Dear members and friends of ipernity,

1) New red marker in user name.
For a long time we have used red markers on the icons for Club News and ipermail to indicate there is something new to look at. Now a red marker in your user name box is similar. A (?) is when there is the reminder to renew, while a (!) means your club membership has expired, and if there is excess content, a reminder of the rule about content deletion after 6 months.
[edit: The reason for this update is that we have had to deal with unhappy members who have failed to notice the expiry, or expecting to still have all their content when returning 1 or 2 years later.]

2) Locked out by 'Too many login attempts'.
This was an issue over the weekend of 24-25 October, and reported at the time in this article. This was linked to from our 'blue banner' system, but it is only displayed for logged in users. While we did get some tickets, we understand that some people were frustrated at not being able to inform us. So for any future cases, be aware that our Help & Contact page (link in the footer) can be used even if you aren't logged in. Also, if you can't access the Help & Contact page then an email can be sent to the team directly at team@ipernity.com

To expand on the article, we can say that James at 'IT Assurance' identified an IP in Vietnam as the source. This was not recognised as a bot by the existing Web Application Firewall (WAF) rules. A new rule has been put in place to address the gap.

This extract from his report: From Sunday morning it sent about 3,000 login attempts a minute to [our login page], around 40% of all traffic to the site. It also hit the forgotten-password page repeatedly, which is where the [password] reset emails came from. It stopped between 8 and 9am UK time this morning and hasn't returned since.

3) Roll out of revised geo-mapping.
As many of you are aware, our map features (geo-mapping) stopped working correctly quite some time ago. This was most likely due to Google changing their programming, however, we could not find a way to adapt our end. It has taken Rob (our web-master) a great deal of time and effort to create replacements based on OpenStreetMap, to again provide mapping features in the following areas.

Setting and adjusting the location of individual images
There was an earlier mention of progress on this via a banner. At that time it had been progressed to the essential of setting or adjusting the position of an individual image. Since then, the 'Where am I' feature has been updated, so that one's own placement, and thus also when someone views your 'More information', page works correctly.

Browse on the map
More challenging was reactivating the 'Browse on the map' option, found under the 'Photos' drop-down menu. This required a total rewrite and is now a little different from the previous version which had red dots indicating the location of images. Now you have tiny thumbnails that can be clicked to show a small image popup. That image can be clicked to open the main photo page. The tiny thumbnails also display the title when mouse-over, before deciding to click.

Also, there is now an option at upper right to toggle between seeing 'only small', namely the popup of small size images, or to have a 'plus large' display of images at a larger size. If there are more than one image on the exact same spot, only the top most thumbnail can be clicked. Access to the others is provided through the 'plus large' option. The additional images will then show in that larger viewing size panel. The position of images can be adjusted on this 'Browse on the map' page also.

One more map feature has yet to be brought back, that is locating an image via Organize. We hope to have that working again in the future.

4) Congratulations, you read all the way to the bottom of the Club News!

Your ima team.