State of the L2P: 2008 in review and a look forward

[LP-Trel]

I have seen many on the forum concerned about the direction that L2P is taking. I feel it is time for a review of some of the behind the scenes activities that have been taking place to give everyone a peak behind the curtain.

Website Security:

Over the last 4 months the L2P security system has undergone some massive upgrades and changes to help handle more sophisticated attacks against websites hosted on our service. This work is largely behind the scenes due to the highly technical nature of it and also due to the sensitive nature of the work.

April has brought more changes during our usability enhancements which are designed to attempt to solve common errors in popular scripts such as a sudden HTTP error code when attempting to post to a forum. This project has fixed as many as 70 common errors and has vasty improved the usability situation.

Note: Work is ongoing. See the post "500, 501, 401, 406, or other HTTP error messages via Apache" in the announcements forum if you see an error in a common script that you think might be related to the security system.

Email and Spam:

As some of you are aware the spam blocking software on Asgard is a production prototype designed with new techniques that will eventually be incorporated into configurations used on production webservers. The work in this area helps keep email inboxes on Asgard virtually free of spam and also allows us to see new ways the techniques effect email sent from legitimate senders.

In March this system was rebuilt using a new whitelisting implementation designed to balance the aggressive nature of the spam blocking on Asgard while still blocking the majority of spam sent to the system. The success of this is still being judged, but early data suggests it is highly successful at preventing a large amount of false positives.

Capacity and Resources:

L2P houses many websites of all sizes ranging from very small websites that only see a few visitors per month to extremely large websites that require their own dedicated environments. These websites will cost us different amounts to host, but the service is offered at the same monetary cost of $0.00. This has lead to some problems as sites outgrow certain systems and are forced onto new systems. We are in a constant battle to find new resources to host these websites without causing existing websites to suffer as a result.

This problem resulted in the Socceram.net website to appear down as the forum overloaded the environment it was hosted on. We worked with suppliers to attempt to find a cost effective solution that would allow us to continue to provide the same service to Socceram.net that other websites we host enjoy every day, but this was difficult due to the resources needed and the funds available to purchase the resources.

Note: Procedures have been put into place to avoid the situation happening again. We want to ensure that the same situation is not repeated in the future.

To the future:

Some have expressed conern over the future of L2P and what may happen. I can only say that the future is never certain for any service like ours. There are simply too many variables to calculate for me to say for certain that L2P will be here in 5 years. It is a credit to the community and volunteers that L2P has been here as long as it has. We have been operating under the Lifelesspeople.com domain since December of 2001 and are looking at seeing the December of 2008 when most free webhosting providers only exist for periods of time measured in months.

L2P is an example of what can be accomplished with the support of a loyal community and a group of volunteers willing to work towards a common goal. I am proud of what L2P is and I believe that 2008 will be one of our best years yet.
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