By
Keyvan Nayyeri
Following to the last announcement about Waegis page on Facebook and our plans to appear on more social networking and communication sites, today we’re happy to announce our Twitter account as well.
We realized that our users need to be aware of the latest news and updates about the service, and be notified in the shortest time possible; therefore, we created this account to publish the latest news about Waegis specifically some urgent updates that may be missed on this blog.
There are some upcoming changes on Waegis in the next ten days and this Twitter account can help us communicate with our users in a better way.
Beside notifying our followers, we also want to keep an eye on all the user feedback about Waegis, so if you send a Tweet with “Waegis” word included (“#waegis” is preferred), we’ll hear your voice and if necessary, will respond you in order to get your help to improve our services.
If you’re a Waegis user, and you want to stay up to date with the latest news, updates, and changes, please follow Waegis on Twitter.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
We always have asserted that we want to have a community of clients on Waegis and use our communications with our users in order to improve our service day after day. Not only we have put a high priority on user’s feedback to consider any input from you but also we have been looking to applying social networking features to stay connected to our clients.
As one of the first noticeable steps toward this goal, recently we created a page for Waegis on Facebook as the most popular social networking service on today’s web. We want to use this page to listen to users voice and share latest updates with our clients and fans.
So we invite you to join to Waegis page, stay connected, and participate in the discussions to help us put Waegis on the point that you desire.
By the way, keep an eye on this blog for our future announcements about our appearance on other social networking sites.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
Many of our users have experienced the recent growth of spam comments that try to promote specific keywords on search engines which are commonly known as Busby comments. A company with the same name that specializes in SEO and online advertisement has started a context to encourage normal web users to leave comments on sites and blogs with these specific keywords to promote their own URLs. They give prizes to the top URLs in search engine results.
Fortunately Waegis has been able to block such annoying comments in a few days after their appearance on the web, but you know how disappointing it is to see such a context from a company that attracts many users to start such a mass spamming.
Earlier today I wrote a post on my blog covering this new generation of dirty business on the web where I discussed the downsides of this context and its potential dangerous for the future of the web. The fact that these spammers are ordinary web visitors and they are real human can aggravate things.
The final and most important note of my blog post was the necessity of better laws worldwide that stops spamming and such businesses. Unfortunately none of the countries in the world have powerful laws against online spamming. It’s really sad to see that a company officially starts such a context and publishes its contact information without worrying about anything.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
In the last ten days BlogEngine.NET community has had some cool stuff coming out about spam filtering and Waegis. It looks like that some BlogEngine blogs have been attacked by spammers, and bloggers are looking for some tools to block them.
First Ruslan Tur wrote a blog post about Waegis and his good experiences with a .NET powered spam filter service, and he explained the process of setting up a BlogEngine.NET blog to use Waegis service.
After this post, Cristiano Fino wrote an Italian follow up (here is the English translation) on his experiences with Waegis to block his BlogEngine.NET spams, and outlined some comments to refine Waegis extension for Waegis. He also offered his own code as a solution for a BlogEngine.NET issue in displaying the list of comments regarding the moderation option.
Yesterday Rulsan Tur wrote his second post in which he announced his own BlogEngine.NET extension for comment management and using spam filter services with some additional features that ameliorates the way that BlogEngine system works. His extension includes the option to use multiple spam filtering services (Waegis and Akismet) with a constant setting as well as the option to report faults to original services, and it also shows some statistics to blog owners.
We’re glad that there has been such an excellent progress around Waegis and BlogEngine.NET as two .NET solutions that can work together very well. Based on the feedback that we have received, we’re going to drop a new build of our BlogEngine.NET extension which is improved with new features.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
Waegis, our online spam filter service for modern spam types, has been live for almost five months, and has served to clients to stop their spams and save their time.
In the past five months we received some feedback from our users regarding their suggestions and comments for the future of the service, and a main part of these feedback were focusing on the commercial model of the site. Honestly, like many other users of internet services, our users were looking for a free service even though our limitations for free service were far from the point that they can stop over 95% of our clients.
However, it looks like a psychological matter rather than a real need for users to have a completely free service, but we realized that it’s better to answer to our clients and let them enjoy a free service without any limitation. We’ve been working on a major update in our codebase that brings some new features and finally earlier today we deployed this new version which is the most significant update in our service since RTW.
The first and foremost change is the removal of commercial services and limitations, and I’m pleased to announce that Waegis is now a completely free service for all clients. After this, all our clients can enjoy a completely free service without any limitation and without paying anything; however, there is actually a very high limitation for security reasons, and if you want to have more than 150,000 API calls per months and/or more than 200 site instances, then you must contact us to allocate more resources to you, of course, without any charge.
Having this said, we also applied many changes to the codebase behind the scenes that are not visible to public users but they are very important changes to help us maintain the site better, and improve our quality. We also more modern development technologies and refactored some parts of the code to refine it.
We also have been working on statistics and hopefully we’ll deploy a new version that contains good statistical reports in the near future.
Although all these major changes in the code have been tested carefully, there is still a chance to encounter problems on the site or service, so here we ask you to please report any problem that you faced with.
We’re so happy to offer the free service to our users and we also hope that you can incorporate in the progress to help us improve the service and find the position that we deserve on the web.
Here I must thank Axosoft and its CEO, Hamid Shojaee, that has had such a great influence on our service. Axosoft sponsored the cost of enterprise hosting for the service, and played a vital role in our progress. We all should thank Hamid and his company for supporting us because without them, there was no Waegis! Actually Axosoft has been supporting many .NET communities and sites, and has helped the .NET community to keep its progress.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
A few minutes ago I published a post on my blog explaining my future plans for Waegis that will be added to the service during the next 1.5 years.
Based on my overall impressions in the past four months and different feedback and comments that I received, I defined a roadmap for the service that will be added smoothly.
Changes are different and target different areas. New spam rules to refine the quality, improving the usability and simplicity, moving to be come a completely free service in the next months (and reducing the limitations in the short time), OpenID implementation, and finally becoming an open source project are highlights of what I have declared for the future. I also have some plans to apply fundamental changes in the core application and use newer technologies that I’ll detail them later.
Feel free to read these notes and leave your comments, suggestions, and feedback for me whether as a blog comment or via email.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
One of the important aspects of our work on a spam filter service is, keep track of statistics of what is going on around the service and users. One point about the spammers that we’re all certain about is their country of origin because we have experienced that there are a few countries that stay at the top of the stack, and there are only those few countries that send most of the spams.
Unfortunately it’s not easy to calculate the real statistics for these countries based on the data that we receive because all spammers pretend their characteristics when they send spam content. However, from the words and languages that they use in their spam content as well as the origin of their domain names, it’s possible to elicit general statistics about these spammers, and we’ve been able to find these statistics on Waegis, too!
A part of the results (that come in a moment) would be predictable for everyone but a part of that would very interesting for you (as it was for us).
There are four countries that play the major role in spamming. The top spammer country, as you can guess, is the United States of America where over 70% of spam posts are coming, and the second country is Russia where something around 10-15% of items are originated. While these two countries would be known to you, the third and fourth places belong to China and Iran with 8-10% and 5% respectively.
I think that the results of the United States, Russia and China were predictable for many web users but you would be surprised by the results for Iran. Yes, that is a concealed fact about Iranian spammers that they send a huge number of spam items to emails, sites, blogs and forums.
Another interesting fact is that all the countries except Iran use their native language when they send spam items, and Iranian spammers are the only spammers that send their items in English language. This would be one of the reasons that other spam filter services have not been able to catch them in their statistics.
I personally was suspicious about Iranian spammers because I had seen the names and words that they were using in their items but I could be assured this fact when I found two other evidences. Firstly I was seeing a huge number of spams with Persian names and words in my email junk that had the same characteristics as those that were appearing on Waegis. Secondly I finally found the evidence that some Iranian Waegis spammers are using local Iranian domains to send their items.
Of course, knowing the origin of spammers can help us find better methods to defeat them, and also can help us move toward the goal of legislating better laws against spammers which is the most effective method to ban them.
In the end, I would say that because of abovementioned reasons these statistics are approximate and there would be a slight difference between the real data and what is presented here but the general order and role of the countries should be constant. We’ll keep aggregating the statistics to do a better examination on the origin of spammers in the future.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
Since the beginning of Waegis existence one of our main strategies has been to provide extensions, plug-ins and add-ons for all common .NET powered content providers and keep our client extensions up to date with their recent changes. Thankfully we’ve been able to provide high quality client extensions for various versions of Telligent Community Server, Telligent Graffiti CMS and BlogEngine.NET as well as a rich .NET library that can be used easily to integrate any .NET application with Waegis API.
Recently Telligent dropped a new major build of its popular Community Server engine known as Community Server 2008.5 or Fall 2008 release in Beta 1 stage. A few days after the public announcement a few Waegis clients contacted us reporting that our spam rule for original Community Server 2008 doesn’t work with the new build. We immediately started examining the problem and found that there is a fundamental change in Community Server spam blocker system, so we contacted Wyatt Preul at Telligent and he helped us to figure out how to rewrite our spam rule in order to work with the new version (a guide about developing spam rules for Community Server 2008.5 is written by myself).
Since last week this spam rule has been ready but a few clients were privately testing it to make sure there is no problem. Today we’re happy to announce the public availability of a new Waegis spam rule for Community Server 2008.5 that is accessible via download page or from the direct download link.
As Community Server 2008.5 is still in Beta 1 and this new spam blocking mechanism is not tested extensively, there is a high chance for future changes that break our spam rule, so keep an eye on Waegis blog to stay up to date with the most recent changes.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
Those who today came to Waegis to visit the site or used the service API to identify spams noticed that we had a short downtime. This downtime was an expected downtime for upgrading our server software to the most recent versions. However, I apologize for the short downtime although it was not avoidable.
The first and most important change on our servers is the installation of SQL Server 2008 and upgrading our previous SQL Server 2005 database to this new version that comes with many great features. Now our server is using SQL Server 2008 x64 edition that is 100% reliable and scalable. SQL Server 2008 was released last month but is not extensively offered by hosting providers yet. Waegis would be one of the first enterprise .NET solutions that applies SQL Server 2008.
The second change was upgrading our .NET Framework 3.5 version to Service Pack 1 that was released last month just a few days after the official release of SQL Server 2008. I also applied some changes in the software to use some new features in this service pack.
And finally the third and the last update was the installation of some security mechanisms that will improve our security level more and more. So far we’ve had several security attacks on our servers and we’ve been able to defend very well. These security changes will refine our security to be much better than the past.
I’m proud to say that at the moment we’re running on the most recent Microsoft server and development technologies including Windows Server 2008 x64, SQL Server 2008 x64 and .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1. More interestingly our software is completely written and hosted on 64 bit platforms. I’m sure all these attempts have their own effects on our high quality, speed and reliability.
Here I would thank our hoster, MaximumASP, that is doubtlessly one of the top two ASP.NET hosting providers. MaximumASP SQL team have been in touch with me in order to upgrade our database to SQL Server 2008 with least downtime and side-effects. MaximumASP was one of the two hosters (along Orcsweb) that offered SQL Server 2008 installation as soon as Microsoft dropped the final version to the market. At that time I decided to upgrade our servers but we (MaximumASP and I) decided to do some further evaluations before the upgrade.
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By
Keyvan Nayyeri
I’m pleased to announce that today Waegis is finally releases to web. Since 9th July 2008 we started the public existence of Waegis as a Beta software that was available with some limitations to our clients.
We tried to fix bugs and issues, improve our spam filter quality by reducing its fault ratios and add new features to make our service more convenient for our users. Beside that we also tried to examine our service activity and enhance our client-side extensions.
Fortunately everything went very well. Our service got better smoothly and we noticed that in our statistics. We predict that this smooth progress follows in the future to let us meet our goals for Waegis.
Although we released our site and service to web and hit the first stable version but there aren’t many changes that you notice immediately. Many of these changes were applies during the Beta period. There are also some major changes that are being tested hidden from your eyes and will be available until next Monday.
You will see some changes such as ease of registration without requiring users to activate their accounts, faster APIs, new and improved features for Waegis site and blog, enrichment of some spam rules and also some basic statistical reports. We will add new and detailed statistical reports as long as Waegis gets older and we collect more information.
Albeit Waegis has hit a milestone in its lifecycle but doubtlessly the progress of changes is not stoppable. As a spam filter service, Waegis should adapt with the most recent changes by spammers and this requires us to apply new changes on a regular basis.
Here I would thank our Beta testers for their patience, help and support to make Waegis better. There were some hiccups in the early days that some users helped us to catch them and we’re very happy to have such great users!
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