Habrahabr, IE8, invites or how it was
A short chronology of the events of the “black” Saturday of July at Habré with my comments and thoughts, as partly the culprit of this whole mess, will be presented under the cut. It was written for a personal blog, so you can not read the explanations - you know everything. If there are adjustments from the administration of the resource, I will gladly bring them in. Consider that everything said is a personal opinion and does not pretend to absolute objectivity.
So, what happened on Friday night on the most popular runet IT resource - Habrahabré ?! What agitated the habrasoobshchestvo and slightly stirred up the IT part of the runet? Why were tons of mud poured, and decent-looking people exposed their true nature? And the following happened. The well-known software giant decided to conduct a PR campaign in order to popularize its new Internet Explorer 8. The goal is good to some extent - let the people finally get rid of the morally and technically outdated IE6 / 7. That's just the audience was chosen is not quite suitable - Habrasoobschestvo. Why not quite appropriate? The thing is that people who are well-versed in the IT sphere communicate on Habré, and there is a suspicion that among them the percentage of IE users (as such) is not very large if you ignore the work tasks. And even this percentage is probably independently updated to the latest version of the browser. This is all about registered users. With simple readers, the situation, however, is exactly the same - random people do not enter the resource, and some Masha from Uryupinsk, who does not get out of VKontakte, doesn’t care. It is perfectly logical that the reaction to IE8 advertising was at best indifferent, at worst - sharply negative. There were really few rejoiced, I think. This was the first slip.
The second mistake was in the organization of the lottery : IE8, which downloaded the special attachment, got a chance to win an invite to the resource! Here you should add a little explanation. From the moment of its foundation in 2006 until mid-2008, registration was completely free. After - exclusively on the invite. According to the official document : “Thus, the growth of registered users turned into a qualitative growth of the target audience.” It was possible to register on the resource only by receiving an invitation from a reputable (by the values of karma and strength) user Habra. A sandbox appeared a little later, where you can publish your material and, if it turns out to be good, get an invite. Simply put - getting to Habr has become much more difficult! Gradually it reached the point that they began to trade with invites, and not at the most democratic prices. It is not surprising that in itself the lottery caused an extremely negative reaction among those who earned an invitation earlier. And it does not matter in what way - by buying, from friends or by earning your own labor. In the lottery one could get an invite almost without straining. This, by the way, resulted in public sprinkling with mud and minus inadvertently (or because of their own stupidity) of the lighted beginners. For many of them, these minuses are completely undeserved, but not for all - to some people, quite rightly, they were “loaded in their ways”. Many feared the influx of completely inadequate newfagov . A "filtering" of such users can take up to six months. During this time, they have time to pretty screw up.
This situation angered me at first. As a result, the corresponding topic appeared in a personal blog somewhere at 1:30. And then, as they say, events began to evolve rapidly. Google and Twitter took the most direct part - in a few hours (or even tens of minutes), the news of the free distribution of habroinvayts spread through popular IT resources. The topic also quickly became overgrown with comments of a different nature. And it all turned into a real pi *** u! For the time being, we will set aside the moral side of the question and tell about the technical one.
')
It quickly turned out that downloading a browser special version is completely optional and you just need to follow a special link if you already have IE8. This disrupted the last obstacles, for many probably stopped the need to download and (re-) install IE8. This was the third mistake. It seems to me that in IE haberduns could certainly include some mechanism for uniquely identifying the browser. But this was not done. Moreover, having formed UserAgent properly, it was possible to get an invite from another browser. This is also an important fact.
The fourth slip was the most epic . In the conditions of the lottery, it was said: “100 invites to Habrahabr are played on the day. Every hundredth ticket is winning! ”These conditions, as it turned out very soon, were not respected! An unlimited number of invites was issued and almost every attempt was a winning one !!! Also, no anti-cheat system was created. The data on the attempt was saved only in cookies (which are erased in a elementary way), although it would be possible to enable identification by IP, screen resolution, etc. Means add-ons IE can also be done, I think. (In passing, I note that some complained about the buggy of the special assembly, but I think that these are rather exceptions.) The only limitation: one e-mail is one invite. Already guess what it led to? To the unprecedented stream of those who want to register! Somewhere in the comments a digit flashed in 26 (0) 000 (?) Requests, but the truth of this digit is in doubt. We take into account that now the population of Habr is approximately 50,000 people, of whom only a third is active.
It turned out to be very easy to deceive the system and by the morning the corresponding scripts were already written to automatically collect invites. Habr slowly "sags" from such a load. In parallel with this, there were countries (big things) - on the anti-tract (the topic has already been removed), in Vinograd and other places packs of habrainvayts appeared in free sale. Moreover, according to rumors, sellers dumped, arranged trading and were engaged in other market speculations. Began a real extravaganza! The topic finally turned into a typical flame on the topic and not very much. Chaotic cries, squabbles, pluses and minuses, insults and gratitude ... The true essence of everyone and everything has been revealed! It was a completely uncontrollable society, a crowd, a people. And this is not a problem Habr! This is not a problem at all. Such is the nature of each person and this should be treated with humor (?), And not join their ranks. And you need to be able to manage it. Or to prevent such situations in principle.
Be that as it may, the fate of all the invites received in the lottery is already predetermined . All beginners will be subject to strict moderation, and the “extra” invitations will be removed. In general, many other funny (to some extent) things happened. Learned about future specials, for example. And the poor bot , on whose behalf the invites were heard, was brutally mined. What for? Want to protest or stupidity? It was possible to write directly to the support. Here, by the way, there is another interesting point. I do not know if there was a stream of letters to the administration informing them of the current situation. But I don’t really believe in people and I suspect that even many old habrayusers have made a couple of invitations for themselves.
Anyway. By Saturday evening it became absolutely clear that the freebie was over and there would be no invites for today. I can only assume that at 00:00 the second wave began, which turned out to be much stronger than the first. At the same time the resource tried to DDoSit . For this reason, Habr went down for 2-3 hours, when even the message about resource unavailability was not available. Then the situation returned to normal and now everything is calm.
So, what Habrahabr has in the end:
PS: All of the above is solely a personal opinion about the events that occurred. Sorry if someone offended by their own words or (without-) actions.
PPS: And Habr is still a cake =)
So, what happened on Friday night on the most popular runet IT resource - Habrahabré ?! What agitated the habrasoobshchestvo and slightly stirred up the IT part of the runet? Why were tons of mud poured, and decent-looking people exposed their true nature? And the following happened. The well-known software giant decided to conduct a PR campaign in order to popularize its new Internet Explorer 8. The goal is good to some extent - let the people finally get rid of the morally and technically outdated IE6 / 7. That's just the audience was chosen is not quite suitable - Habrasoobschestvo. Why not quite appropriate? The thing is that people who are well-versed in the IT sphere communicate on Habré, and there is a suspicion that among them the percentage of IE users (as such) is not very large if you ignore the work tasks. And even this percentage is probably independently updated to the latest version of the browser. This is all about registered users. With simple readers, the situation, however, is exactly the same - random people do not enter the resource, and some Masha from Uryupinsk, who does not get out of VKontakte, doesn’t care. It is perfectly logical that the reaction to IE8 advertising was at best indifferent, at worst - sharply negative. There were really few rejoiced, I think. This was the first slip.
The second mistake was in the organization of the lottery : IE8, which downloaded the special attachment, got a chance to win an invite to the resource! Here you should add a little explanation. From the moment of its foundation in 2006 until mid-2008, registration was completely free. After - exclusively on the invite. According to the official document : “Thus, the growth of registered users turned into a qualitative growth of the target audience.” It was possible to register on the resource only by receiving an invitation from a reputable (by the values of karma and strength) user Habra. A sandbox appeared a little later, where you can publish your material and, if it turns out to be good, get an invite. Simply put - getting to Habr has become much more difficult! Gradually it reached the point that they began to trade with invites, and not at the most democratic prices. It is not surprising that in itself the lottery caused an extremely negative reaction among those who earned an invitation earlier. And it does not matter in what way - by buying, from friends or by earning your own labor. In the lottery one could get an invite almost without straining. This, by the way, resulted in public sprinkling with mud and minus inadvertently (or because of their own stupidity) of the lighted beginners. For many of them, these minuses are completely undeserved, but not for all - to some people, quite rightly, they were “loaded in their ways”. Many feared the influx of completely inadequate newfagov . A "filtering" of such users can take up to six months. During this time, they have time to pretty screw up.
This situation angered me at first. As a result, the corresponding topic appeared in a personal blog somewhere at 1:30. And then, as they say, events began to evolve rapidly. Google and Twitter took the most direct part - in a few hours (or even tens of minutes), the news of the free distribution of habroinvayts spread through popular IT resources. The topic also quickly became overgrown with comments of a different nature. And it all turned into a real pi *** u! For the time being, we will set aside the moral side of the question and tell about the technical one.
')
It quickly turned out that downloading a browser special version is completely optional and you just need to follow a special link if you already have IE8. This disrupted the last obstacles, for many probably stopped the need to download and (re-) install IE8. This was the third mistake. It seems to me that in IE haberduns could certainly include some mechanism for uniquely identifying the browser. But this was not done. Moreover, having formed UserAgent properly, it was possible to get an invite from another browser. This is also an important fact.
The fourth slip was the most epic . In the conditions of the lottery, it was said: “100 invites to Habrahabr are played on the day. Every hundredth ticket is winning! ”These conditions, as it turned out very soon, were not respected! An unlimited number of invites was issued and almost every attempt was a winning one !!! Also, no anti-cheat system was created. The data on the attempt was saved only in cookies (which are erased in a elementary way), although it would be possible to enable identification by IP, screen resolution, etc. Means add-ons IE can also be done, I think. (In passing, I note that some complained about the buggy of the special assembly, but I think that these are rather exceptions.) The only limitation: one e-mail is one invite. Already guess what it led to? To the unprecedented stream of those who want to register! Somewhere in the comments a digit flashed in 26 (0) 000 (?) Requests, but the truth of this digit is in doubt. We take into account that now the population of Habr is approximately 50,000 people, of whom only a third is active.
It turned out to be very easy to deceive the system and by the morning the corresponding scripts were already written to automatically collect invites. Habr slowly "sags" from such a load. In parallel with this, there were countries (big things) - on the anti-tract (the topic has already been removed), in Vinograd and other places packs of habrainvayts appeared in free sale. Moreover, according to rumors, sellers dumped, arranged trading and were engaged in other market speculations. Began a real extravaganza! The topic finally turned into a typical flame on the topic and not very much. Chaotic cries, squabbles, pluses and minuses, insults and gratitude ... The true essence of everyone and everything has been revealed! It was a completely uncontrollable society, a crowd, a people. And this is not a problem Habr! This is not a problem at all. Such is the nature of each person and this should be treated with humor (?), And not join their ranks. And you need to be able to manage it. Or to prevent such situations in principle.
Be that as it may, the fate of all the invites received in the lottery is already predetermined . All beginners will be subject to strict moderation, and the “extra” invitations will be removed. In general, many other funny (to some extent) things happened. Learned about future specials, for example. And the poor bot , on whose behalf the invites were heard, was brutally mined. What for? Want to protest or stupidity? It was possible to write directly to the support. Here, by the way, there is another interesting point. I do not know if there was a stream of letters to the administration informing them of the current situation. But I don’t really believe in people and I suspect that even many old habrayusers have made a couple of invitations for themselves.
Anyway. By Saturday evening it became absolutely clear that the freebie was over and there would be no invites for today. I can only assume that at 00:00 the second wave began, which turned out to be much stronger than the first. At the same time the resource tried to DDoSit . For this reason, Habr went down for 2-3 hours, when even the message about resource unavailability was not available. Then the situation returned to normal and now everything is calm.
So, what Habrahabr has in the end:
- invaluable experience for not repeating such mistakes and blunders in the future
- many new habrayuzer, good and not
- plus admins skills in building high-load services
- extra proof of his authority (not to be confused with elitism )
- the new meme of July , by analogy with leprousin
- several topics related to this event: ironic , half-astonished and publicly hysterical (may the author forgive me for such a definition), with a total feedback of about 1000 comments (taking into account the starting post for 500+)
- finally just a good shake that is sometimes helpful
PS: All of the above is solely a personal opinion about the events that occurred. Sorry if someone offended by their own words or (without-) actions.
PPS: And Habr is still a cake =)
At this point, I propose to stop all discussions of this event.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/64299/
All Articles