Introduction
Spamming has been an evolving problem for the web from the early days to now. Some
years ago spamming was expanded to all electronic communication systems and moved
from the web to mobile devices as well. Not only it moved to mobile devices but
also it moved from traditional email spams to other web content types like blog
comments and trackbacks, forums, wiki's, contact forms and micro-blogging sites.
Spam filtering turned out to be a big market on the web like the spamming, itself.
While spamming costs less for spammers, on the other end it can cost more for spam
filters to stop them!
New types of spams for blog comments, trackbacks, pingbacks, forum posts, wiki pages
and contact forms are more annoying than other traditional types (email spams) because
not only they're spamming but also they're filling database storage and grow them
significantly and this is very cost-effective. They also appear publicly on sites
and disturb the look and feel of a site and its content. Not only this, but they
even do a worse job and waste a lot of time from site owners to moderate them.
The growing number of new types of spams on the web inspired webmasters to think
about some ways to prevent them. One of the solutions was using CAPTCHA controls
that ask users to enter something to make sure they're human and not a machine but
soon they could be broken with some Artificial Intelligence methods. In a few months
professional CAPTCHA controls used by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft could be broken
by hackers and spammers so CAPTCHA controls are not very reliable at a professional
level anymore. Moreover, they're not user friendly at all and can waste a lot of
time from users. There are also many usability issues in using CAPTCHA controls!
History
Having above background, since 2005 and after starting to get lots of spam comments
and tracbacks on his own blog and having some conversation with a few friends, Keyvan
Nayyeri started thinking about a centralized online service as a spam filter solution
for such spam types. Some big companies were faster than him to implement this idea
with a great quality so he stopped the progress for a couple of years.
By the way, he was studying Applied Mathematics at university and the relation between
this stuff and his courses didn't let him to stop this idea completely so he studied
about this field and did some researches and works around spam filtering.
Since 2007 and with getting a more important role on the .NET community and seeing
some holes in existing services, Keyvan finally decided to get serious about this
idea but couldn't do much because of his limited time at his mandatory military
service. Finally in February 2008 and after doing some initial architecture design,
Keyvan started the development in his spare times and long holidays at the service.
Keyvan chose Waegis (pronounced veegis) as the name of this project, site and service.
He inspired this name from aegis English word. First time Microsoft ASP.NET MVC
Program Manger and community leader, Phil Haack, introduced him to this word. Waegis
stands for Web + Aegis and actually tries to act as an aegis for the web!
For testing purposes at 12nd May 2008 Keyvan made Waegis public and launched a private
Alpha 1 version of the software and invited a few Alpha testers to test the system.
Keeping the progress and after getting excellent results from Alpha 1, he launched
private Alpha 2 at 3rd June 2008 and got more Alpha testers on the service. The
last private Alpha version, Alpha 3, was launched at 13rd June 2008 to take off
for a public release.
Finally Waegis got public in Beta stage at 9th July 2008 (8:30 AM Central Time)
and is still being tested to move to final version in a few weeks.
Goals
But what was in our mind for building this site and service?
- Help the world: Spamming is wasting many resources from the human. From a technical
perspective, it uses the server resources for sites, makes them dirty, and has a
negative influence on the content. From another view, it wastes a lot of time from
site owners, webmasters and bloggers to manage their sites. There is no doubt that
the success of such a service is very good for the world. Just suppose that it can
save 15-30 minutes from owners and visitors of a site. Many of these guys are technical
people so their time worth it!
- Achieving the minimum fault ratio: In fact, the success of such a service depends
on the number of users and sites that it hosts and also its fault ratio. Here fault
ratio is defined as false-positive and false-negative values. The less values for
both rates the better. Other services were showing some signs of ineffectiveness
before we start the project so we tried to join them in order to stand against spamming.
- Simplicity: Simplicity is what we always follow in our works and this time he tried
to bring simplicity to this platform.
- Targeting Web 3.0: As long as we move on and web grows, spammers bother us with
their works and we need to evolve with them. So Waegis tries to
target web 3.0 to make it cleaner from spams.
Our Team
We have a small but passionate and skilled team that are serious about this site
and service and want to improve it as much as they can.
-
Keyvan Nayyeri (Founder, Architect and Developer)
-
Keyvan is a software architect and developer who has a bachelor of science degree
in applied mathematics. He was born in Kermanshah, Kurdistan, in 1984.
His main focus is on Microsoft development technologies and their related technologies
such as mark-up languages. He’s also experienced in practices and enjoys them very
much. Keyvan has a serious passion for community activities and open-source software.
As a result, he is an author for some famous .NET communities and has published
various articles and tutorials on them. He is also a team leader and developer of
several famous .NET open-source projects where he tries to learn many things through
writing code for special purposes.
Keyvan is also an author for Wrox Press and has authored Professional Visual Studio
Extensibility and co-authored Professional Community Server books.
When he’s not coding, he enjoys blogging, reading technical books, listening to
music, and playing video games. Keyvan blogs at www.nayyeri.net.
-
Mehrdad Ebrahimi (Director & Billing Manager)
-
Mehrdad is a web developer, entrepreneur and co-founder of
AryaNix Inc, an Internet related start-up company. He was born in Tehran,
Iran in 1983. He remained there as he grew up and was educated in public schools.
He started programming with Commoder 64 at the age of 10. He has 5 years of experience
in developing software with FoxPro and developed standalone salary system software
when he was 16. Mehrdad became a web designer 2 years later and designed his first
site, his own personal site, on 1998.
He immigrated to United States in 2006 and has been working on .NET technologies.
Now Mehrdad lives and works in Austin, Texas, with his wife. In his non-existence
spare time, Mehrdad is an avid photographer and R/C airplanes enthusiasm. You can
read Mehrdad's blog at www.everydayasp.net.
-
Shaho Toofani (Visual Designer)
-
Shaho Toofani is a freelance web developer and graphic designer, living and working
in Sanandaj (Sîne), Kurdistan. He enjoys building accessible, elegant and Standards-Compliant
websites, passionate about hand-coded scripting in XHTML, CSS and Ruby on Rails.
He also has experiences in ASP.NET from first public release.
His online home can be found at www.toofani.net
where he writes in-depth Persian tutorials about modern web design.
On those rare occasions away from the computer, you can find Shaho with his friends
who enjoy Kurdish traditional dance called Halparkê.
Technology
The development technology behind the Waegis is just from Microsoft, the giant of
software! We don't want to advertise for Microsoft but we have a serious passion
that Microsoft development technologies and server-side products are very powerful
and want to prove this.
Waegis is built completely on an extensible platform that lets its owners extend
it quickly and easily to adapt with new spamming techniques. Waegis is built on
top of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and is written completely in C# language.
There are some main technologies used to build Waegis including Windows Communication
Foundation (WCF) 3.5, ASP.NET 3.5, ASP.NET AJAX 3.5 and ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.
Waegis also uses Microsoft SQL Server in the backend and applies some of its newest
features to work much better.
Waegis is optimized for 64 bit platforms and for Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft
Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0.
This platform is also written based on some self-learning algorithms and methods
inspired from mathematics, statistics and Artificial Intelligence.
As of security, we're aware that this is a very important aspect of Waegis so we
have designed a built-in integrated security mechanism to take care about such stuff.
Hosting
There is one obvious and very important aspect for online services and especially
for a spam filtering service that should be up and running without downtime. This
aspect is hosting.
We already have taken care about this and tried to choose the best solution to make
sure that we and our clients are %100 satisfied with the hosting experience.
Waegis is hosted on a multi-server dedicated bundled solution by
MaximumASP which is a very well-known and professional company that has
proved its power with enterprise Windows hosting for many big sites over the years.
Event MaximumASP is hosting some big Microsoft sites.
We have hosted our site and service on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 x64 edition
and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 x64 edition and MaximumASP takes care about all support
stuff for operating system, SQL Server, security, hardware and backups. According
to our contract with MaximumASP, they guarantee %100 uptime for our servers so like
you, we don't worry about anything!