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practically all the detritus I'm leaving across the web tubes.
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April 12 2012
Working on it ...
Something seems to have upset the asset store. We are investigating the issue and apologize for any lolcats not seen.
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April 11 2012
The database wants a small upgrade...
... so we will be offline in ~10-20 minutes (1:15 pm UTC), the whole thing should take around 15-30 minutes max.
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March 27 2012
Scheduled downtimes for hardware maintenance
We will do some hardware maintenance today (28/03/2012) from 00:30 CEST to 02:00 CEST. Most of this should go unnoticed by you, however we probably won't be able to prevent a few downtimes of about 5 minutes within this timeframe. We will try to keep them as short as possible.
For those of you who care, we will improve the cabling in the server rack, move some servers around and reinstall old unused machines. These will most probably then serve as frontend servers for soup.io and/or as backend workers to deal with the feed imports.
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February 09 2012
Scheduled hardware maintenance
We will do some much needed hardware maintenance and disk upgrades today from 10:30 GMT to 12:30 GMT. We apologize for the cold turkey.
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December 26 2011
November 03 2011
Downtime for DB maintenance on Monday
In order to prepare our database for some upgrades in the near future, we'll have to take the Soup database offline for a few hours.
So in the morning of Monday, the 7th November 2011, you won't be able to access Soup from 04:00 to 08:00 CET (that's 03:00 to 07:00 GMT).
We're sorry for the inconvenience.
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September 15 2011
Help Wanted: Soup.io/me is hiring
Can you create rich multimedia visualizations with JavaScript, build bleeding-edge HTML5 frameworks or scale popular webapps?Do you want to work for a freshly-funded, developer-driven startup with 100k+ users that's about to make the jump to Silicon Valley?
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c3o
c3oJune 24 2011
Next round of data Sokoban!
After we finally have the new file servers under control - can you feel it too? - the next bottleneck is running amuck (gotta catch 'em all!): the database, which is under extreme duress due to people scrolling faster now... who said more bandwidth and swift images would be a good thing again?
So, @terrorobe and me are going to update our database tomorrow, saturday ~10:00 am CEST and also put a new machine in place. If all goes smooth, it should be over somewhen in the afternoon. However, an exact estimate is difficult.
Please watch out for updates on twitter and honor us with some more of your patience. I expect we can reward you with better performance especially during peak hours.
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June 22 2011
Something's still going wrong.
After the recovery a few days ago, our freshly set up file cluster crashed again (no, no lost files) when we tried to expand its capacity. Now everything is pretty messed up, yet not unrecoverable. I hope I can fix most of it until tomorrow morning, so that soup becomes usable again.
edit 08:28 CEST: That's it for now. If a picture seems to be missing, try reloading it.
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June 14 2011
"Something went wrong"
During the server relocation last night a node of the file cluster gave out, and took it's assets with it.
We are currently running with old and new assets. Right there in the middle is a "donut hole", which some of you might have noticed already because a profile picture is missing every now and then.
We are very sorry about that, but that's life.
What's also life is, that we have offsite backups of everything, so fear not, all is good.
However, the backup replay might take a while: we can do a pretty good job with the new uplink in downloading, but it is a bit more complicated than just replicating a volume. Every asset that's being pulled from the backup needs to be checked if it is still active, downloaded and verified. My guess is, that it will take anywhere between one to five days to bring back everything.
In the meanwhile, if there is a file you really really need now, because it's homework or otherwise extremely(!) important(!!), you can drop us a mail at team@soup.io with the file URI. We will then restore the file for you manually. Did I mention it needs to be life-or-death important? ;)
Again, sorry for the inconvenience, the next iteration of the file cluster will certainly not be susceptible to this kind of data loss.
edit: those of you who can't open their soup: we are working on that. When your soup opens again, it might not have the design you expect. Please be patient, yours will come back.
edit: the user avatars are now completely restored, which should lead to better performance right away.
edit: the last two days we were very invested in setting up the new file cluster, which is now mostly done, and is still importing files from the old server and the backup. Over time, speed will improve and most important of all, it is built very redundantly. Yay! No more inconvenient data loss in the future.
Also, since we now have more available space at our hosting facility, some other long planned improvements will be implemented over the next days and weeks, all targeted towards acceptable speed and a little bit more stability ;)
Btw, did anybody notice that this little trashcan in edit mode looks like a crown? ... I think I need to go to bed now.
Reposted by
June 12 2011
Bandwidth upgrade, server migration
In light of your bottomless hunger for bandwidth - we now (again) saturate our uplink for more than 12 hours every day - we will move some servers around tomorrow afternoon. This will result in a downtime between 4-6 hours. We estimate the outage to start at 12:00 CET (8:00 a.m. PST) at the earliest and finish at ~20:00 CET (2:00 p.m. PST) at the latest.
This measure will not only bring a new and faster uplink, but also enable us to upgrade some critical infrastructure in a week or so, thus making soup's speed tolerable again ;)
As always, during (and after) the outage, you can find us on twitter for any news and updates.
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January 24 2011
Coming soon: Server upgrade, new version of Soup
We know that Soup has been slow as molasses for the last few weeks – the load time has quite literally been off the charts. One of the reasons was a lack of available bandwidth. We've now added a second uplink, and the bottleneck has shifted to a lack of processing power – both database CPU and application servers – causing some short downtimes over the last few days.
The good news: We've already ordered the parts and will be implementing a comprehensive hardware upgrade at the beginning of next week.
In even bigger news, as we've hinted at in the past, we're preparing a relaunch of Soup.
In the first version, it will focus on improving the way your Soup account looks and on giving you more control over your content, to sort and filter it and display different types of content in different ways. Changes to the reading experience (friends/everyone) will follow later. Developers will have new opportunities to work with Soup data and change the way Soup works.
Within this week, we will start sending out invites to a separate alpha installation of the new Soup to a first small batch of users. As we react to their feedback, improving the user experience and fixing bugs, we'll gradually invite more people, ultimately upgrading all current Soup users to the new system within the next months.
We can't wait to see what you think and how you're going to put the new featureset to use!
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September 29 2010
Control filtering of Everyone and Friends streams
First, thanks for all your feedback on the NSFW filtering issue. There are a lot of opinions and people are obviously split on which way we should go. So we've decided to introduce a way to disable filtering.
Please note that this setting is currently stored in your brower's cookie, and defaults to "off". We will store it in your user settings if we're happy with how this feature works.
We know that this isn't the best solution, and that e.g. per-post filtering would make more sense. We will keep working on it and eventually implement a better solution, but until then you at least have the option of choosing for yourself wether you'd like to filter or not.
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September 28 2010
Help us make Soup more safe for work
Last week we launched some experimental features to allow users to flag content that is "not safe for work" (by which we mostly mean pornography and "shock" content), both on individual Soups and in the Everyone stream.
While we do not believe in censorship and support your right to post anything not conflicting with Austrian law on your own Soup, we do have to keep the Everyone view mostly clean.
Once flagged, a member of the Soup team will check out the supposedly offensive content and, if confirmed, hide that Soup from the Everyone stream. This does not, however, affect its posts showing up in Friends streams of people who are specifically following the Soup.
If this system works, we will later add self-reporting, a NSFW toggle switch and per-post filtering – right now we just implemented the minimal technical solution.
What do you think? A much-needed cleanup of Everyone? Or too much Big Brother for your tastes?
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June 29 2010
Post by email is back
It took us an embarrassingly long time, but finally making posts to Soup by email is working again – we've moved the infrastructure to a new system. If you're unfamiliar with this feature, read up on how it works!
Sorry again for the wait. Did we mention we feel bad about the humiliating amount of time this feature was broken? :-/
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May 12 2010
Scrollable image zoom
David, one of our new team members, just fixed a long-standing issue: You can now keep scrolling up and down when viewing a zoomed-in image: Finally all those long narrow infographics, comics and 4chan screencaps are readable!
While we were at it, we increased the maximum overall size of those images as well.
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March 09 2010
Improving Soup performance, and a general note on our status and the future
As you may have read on kitchen.soup.io or Twitter, we recently upgraded our hardware. This had a dramatically positive effect on page loading times, which had been gradually creeping up over the previous weeks due to Soup's continued growth. We also fixed a longstanding, annoying issue in which the content of posts temporarily seemed to disappear.
Unfortunately, since then a new problem has popped up, which is intermittently slowing Soup down yet again and even lead to several hours of downtime yesterday.
We're doing what we can to get to the bottom of this. Since signs point to the cause being in the notification system, we need to experimentally disable notifications for the next day or so as part of our debugging efforts. Sorry about that!
I know how much it sucks when Soup is slow or unreachable, when support requests remain unanswered and obvious feature improvements aren't implemented.
Unfortunately, our resources are very limited right now. @lfittl decided to leave the company earlier this year, and despite everyone's intentions of a smooth and swift transition to another full-time technical team member, it has been plagued by delays.
That you all are willing to tolerate these circumstances and continue to be active in the community and entrust us with your data is humbling and motivating, and just strengthens my unwavering commitment to the site and its future. Here's what's currently being done:
– I'm expecting to be able to introduce you to some new team members shortly.
– Plans are being made to future-proof the database architecture of Soup. This is just the start of a process that will take months, but will ultimately give us lots of breathing room from scaling issues.
– I'm busy working on the general future direction of Soup. I'm seriously excited about the way the plans, mockups and prototypes are developing and can't wait to share them and get some feedback from all of you. Right now, the only aspect I can give away is an increased focus on mobile devices, but that's just one part of it. Stay tuned!
– We're actively talking to investors to put these plans on a more stable financial foundation, while still keeping a plan B in mind for when that doesn't work out.
To stay in the loop on the progress of these plans, consider adding kitchen as a friend, if you haven't already. Thanks so much for your continued support!
– Christopher, Founder
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December 08 2009
Facebook integration: Auto-posting & login/signup
You prefer Soup, but some of your friends mainly use Facebook? Not a problem: We can now automatically publish everything you post on Soup to your Facebook wall (including reposts, but excluding imports and reactions – why?). Video clips and audio files will be playable directly on Facebook, all other kinds of posts link back to your Soup.
You'll find the setting in the new "Automatic exports" section of your Soup's options panel.
You may also choose to sign in or register via Facebook Connect, which makes it even easier for new users to start a Soup: Entering an email address, picking a password and uploading an avatar image are no longer necessary!
Maybe you can convince your Facebook friends to give it a try now... ;)
You prefer Soup, but some of your friends mainly use Facebook? Not a problem: We can now automatically publish everything you post on Soup to your Facebook wall (including reposts, but excluding imports and reactions – why?). Video clips and audio files will be playable directly on Facebook, all other kinds of posts link back to your Soup.
You'll find the setting in the new "Automatic exports" section of your Soup's options panel.
You may also choose to sign in or register via Facebook Connect, which makes it even easier for new users to start a Soup: Entering an email address, picking a password and uploading an avatar image are no longer necessary!
Maybe you can convince your Facebook friends to give it a try now... ;)
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November 21 2009
→ soup.tv
Soup TV: Endless scrolling for videos
We're excited to announce the launch of the alpha version of Soup TV: You can now watch the video content of your friends, their friends or any particular Soup in (almost) full screen mode with seamless playback – and your own Soup now also comes with your own personal "TV station": Just add
As with Soup in general, we've tried to keep this feature as simple as possible: A big "next" button is all navigation there is (even just hitting the space bar works as well). The next time you want something interesting to watch without having to do much searching, selecting or navigating, lean back and give Soup TV a try!
Some notes: In this first version only videos hosted on YouTube are shown due to technical reasons, but we plan to include other sources later. Video resolution will vary depending on the particular clip – and of course, a fast connection is highly recommended.
We think this is a great way to enjoy video content, and are pretty addicted to it ourselves. Please let us know how you like this feature!
Here are some channel recommendations to get you started:
- WTF will astound and confuse you
- Advertime shows outstanding advertisements
- Songsung has a great collection of music cover versions
Find any other great TV streams? Tell us in a reaction!
We're excited to announce the launch of the alpha version of Soup TV: You can now watch the video content of your friends, their friends or any particular Soup in (almost) full screen mode with seamless playback – and your own Soup now also comes with your own personal "TV station": Just add
/tv to the end of your address, or go to (and send your friends to!) username.soup.tv.As with Soup in general, we've tried to keep this feature as simple as possible: A big "next" button is all navigation there is (even just hitting the space bar works as well). The next time you want something interesting to watch without having to do much searching, selecting or navigating, lean back and give Soup TV a try!
Some notes: In this first version only videos hosted on YouTube are shown due to technical reasons, but we plan to include other sources later. Video resolution will vary depending on the particular clip – and of course, a fast connection is highly recommended.
We think this is a great way to enjoy video content, and are pretty addicted to it ourselves. Please let us know how you like this feature!
Here are some channel recommendations to get you started:
- WTF will astound and confuse you
- Advertime shows outstanding advertisements
- Songsung has a great collection of music cover versions
Find any other great TV streams? Tell us in a reaction!
Reposted by
November 03 2009
Tagging
Last week, we implemented basic support for tagging so you can categorize your posts and improve findability. Just click the "+ TAGS" button at the bottom of a post editing form to start adding some tags.
You can separate individual tags either by commas or spaces, and when using spaces you may use quotes to enclose phrases – so these two inputs are equivalent:
tag1 "another tag" tag3
tag1, another tag, tag3
Tags are also imported from some feeds, notably Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Unfortunately, most other services do not include tags in their RSS feeds.
This feature is still in an early testing phase, and we'll be making further improvements: Tag clouds and global tag pages are on the todo list, and we're happy to hear your suggestions for further improvements.
You can separate individual tags either by commas or spaces, and when using spaces you may use quotes to enclose phrases – so these two inputs are equivalent:
tag1 "another tag" tag3
tag1, another tag, tag3
Tags are also imported from some feeds, notably Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Unfortunately, most other services do not include tags in their RSS feeds.
This feature is still in an early testing phase, and we'll be making further improvements: Tag clouds and global tag pages are on the todo list, and we're happy to hear your suggestions for further improvements.
Reposted by
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