Status as of Sunday, October 22, 2017
Posted: Sun Oct 22, 2017 8:14 pm
Good evening!
- We didn't get much done this weekend. I fell ill, and Chris is still recovering from what appears to be a different virus, so I'm hoping he doesn't start over again with whatever I have. We hope to be back to normal in a few days.
- There were a few things we accomplished. First, we discovered a problem with electricity calculations. A year ago, we added a factor that only stores a random percentage of shares in the database. We correctly multiply the value of the shares by the factor to get a rough estimate of earnings, but did not do that by electricity calculations. Because the factor is 10, electricity values were 10% of what they should have been. Chris will be releasing an update this evening to resolve this problem.
- We resolved an issue that prevented some users from logging in with two-factor authentication.
- Over the next week while we continue to prepare our future plans, I'll be focusing on making permanent reductions to support ticket numbers and improving security. For support tickets, we already added and deployed a countdown timer that displays when the latest possible payout time can be if a balance is mature. We hope that this timer will cut down on the number of canned replies provided to customers who ask when their payouts will be issued.
- In security, I'm going to make a few changes to try to reduce the number of tickets from customers who have money stolen. First up will be blocking Tor access to accounts. When available, this feature will be enabled for all new accounts, and people connecting through Tor exit nodes will see a message stating that access is disabled. Customers can uncheck the feature upon signup if they wish it not to be enforced for their accounts. Many hackers use Tor to try to hack accounts at various websites, and this feature will force these people to either choose a target where they can remain anonymous, or reveal themselves and suffer the consequences. Existing customers will be able to opt-in, with the feature disabled by default.
- Chris was unable to determine why the mining server shut down yesterday. We'll continue to monitor the problem.
- I expect that the maximum number of users we can handle without parallelization of coin assignment is 11,000. Since we can't take the risk of such a big release without 100% of our attention, expect that registrations will be disabled for an extended period if the limit is reached before we hire additional employees.