eFree Development Blog

Installing more templates

2009-07-08T17:18:00.003+01:00

Soon you will have the opportunity to choose from more free templates!
We're currently aiming for 200+, which will hopefully be completed before the end of this week.

Cheers,
Victor

Whoops

2009-05-12T14:32:00.004+01:00

I forgot to add a startup script for lighttpd so actually we've been running Apache for a while which might have been the reason why the server has been a bit sluggish during the weekend. It seems to run smooth now with lighttpd :D

I've configured the startup scripts so this shouldn't happen again.

Sorry for any convenience this might have caused.

New inactivity checker

2009-03-29T20:49:00.000+01:00

It seems like we have lots of inactive accounts that possibly slow down the system, so in 30 days a new check will be added that will remove all shoutboxes that doesn't have at least 1 post every 30 days.

So as long as you have at least a post per 30 days you can ignore this except that you'll probably get a speed boost because of a smaller database ;)

Software switch finished

2008-08-14T23:05:00.002+01:00

Now we got lighttpd running for all dynamic content as well and it seems to boost the performance quite a bit :D

We'll also run a test without the daily shutdown to see if it will stay up anyways.

And another thing is that we have removed cookie-based sessions for freeshoutbox.net so hopefully the double posting messages some users have reported should be gone.

Update on the upgrade + Switching server software

2008-08-14T14:22:00.002+01:00

Yesterday we finished the addition of an extra lighttpd server for the static content, so now the system is running fine on 2 dedicated boxes.

We felt so content with lighttpd so we'll switch over to it for the dynamic content server as well later today, that means we have a scheduled downtime later today. However we've done a test run on another server so we think it will be very short.

So performance has increased and will increase further after this upgrade, we might also be able to remove the scheduled everyday server-restart after this, more info on this later.

Thanks for hosting with freeshoutbox.net!

The forums are up again

2008-08-13T14:17:00.001+01:00

All active forums should be working again (including the support forum), but it might take a few hours until your DNS-cache have updated so you can access it.

All forums have been updated to phpBB 3.0.2 as well.

eFreeForum Downtime

2008-08-13T09:00:00.002+01:00

eFreeForum will be down for a little while today while we are switching server for that service.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

Several Updates

2008-08-11T21:22:00.002+01:00

We will close down eFreePics and registrations for eFreeForum (running forums will continue to run as long as there are at least one post every 30 days) because almost noone did use those services.

But the good part is that we will focus on FreeShoutbox.net to make it even better, Victor is installing templates and we'll soon have our second server ready as a static content server.

Auto pruning

2008-08-11T17:13:00.002+01:00

To save server resources, and so you don't have to delete spammy posts to far in the history we have now implemented a post-pruner.

Once the postcount in your box is higher than 2000 it will remove all posts that are not in the 1000 last. This means that the last ~500-1000 posts (at least ~20 pages) will always be available so on your end it will probably not change anything.

Another update

2008-08-02T16:39:00.002+01:00

Now all ads at freeshoutbox.net are loaded asynchronous, so the page loading speed is increased further.

Ad serving optimizations

2008-08-02T14:24:00.002+01:00

Today I've done some changes to speed up the ad-serving so pages will load faster.

For all eFree-sites ads are now served with a maximum of 1-2 calls instead of up to 3-4 calls.

And for FreeShoutbox.net all ads are now loaded inside an iframe so the page and the ads will load asynchronously for maximum speed.

I might have some more optimizations coming later but this will hopefully speed up things a lot.

Freeshoutbox.net: One click banning

2008-07-27T21:58:00.003+01:00

All moderators and admins can now ban users with one click from the shoutbox. The ban will be added to the banlist in the admin panel along with the name of the user who banned and date.

The banning should now work better with proxies etc. also.

Short downtime

2008-07-24T21:47:00.003+01:00

An automatic DNS-server upgrade went wrong to the server hosting the eFreeCompany homepage, eFreeCounter, eFreeForum and eFreePics. Everything are now restored using a upgrade backup.

FreeShoutbox.net: Resizable name and message fields

2008-07-24T16:25:00.003+01:00

There are now options to change the size of the name and the message fields in the settings tab in the admin panel.

eFreeBlog update

2008-06-03T11:59:00.003+01:00

Because we almost only get spam registrations at eFreeBlog we have decided to close registrations for now, all current blogs will continue to work as long as they are updated, and not contains spam-posts.

We might re-release a better version of eFreeBlog later but now we will focus on the other eFree services.

One blog for all services

2008-06-03T11:48:00.002+01:00

We thought that all these eFree development blogs were a bit to much to navigate. So from now on all news updates to all eFree services (FreeShoutbox.net, eFreePics, eFreeForum, eFreeBlog, eFreeCounter) will be posted in this blog.

We can also tell you we have lots of stuff going on, so stay tuned for further info in this blog.

New design.. again..

2008-05-01T13:14:00.004+01:00

We have tested different designs the last few weeks, that's why the site may have look different at different visits. The one we feel is most easy navigated is the default and can now be found at http://www.freeshoutbox.net/

The control panel is also restructured into tabs to get an easier overview and space for expansion later.

There will probably be minor changes to the design soon, feel free to post your thoughts on the new designs and possible improvements..

2008-03-23T07:38:00.000Z

We’ve seen some advertisements recently that has redirected users, we take this very seriously so now all new advertisements have to be double-blind approved by the staff at Direct Media before they are added to any eFree-pages (like your shoutboxes).

Sorry for the inconvience this might have caused.

New support forum + important info

2008-02-14T10:22:00.002Z

Today we've moved the FreeShoutbox support forum from freeforums to our own eFreeForum.net platform, which uses the much better phpBB3 forum system. The new address is:
http://forum.efreeforum.net/

However there was no way to move the posts off to the new forum so we have to start over, however the old forum is still available at http://freeshoutbox.freeforums.org/ so the questions/feature requests are not lost. However for any new questions/feature requests please use the new forum.

New team members, new design

2008-02-08T13:54:00.000Z

I would like to welcome Victor and Max to the eFree development-team, Victor just made a new design for the main-page at freeshoutbox.net hope you like it.

The design is not finished, the control-panel will be updated to reflect the new design in the near future.

eFreeBlog, and some more info about eFreeTools

2008-02-02T22:46:00.000Z

I now have a blog hosting service called http://www.eFreeBlog.net/, it is based on the powerful software wordpress, go over there and register your blog =)

Also I've written a page about the eFreeTools network at http://www.efreetools.net/

The support forums is temporarily at http://freeshoutbox.freeforums.org/ during the restructuring.

eFreeTools and eFreeCounter

2008-02-02T20:05:00.000Z

I've released a counter hosting service named eFreeCounter.net, feel free to go there and register yourself one (or more) counter(s) =)

I've also decided to use one trademark for freeshoutbox.net and the counter service which is now eFree, I plan to write a separate page about the network at http://www.eFreeTools.net/ later. They run under the trademark to be able to use the same support forum etc. in the future. Freeshoutbox.net is not changed in any ways because of this, your shoutbox will run as normal.

Stay tuned for more releases, and a support forum etc. for eFreeCounter..

Blogger shoutbox installation instructions

2008-02-01T10:48:00.001Z

Here is a guide how you add a FreeShoutbox.net shoutbox to your Blogger blog.

Create a free shoutbox at http://www.freeshoutbox.net/
Login to blogger, go to "Manage layout" for your blog (it may also be called "Template" depending on which Blogger page you are at).
Press "Add a Page Element" shown in the sidebar layout.
In the page that pops up, select "HTML/Javascript".
At the next page, fill in "Shoutbox" or something similar as title and paste the HTML-code you get when logging in to freeshoutbox.net in the content field.
Save and check your blog, you'll probably have to edit the HTML-code and change the height and width parameters to fit your blog, I found that width 250 seems to be fine for this blog's sidebar.

I hope you find this useful, feel free to add any questions as comments to this blog post or in the support forum.

phpBB2 shoutbox installation instructions

2008-01-28T10:17:00.000Z

Here is a guide how you add a freeshoutbox.net shoutbox to your phpBB2 forum (like freeforums.org forums for example):

Create a free shoutbox at http://www.freeshoutbox.net/
Login to the admin panel, go to "Management" under the header "Forum Admin"
Press the "Create forum"-button without putting anything in the name box
Fill in these values for your new forum:

Forum name: You can leave this empty, or simply put the text "Shoutbox" if you want a header, do not put the shoutbox code here or it might break your forum.

Forum description: Here you should put the HTML-code you get when you login to freeshoutbox.net

Category: Set in which forum category you want the shoutbox to appear.

Forum status: Locked, because you are not creating a true forum but a shoutbox, this will not affect the shoutbox posting.

Auto-pruning: Leave these settings at their default values

Here is the forum.freeshoutbox.net shoutbox as a reference, click at the image to enlarge it:
By default everyone can view/post in the shoutbox, if you only want users that have registered in the forum to be able to post, set the forum permissions for the shoutbox "forum" to "Registered [hidden]"

I hope this will be useful for everyone that want to have a shoutbox in their phpBB2 forums, feel free to comment this article or post in the support forums if you have any further questions.

Word wrap

2008-01-25T11:35:00.000Z

Because of the new AJAX function the wordwrap function work again. So long words that dont fit on one line will wrap to multiple lines.