Wild Week! – BosnianBill's LockLab
What a WILD week! The TRIBE really came through with some super suggestions to improve the website. So many, in fact, that we started a “Website Improvements” page to keep track of the priority and status of each suggestion. Some of the suggestions are great, but technically impossible, or at least require a lot of custom coding to implement. Others I implemented right away, like improving the menus for mobile devices. The techies are still working on condensing the headers a bit further, trying to optimize things for you guys that use mobile devices.
By FAR, the most requested features were a TRIBAL Blog and Forum. As you can see, the Blog is now active and I hope to have the forum active within a week or two. As you can imagine it isn’t something you just turn “on” with software. When I do it, it should be RIGHT, or as close to right as we can get it. In all likelihood there will be another LockLabGiveaway next week to solicit ideas for Forum subjects that you’d like to see covered.
We moved everything to a cloud distributed network (CDN) to improve speed, reliability and security.
Speaking of LockLabGiveaways, there were 437 emails containing suggestions, giving entrants much better odds of winning than after the Vorax review video where each entry only had a 1 out of 5300 chance. Still, the techies and I read every single suggestion. Selecting the winner was not easy, but one really stood out: Andrew Barrows. He picked the site apart, identified everything from grammatical errors to software glitches, and made over 20 excellent suggestions for improvement. After reviewing everyone’s suggestions I spent several hours on the phone with the techies, after which we all felt pretty beat up. We hear you and are working to make things as close to perfect as possible.
We moved everything to a cloud distributed network (CDN) to improve speed, reliability and security. During the first week we were on a…lesser server… and the site was HAMMERED by two DoS attacks and brute force attacks. Every day the site was scanned HARD by automated scanners, which ate up a lot of bandwidth. The server just couldn’t keep up. To counter that, I moved to Amazon’s AWS commercial servers. We now have multiple, redundant servers that scale up according to demand, are fault tolerant, and use Amazon’s ELB (Elastic Load Balancer). More demand, more servers kick in. On top of that, I opted for a CDN, meaning the website is on servers everywhere. If you are in Germany or the UK, you are accessing the Euro-based CDNs. Obviously, this improved speed dramatically for everyone.
I want to thank EVERYONE for their suggestions to improve the site.
Several of you ran security scanners against the site and found remnant documents left over from development, and we’re deleting it as it pops up. The techies are still setting things up and I’m still drafting content, but eventually we’ll get there. To improve security I’ve applied for a green bar Extended Validation (SSL). The process takes about a month so they can complete the background investigation. Once that’s active we’ll have site encryption equal to any financial institution and you’ll know immediately that you’re on an encrypted site because you’ll see the lock and green bar next to the address at the top of your browser. The Internet can be a mean place and we are armoring up and arming ourselves against it.
Anyway, this makes for a long blog. I want to thank EVERYONE for their suggestions to improve the site. If you think of any more, please don’t hesitate to send them in.
Thank you!
Stay Safe, Stay Legal