WedTM's Blog

My Curse Story

Sun, 13 May 2012 15:17:32 -0700

I promised that I would explain what happened with Curse, and why I no longer contract for them on the Minecraft Forums and Minecraft Wiki.

I enjoyed my time working there, and I learned a ton. I do regret selling the sites to Curse, mostly because I believe that the community would be a much better place without them.

There were a bunch of great things that Curse did, however, they were overshadowed by most of the things that were not motivated by making the community better, but in lining the pockets of Curse just a little bit more.

This should go without saying, but I feel I need to anyways.

These are, my own personal feelings, and others may have had an amazing experience. That being said, take the following with a grain of salt.

On the first of February, I received an email from Lesley Abernathy at Curse, who at the time, was my direct supervisor. The email simply stated that they thanked me for my time, but I was no longer needed.

Lesley is an amazing person, and if you ever have the chance to work with her, I’m sure you’ll agree.

I wasn’t surprised. Over several weeks prior to this email, I had been told repeatedly by Donovan Duncan from Curse, that I was not performing my job as I had been requested.

Here’s why.

Donovan Duncan is the main person at Curse when it comes to communities. He was my direct report for several months before he was promoted and Lesley took over that job.

Donovan was the person who first approached us about selling MC Forums, and was our main contact through the entire selling process.

When we founded MC Fourms we always said we wanted to make sure that the community was happy with what we were doing. My thought being, if the users are happy, then they’ll naturally frequent the site more, thus bringing in more advertising revenue.

Basically, do our jobs right, and everything else will work itself out!

When we sold the sites to Curse, that all went out the window. It was strictly profits in the eyes of Curse. Don’t believe me? Here’s some raw numbers for you.

In August of 2010, we were making nearly $12,000/month from having a single AdSense banner ad at the bottom of each page. It was extremely non-intrusive, and most users didn’t even notice! It was enough to pay our server bills, and then split the remaining 3 ways and provide a decent income.

Our main reason for selling to Curse was the fact that the sites had started taking more than just weekends away, and we needed to either quit our day jobs, or find someone to manage the servers. That’s exactly what Curse promised.

It’s now painfully obvious that they did everything BUT take care of the servers. I’m sure anyone who’s ever visited the Minecraft Forums is very familiar with a 503 error.

They did, however, proceed to spam the entire site with advertisements, and general money whoring techniques.

Our contracts basically gave Curse complete control of the sites, while retaining us as contractors who maintained the sites for the period of a year (it was supposed to be 2, however due to “UK law” they were forced to limit it to 1. I still have my doubts about that “law”).

The trouble came when we started doing the news. As the news became more popular, I created a segment called “Digital Diamonds”. DD’s were my creation, and I had planned on having them be a way to spotlight the awesome things that the community did. Donovan, however, had more perverse ideas.

I was instructed around December 2011 that any videos posted to the MC Forums news portion, would be required to be on the CurseNetwork youtube account.

In other words, any videos that I wanted to post, I would have to take the following steps:

1. Contact the content creator, and ask for the raw video footage.

2. Post this footage to the CurseNetwork youtube account.

3. Post the video on the MCF News site.

This is wrong. Plain and simple. This is stealing. Not to mention that I was instructed to only feature videos that were already popular.

So not only was I being told to cheat people out of subscriptions and ad revenue, Donovan actually thought that the people who get millions of views would be stupid enough to give me the raw footage from their money making videos.

Why? So CURSE could reap the rewards from others hard work.

I refused to do this, and, this is the reason why I was fired. I don’t want to blame the entirety of Curse; most of the employee’s there are amazing people that I was overjoyed to work with. Even the owner, Hubert, is an awesome guy.

I’d like to say that while Curse happens to own several game communities, they people who manage those communities are usually the people who started them. These are the same people who have been there from the beginning, and love the game just as much as you do.

If you own a gaming community, and are having a difficult time figuring out how to manage growth, or need some technical help, I urge you to look for some temporary help, or some consultation. Don’t sell your community to a large company like Curse simply because they flash dollar signs at you. The money may seem great, but you’ll usually make more by keeping the site, than you would if you sold it.

You can always find someone who you can pay as a contractor to manage your servers, and monetizing a popular site is not rocket science!

I hope this has cleared up any questions there may be regarding my departure from Curse.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at miles at vimae dot com.

Twitter's Real-Time URL Fetcher Using Cassandra and Memcached

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:32:42 -0800

Twitter's Real-Time URL Fetcher Using Cassandra and Memcached:

nosql:

Twitter’s real-time URL fetcher, code named SpiderDuck, is an excellent example of how NoSQL databases fit in the architecture of today’s systems:

Metadata Store: This is a Cassandra-based distributed hash table that stores page metadata and resolution information keyed by URL, as well as fetch status for every URL recently encountered by the system. This store serves clients across Twitter that need real-time access to URL metadata.

SpiderDuck is also using memcached:

Memcached: This is a distributed cache used by the fetchers to temporarily store robots.txt files.

Original title and link: Twitter’s Real-Time URL Fetcher Using Cassandra and Memcached (NoSQL database©myNoSQL)

Yogscast and Markus: My Two Cents

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 19:08:10 -0800

First and foremost, I know both parties involved, and think they are wonderful people. That being said, we all make mistakes, and it shouldn’t ever mean we should stop supporting or boycott a brand/person because of it. We’re all human here.

The issue here lies in the fact that NOBODY has ever done what’s being done here. Very few games ever try the release cycle and transparency that Markus & Co. have. Even fewer (if any?) succeed.

Yogscast are spoiled diva’s. Duh. They should be, they are amazing! Have you ever seen their shit? It’s awesome! That’s what the fans make them, YOU love the fact that Simon and Lewis are ass hats. I do too.

So you mix a very tired Mojang crew, with the weight of high expectations for an event that is really just an over-glorified game launch that had to be stretched out over 2 days, and never doing ANYTHING like this ever, and some spoiled divas (even if they are justified) and obviously ego’s are going to be stepped on.

I think this points to an even bigger problem. A while back, Yogscast made a comment about us allowing adf.ly links for mods. We never issued a response because, after all, they have every right to be pissed about that. Regardless of the fact that I personally thought it was silly, we never made an official statement.

The people to blame are the people who take it too far. The people who take a single off hand comment, and twist it and turn it around so many times, that the original meaning is lost and all that’s left is a twisted web of lies.

I urge you, the fans, to take to heart what you really love about these people, and realize that they are just normal guys. They drink, they like to play video games, they laugh and cry, they get pissed and say things they don’t mean. After all they’ve done for us, do they really deserve us taking an off-the-cuff comment and make it a huge deal? I mean FFS, Minecraft was just released! I’ve been personally working and waiting for this moment for two years. That is what we should be focusing on.

As for me, I love everyone. In fact, this was my view from the Nether part at MineCon:

This Guy Really Likes MCSL

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 21:11:42 -0700

So I was checking through some analytics and found this youtube video popping up. I decided to see what it was, and much to my surprise, someone has made a video on how to post a server on MCServerlist.net. I guess I should rework some things if it requires a tutorial!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnGTRw69BmU

Voting on MCSL

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 22:27:10 -0700

Hey, guess what? You can now vote on servers at MCSL! It’s a feature that’s been requested alot, and I think it will give people the chance to promote their server in a much larger way.

I haven’t quite figured out how I’m going to add the votes into the ranking, but I will let you guys know, and I’m open to suggestions. Just pop in #mcsl on irc.esper.net.

As always, let me know via the Feedback tab if you find errors or anything.

How the ranking system works on MCSL

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:10:00 -0700

I’ve gotten a lot of questions on how ranking works on MCSL, and I’ve been trying to find the best way of showing people. The best way that I’ve found is to simply post the source of the ranking algorithm.

So here it is: https://gist.github.com/1024062

I hope this squashes some people’s questions on the ranking algorithm.

New Changes on MCSL

Sun, 12 Jun 2011 19:38:36 -0700

I’ve just finished pushing the new code to the production boxes for MCSL. I made a bit of a concession on the new “New Servers” tab on the front page. It shows any servers created in the last 7 days.

Pagination is where the real issue lies. The gem I’m using for it (Kaminari) has a weird issue when trying to paginate multiple models on the same view. It can’t keep the variables seperated, and ends up adding both pagination linkst to the URL, so it’s a bit clunky atm.

After I get that fixed, it should run much cleaner.

I’ve also added a new button in the dashboard that will show you a history of EVERY check made on your server, and what it’s result was. This should help people who are having trouble tracking down why their server is going down on the list.

I’ve also added a link to the blog on the front page, so people can start realizing that this is where I do most of the update chatter.

Fixed Page Views On MCSL

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 01:20:12 -0700

I’ve fixed the first round of errors that I’ve found, and MCSL seems to be functioning reasonably well.

I’m also in the process of adding a “New Servers” section, that’s a tab on the front page, I’m having a slight issue with my pagination though, so right now, it’s not on the production site.

As soon as I get that fixed I’ll push that live.

MCServerlist Update

Wed, 04 May 2011 14:59:14 -0700

Ugh, people really irk me sometimes.

For those of you who don’t know, I just had surgery on my T11 and T12 vertebra, and have had to suspend work on the new MCSL for a couple days. I’ve gotten several emails from users of MCSL asking for help with their servers, as the current site is COMPLETELY broken.

I designed the current MCSL to handle hundreds of servers. I never thought there would end up being THOUSANDS of servers, and the site was never optimized that way.

That’s where the beta comes in. To show people that we were working on the issue, we started letting people come in and see the new site before it went live.

We’ve had tons of people donate, and this helps keep the $1,000+/month server bills down, but we have also had several people of late either issue PayPal complaints, or (this is my favorite) threaten to take us to the BBB. Well, first off, the BBB isn’t going to do anything, since we’re not a member organization. Secondly, you’ve DONATED, not purchased anything. We love our donators, and even have some special badges that have been made, just for them. But if you are expecting something in return, please don’t donate. We don’t want to deal with any of the drama it brings.

On the beta, after I get feeling a bit better, I’ll be putting the finishing touches on the site that will get it to it’s CURRENT stage on production, except it will be stable.

Then I will release it. We’re talking 2 weeks, tops.

After that, I’ll start on the other features that I had planned and will start getting those added in as well.

To those of you who don’t act childish, and understand that there’s really only one developer, I appreciate you.

- WedTM

WedTM - By TheDr.

Fri, 22 Apr 2011 20:51:33 -0700

WedTM - By TheDr.

MCServerlist.net Needs Your Help!

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:07:02 -0700

MCSL has been growing exponentially over the past few weeks. I’ve been feverishly working on a complete redesign. One that is both more stable, and has more features.

I’ve also purchased two brand new, 16 core, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 1TB Raid 10, servers. These are uber fast. The site should be moved over to these in the next few days, however, they are starting to tap my budget dry.

For those of you who don’t know, Minecraft is how I make my living. With the work I do with Curse on the Minecraft Forums and Wiki, as well as MCServerlist.net, that is what supports my family!

Our advertisers (Especially Multiplay!) have been amazing thus far, but we’re in need of a bit of capital to bring the site to it’s fullest potential. This is why I’m putting up a donate link. I want people to be able to support MCServerlist, and I think this is the best way of doing it.

I’ll be giving people limited access to the new MCSL v2 over the next few weeks, however, if you want in sooner, I’ll be giving people who donate over $10 exclusive access to the beta as it’s being developed.

Also, any server who donates over $30 will have a flag set on their server which will show your server name in bold, and also weight your server (ever so slightly) so you appear higher in the rankings. You’ll also get a cool supporter badge on your servers page.

This weighting won’t be drastic, so if you’re at 50% don’t expect to jump to the front page, however, if you ARE 100%, you will be at the top of the list, above other 100% servers.

If your interested in donating, please click the donate button located here:

http://mcserverlist.net/donate

What I would have done different...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 13:22:25 -0800

First of all, it’s important to note, that this is not going to be a “Bash Mojang” post. This is simply going to detail why/how I think Mojang could improve.

Mojang is by far one of the fastest growing companies I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the past year. They have a great product, and even greater employee’s, however, they have one fatal flaw that countless other companies have fallen victim to in the past years.

They don’t learn from their mistakes.

We all do it, we think that the circumstances have changed, we think that this time it will be different for reasons A, B, and/or C. However, it’s not.

First off, I don’t know Mojang’s development practices, nor do I know Java all that well, however I know that if you haven’t caught up to the Behavior Driven Development paradigm, then you’re doing it wrong.

You should never write code, and then decide what it should do. You should detail out what you want your code to do, and then write the code to do it. This will give you a much greater understanding of your project, and also allow you to consolidate or even remove parts that you though you would need.

Secondly, FFS, if you have made over $100k on your project, you should have seperate development, staging, and production environments. Every patch/update you send out should hit that staging setup first, and you should have a subset of users do testing for you. That way, silly little things will be caught by the group of users who KNOW they are being testers.

That leads me to my next point. Beta. Yeah, we know, Minecraft is in beta. But so was GMail for years, and I can’t remember when they went down. If I can expect stability from a beta project from one company, then whether or not you like it, they have set the precedent of how a beta project SHOULD behave. We’re not talking about random bugs, or things randomly appear in game. We’re talking about keeping your servers up. Ensuring that when you do maintenance, that people are given a time frame as to when to expect things to go down, and when they will go up. If you had a staging environment, you should have very little downtime for your production systems.

Next point. Everyone loves to goof off at work, but when you have a buggy product, and your customers are upset, it’s best not to let them see you tweeting every 30 seconds about nerf guns or how popular you’re becoming.

Next point. Use your resources wisely, and when you need to, swallow your pride. One of the best parts of the internet is the ability to network with like minded individuals. The ability to talk to someone half way across the world about how something isn’t working, and the possibility of them having the fix already on hand is slim, but on the off chance they do, then you BOTH are a hero. If you’d rather shut the door on free help, then at least be prepared to do it right. If you don’t, then you just look foolish, as you have 30 thousand tweets about how to fix your issue, and all of your customers see that.

Next point. Hire enough people so that you have at least one person available 24/7. When you sell a global product, it’s asinine to think that your customers should bow to your time zone.

My final point isn’t really a point, it’s just a reminder. If you’re starting a company with a product that people love, your number one goal should be to ensure that those people CONTINUE to love it. If not, you’re going to be up a creek without a paddle on your next venture, because everybody will remember how your last project went.

I for one send praises to Markus and his group for the amazing work they have done, and are undoubtedly doing. The above points are not issues that Mojang may currently be having or even had in the past, I think they are points that had Markus known from the beginning, would have helped him in the long run.

Project Wonderful Ads, now on MCServerlist.net

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 09:47:08 -0800

I’ve gotten quite a few emails from people asking if they can advertise on MCServerlist. I’ve never really had the time to work out deals with everyone, and it was starting to aggravate me that I couldn’t provide what the community seemed to want, so I’ve instead added project wonderful advertisements on the server list.

Project wonderful allows ANYBODY to advertise on the serverlist, and your ad will appear on the site for as long as you are the top bidder.

So go for it, start advertising your clan server, or your hosting business, the sky is the limit!

-WedTM

MCServerlist.net For Sale

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:02:00 -0800

The time has come. I’m in need of more R&D time, and mcserverlist is taking up all of it. It has a thriving userbase, a loyal community, and is the largest publicly available listing of Minecraft Survival Multiplayer servers in the world. I need someone who is as dedicated to the community as I am to take over, and give the site the attention that I cannot.

Here’s some basic stats for those who are interested.

Stats

Currently costs ~$150/month to run the site, could be cheaper if you ran it on your own server, however I use heroku because of it’s simplicity.
Currently serves ~170,000 pageviews per day (5.27 million per month)
Currently serves ~33,000 uniques per day (625,000 per month)
Has it’s own bukkit (http://bukkit.org) plugin that allows servers to update the system.
Has 2,090 registered users. With 1,554 logging in within the last 10 days.
Written in Ruby, using Rails 3.0, mongodb, memcached, and a plethora of other technologies
Premium features planned, but not implemented. (Sponsored servers, whitelist management, SMS notification of offline servers, etc, etc.)

Reach

73.57% from search engines
14.47% from referring sites
11.96% from direct traffic
20.61% increase in pageviews from 1/16/11-1/22/11 to 1/23/11 - 1/29/11

What’s included in the purchase?

EVERYTHING!

If you have a heroku account (they’re free), I can push the app to your account, and everything will run exactly the same. If you’d prefer that it be installed on your own server, we can include my services of migrating the app to your chosen location. I’ll take care of migrating the site, ensuring everything is setup properly, and leave you with the keys.

You’ll receive the entire Git repository that contains ALL the historical changes made to the site since it’s inception.

How to submit an offer / find out more information

The best way to contact me is on IRC. I’m always on, but don’t always respond, but a message left there will get to me with 24 hours. Unfortunantely, due to the massive amounts of email I get from the wiki, forums, and mcserverlist, any email sent there wont’t be seen for weeks. In IRC you can find me in #rsw on irc.esper.net. Most people in that channel will know where I am, or how to contact me. If you’d prefer the old fashioned way, you may email me at miles@vimae.com. Try to put something regarding the site in the subject, as that inbox get’s pretty full!

Reasonable Offers

Please don’t come to me with a lowball offer, I know that alot of people don’t realize how to monetize sites, and they think that a project like this is worth a couple hundred bucks. I will not entertain any low ball offers. Period.

So, if your interested, come and ask any questions you may have, send me an offer, and let’s make a deal!

I don’t expect the site to stay on the market for long, so if your interested, get your name in the pot early.

Some Changes

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 10:39:53 -0800

I have quite a few changes coming up. One of the biggest ones that have been requested, is a singular IP address that does the pinging of servers. I’ll be making the changes that only one IP address is pinging the servers.

Hopefully this will also fix the random “0%” errors that are occurring as well.

Changes to MCServerlist

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:22:59 -0800

Alright. I’ve done it. I’ve been bugged for months about how people want more control over their servers, the ability to vote on servers, etc, etc. All these things needed to have user accounts in order to work properly.

So that’s what I’ve done. Starting today, you need a user account to post a server. In the next couple days (maybe hours) I’ll be enabling voting on servers, and also integrating advanced searching.

As always, this is bound to introduce some bugs, so if you find any add a comment below. I’m entertaining the idea of getting a “Get Satisifaction” account, but we’ll see.

If you had an older server (one before today), then all you need to do is create an account with the same email that you used to post your server, and the magic will connect the two!

Why standards are important to follow

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:51:52 -0800

Citricsquid linked me to this awesome SO post (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/198462/get-versus-post-in-terms-of-security/202465#202465) where a user details that all his app’s data was being deleted randomly every few days.

They checked the logs and found that Google was spidering the site and GET’ting all the links, including the “Delete” and “Are you sure?” links.

The standard is to NEVER put any destructive actions under the HTTP verb “GET”. That’s what the POST, PUT, and DELETE verbs are for! USE THEM!

Why standards are important to follow

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 11:51:32 -0800

They checked the logs and found that Google was spidering the site and GET’ting all the links, including the “Delete” and “Are you sure?” links.

The standard is to NEVER put any destructive actions under the HTTP verb “GET”. That’s what the POST, PUT, and DELETE verbs are for! USE THEM!

Oops, sorry about that.

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 13:40:53 -0800

So it seems that a bug in the software has deleted any server that failed a check within the last 24 hours. Sorry about that, feel free to re-add your server if yours was affected, you can hit me up in IRC to restore your percentage if needed.

API Almost Ready For Primetime

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 11:55:04 -0800

I’ve been working closely with several mod developers to allow dynamic updates and posting of server info to the server list. I’m proud to say that this is almost complete, and we’ll be rolling out the first wave to beta users soon.

To become a beta user, please contact me in #rsw on irc.esper.net. Not all applicants will be accepted, you’ll need to be a mod developer, or a large server provider like multiplay.