improvements.
The AdRotate Geo Service got updated again. This time we try to tackle sites who slow down the server too much by just being slow. This kind of slowness is usually caused by crap hosting packages. You know, all those $1 hosting setups. Or people who have outgrown their shared hosting but won’t admit it…
Over the last few weeks I’ve been flooded with monitoring messages that the overall state of AdRotate Geo is deteriorating quickly. Some investigation turns out that (currently) 14 websites can not respond quick enough to handle the AdRotate Geo response.
This basically means that those websites process the AdRotate Geo response too slow, causing other sites to slow down as well. As a result of the slowdowns I’ve put the following rule in place.
If your site is slower than 750ms you’ll be denied access to AdRotate Geo for 2 days. If this happens you’ll receive a email notification.
I’ve upgraded AdRotate Geo to version 5. The older API will be retired in a few months. The newer API has better protection against fake users and stuff like that. Hopefully it’ll be faster for legitimate users 🙂
More importantly to you – the new API will no longer send empty responses like some users using version AdRotate Pro 4.17 experienced. So it’s working more reliable now, too.
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on new mechanics to better manage AdRotate Geo. As an immediate response I shut down AdRotate Geo API versions 3 and 4 and introduced version 5 a few days later with better detection mechanisms to block/ban abusers.
This worked fine for a while until the DDoS nonsense started again, those requests are not attached to a license and thus I can’t use the mechanic to block them as well – Since the system didn’t look at the IP address or origin other than the license key.
Today I woke up to 22 emails that my website was offline-online-offline and so on. Turns out some users are once again abusing AdRotate Geo by sending millions of requests to my API.
AdRotate Geo serves around 3 million requests per day. And scales pretty well for small to medium sites. Currently there are a couple of hundred users subscribed to AdRotate Geo. But getting upwards of 40 million requests per hour is a bit too much for my servers.
So, DDoS then, again… But they’re all real AdRotate Pro users as far as I can see. Valid authentification keys and api access… After some digging it turns out that it was AdRotate Geo being hammered with traffic from a bunch of AdRotate Pro users sites. Millions of requests per site? Come on. That’s not real traffic. Can’t be… Or is it.
Happy new year!
It’s been a while, the new year has arrived. And with that, a bunch of new features right of the bat. I’ve re-added FreegeoIP for Geo Targeting. Added more caching support options and support for Google their new tracking tag.
Check out the settings in the plugin to see more.
I’ve made a number of changes to the dashboard, including the removal of the slow and ugly Facebook widget. I’m sort of looking to phase out Facebook a bit more from my life, so now you have a pretty banner to my website to look at. Among with some other dashboard improvements.
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