One Disqus-enabled website was the recipient of an automated message flooding attack this morning. While malicious, it’s a bit different from what commercial spam is.

This attack put some stress on the Disqus service and a number of people may have had issues with accessing Disqus this morning. The entire incident, until all was completely smooth, lasted under 30 minutes. This was an isolated case and we’re implementing ways to address this moving forward.

Thanks,
Team Disqus

If you’ve posted a comment anonymously and now have a Disqus account, you can merge those old comments into your registered profile.

Head to the claim page to locate and claim your comments. Read on for a some information on how this works.

When a comment is posted, it can be one of two types:

• a) Verified, posted by a registered member of Disqus
• b) Unverified, posted “anonymously” by filling in some basic information (Name and email)

These comments are attached to a Disqus profile, which is also one of two types: either Verified or Unverified. To be verified, you must register an account so we know who you are.

A registered, verified account allows you more control and functionality: manage your past comments, receive email notifications, bypass most moderation, and rate other comments.

An unverified profile is indicated as this screenshot shows. If you come across your own unverified profile, click the “Claim” button to be taken to the Claim page.

That’s all, folks. Let us know if you run into any problems.

Happy Thursday, friends. Here’s a few new (and short) things we wanted to point out.

• For comments where a down arrow will not suffice, you can now allow people to explicitly flag inappropriate comments. It looks something like this:
  

  Toggle this under Access & Moderators.

• If you would like to disable the short excerpt of your blog post from appearing on your Disqus community page, you can now toggle that under Extras.

  

• Our pals at joomlaworks have released a Disqus plugin for the Joomla! CMS.

  

• Clickpass, the service we use to power our OpenID support, has made some updates. You can now log into Disqus with other accounts such as Google and Facebook. You can see the new button on the login page:

  

Trackbacks? We haz it. I won’t waste your precious time — here’s how you enable it.

Go to the Configure tab and scroll down to General Settings. Check the box and let it do its thing. This is our support for standard Trackbacks. More fun Linkback implementations still to come.

And since this is such a short post, I’ll round it off with the latest Wallstrip episode which features Disqus.

I know — you came for feature news and you’re greeted with that mug. Sorry guys, but it is how it is.

MintCache is a caching scheme Disqus has recently implemented. We posted Disqus’ implementation of MintCache for others to use.

From the original MintCache posting:

The purpose of this caching scheme is to avoid the dog-pile effect. Dog-piling is what normally happens when your data for the cache takes more time to generate than your server is answering requests per second. In other words if your data takes 5 seconds to generate and you are serving 10 requests per second, then when the data expires the normal cache schemes will spawn 50 attempts a regenerating the data before the first request completes. The increased load from the 49 redundant processes may further increase the time it takes to generate the data. If this happens then you are well on your way into a death spiral

MintCache works to prevent this scenario by using memcached to to keep track of not just an expiration date, but also a stale date The first client to request data past the stale date is asked to refresh the data, while subsequent requests are given the stale but not-yet-expired data as if it were fresh, with the undertanding that it will get refreshed in a ‘reasonable’ amount of time by that initial request.

Link: MintCache (simple version)

A little while ago, we wrote about Sean Reiser’s How To for Drupal+Disqus.

Today, we found out about Rob Loach’s Disqus module for Drupal. This should make it even easier to drop Disqus into your Drupal site. If you use Drupal, try it out and let Rob and us know what you think.

Link: Disqus and Drupal: Rethinking Comments

[UPDATE] Andy Cowling brought to my attention a new Disqus plugin for the Habari blogging platform by Michael of twofishcreative. Check it out here.

Disqus experienced a database error that resulted in a number of people unable to access the service. This lasted for about 45 minutes until we were able to get everything consistent again. While we don’t have a cute aquatic mammal for this situation, we do have this comparably mundane (and brief while hopefully thorough) post describing what’s up.

Why it happened

Some of the heaviest hits on the database come from the widgets — particularly the “Popular Threads” widget. We use memcached for this relatively expensive query, but an expired cache combined with a spike in traffic will cause a dog-pile effect.

From highscalability.com:

Data freshness requires a refrigeration truck or an expiry time on your cache entry that causes stats to be periodically recalculated. Now, what happens when your cached data expires and a 1000 requests simultaneously try to recalculate the expensive to calculate data? Database load spikes and the world nearly ends.

The world didn’t end, but it doesn’t make for a happy Friday morning.

Why it won’t happen again

Ok, that’s a bit presumptuous. Let me restate that.

What we’re doing to prevent it from happening again

Scaling is not a problem we’re only beginning to address. It has always been a priority ahead of everything else. We’re building out a service that you can depend on, not just a product with fancy features. Fortunately, we know how to address the issues.

We are implementing MintCache, which will alleviate some of the woes around the dog-pile effect. This past week was spent scrutinizing and improving the core architecture. And by next week, we hope to finish scaling out the database servers.

With the new help of Andrew and Devin, we’ll be building out Disqus faster than ever. I’m very proud of what the team has been up to lately and I hope you all will be able to directly experience the results.

Communication

You rely on us to provide a vital component of your blog or website. We don’t ever forget that and we realize we let many of you down this morning. I apologize. As always, if you don’t feel comfortable with Disqus, you can export your data from us. We are working hard to make sure you feel comfortable with our service, so please voice your concerns.

We’re listening. We monitor tweets, email, and blog posts. So let us know the good and bad. Just like you, we want Disqus to be great.

Andrew and I both started this week, but seeing as I just flew in from Texas on Sunday, I think I’m the official new guy. That’s me: Devin Naquin, Official Disqus New Guy.

I’m a software developer and in the next couple weeks, I’ll be tackling a couple of tasks here at Disqus. First, I’ll be working on Disqus’ very own automated test suite. I’ll be developing a set of tests that ensure that our current codebase is behaving as we expect. This will allow us to implement new features more quickly without unintended consequences and hopefully avoid any hiccups when we push out new features for y’all.

Second, I’ll be setting up in-house tools for mining and interpreting the data we have on how Disqus is being used. This will give us a feel for what’s happening day-to-day on Disqus. Using these statistics will help us focus our efforts in areas that would benefit our users the most. Letting us ship first the features you’d use most.

I’m excited to be here at Disqus and out of that 100 degree Texas heat. Drop me a line at devin@disqus.com.

I’m happy to introduce myself as the newest addition to the Disqus team. I officially started this week as a software developer. 

The first tasks I’m working on are behind-the-scenes: setting up a better deployment system, and getting us running off an updated version of Django. Both of these should allow us to roll out new features, bugfixes, and enhancements significantly faster than before. They should be finished by the end of this week. After that, I will be joining Jason on the application code. I’m very impressed with how much he and Daniel have accomplished so far, and I’ll be trying hard to match up with that.

As you know, these are exciting times at Disqus. I love the product, the team, and the technology, so the decision to join them was easy. Since then, I’ve already had the pleasure of watching our total number of threads cross the one million mark. Of course, the whole team knows that our continued growth depends on keeping you, our users, completely happy with Disqus. So please let me know what’s on your mind — here’s to ten million. :)

Reach me at andrew@disqus.com

We moved! Disqus is now located in the SOMA neighborhood of San Francisco. It’s been a hectic month and we’re only 4 days in.

Thank you all for the interesting discussion regarding a commenter’s rights and content ownership. We’re working to incorporate a lot of these ideas into our next releases.

We’re also really excited to introduce two new members of the Disqus team: Andrew and Devin. Andrew has been out here in the city for about a year, while Devin joins us from Texas. We’re really happy to have them with us. Everyone’s been getting up to speed and working to make Disqus rock harder.

I’ll let Andrew and Devin tell you themselves a little more about what they’re working on at Disqus.