26 Oct 2006 robogato   » (Master)

Advogato Status Report

A new rev of mod_virgule code went live on Advogato today. There were only minor changes and bugfixes. See the changelog for details.

Most of the code changes this week were aimed at getting a clean compile on gcc 4, Apache 2.2, and the newest version of the Apache APR libs. Here and there mod_virgule still relies on some of the deprecated Apache 1.3 compatibility code that's being dropped from the newest Apache libs. There's still more work to do here but it's getting close.

The rate of Advogato spammer account deletion has slowed to a trickle. Most of the easy to spot spammers are gone. I did run across a few today, however: Pramod, nulledphpscritps, Phat, JohnH, bekka, Zorro and a few more if you follow the inbound certs on those.

The removal of all those accounts has had two side effects. One is that thousands of certifications issued by the spammer acounts have also been removed. That seems to have contributed to shorter run times for trust metric computations. The other side effect is that search engine robots are hitting a lot of account pages that no longer exist. Mod_virgule didn't handle this quite the way it should. It displayed an error page saying the account wasn't there but it returned a result code of 200. So the search engines continue indexing the bad URL and continue hitting it every couple of days looking for updates. I've tweaked this so mod_virgule now returns a 404 when displaying the person not found error page. This should cause the search engine robots to eventually stop trying to hit all those dead accounts.

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New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!