Archive for the 'Mininova technical' Category

More updates…

Published
by
Niek
on December 28, 2006
in Interesting links, Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 38 Comments

Hi, I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas time! I will use this blog post to share some updates with you.

First of all, the new website: it took a while, but it seems that the new server setup is working fine now. We still need to fine-tune some areas, which will happen next week. Thanks everyone for reporting bugs and glitches!

Some people noticed that specific search queries return wrong results. For example, searching on “French” only returns old torrents. We hope to fix this issue in a few days. Update January 6: this problem is solved now.

Some other people reported that searching for “bla” does not return results for torrents with the name “blabla”. This so called “prefixed searching” is not possible yet with the new searching backend (Sphinx), but we hope to have this fixed somewhere in January. Update January 8: and this problem has been solved as well.

Enough about technical issues, on to the good news: several news sources (BBC, CTV, Torrentfreak) reported that “Mininova” was the ninth most Googled term in 2006. It’s good to see our site between the top-10 most popular search terms, but it probably also means the homepage of Mininova is not very trivial to find. We promise you we’re going to work on this issue next year!

And now for something else, the guys over at BitLord have released a TV show for the BitTorrent community. Mininova also plays a prominent part being the sponsor of the Torrent Top List. The guys at BitLord told me the first episode would be a first attempt at a show so they will improve it as time goes. But I have to say, the first episode is a nice start. Make sure to download the first episode here.

OK, that’s it for now… have a nice year-end and till next time!

Christmas update: big site changes

Published
by
Niek
on December 20, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 226 Comments

Hi everyone!

Just a few days left and it’s Christmas, the time of the year you spend with family, friends and… browsing the new & improved Mininova ;)

As you may have noticed, the site has undergone huge changes. We moved the site to a new hoster and datacenter, which will drastically improve performance. The search backend of the site has also been rewritten, resulting in a faster (and hopefully better) search experience.

After months of development and testing, we’re also introducing a new layout for Mininova. Extra functionality has been added and existing features are easier to use now. For example the “Jump to category” drop down box will help you quickly go to your favorite section, but also quite a few other cool but subtle features have been added.

This doesn’t mean the site is perfect now. In fact, we’re quite sure there are still some bugs & errors left, which we didn’t spot. In case you do, please let us know, and we’ll be happy to fix them! Same counts for the layout: please let us know your ideas to improve the layout.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Thanks for using Mininova.

Design and server updates

Published
by
Jos
on November 29, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 69 Comments

Hi all!

It’s been a month since we wrote our previous blog post about redesigning Mininova. We got an enormous amount of feedback (thanks everyone!), and incorporated much of this in our ongoing redesigning process. We’re happy to announce that a new version of our redesign is ready for beta testing at http://beta.mininova.org/.

A lot has been changed since the previous beta version, the main differences are a new color scheme, the navigation menu (back and improved at the top) and the advertisement spot (switched back from left to right).

Of course we would still like to hear your opinions on the redesign. If you spot any bugs, please let us know! Constructive criticism is always welcome :)

On another note, many users asked us why the site is so slow lately. The answer is simple: the site grew very big last months (both in amount of torrents and popularity) and we couldn’t add more server power. But no worries: we decided to switch large parts of Mininova to another hosting provider. The new server farm will be opened early December, so stay tuned for a blazing fast Mininova soon!

Mininova’s new design (beta)

Published
by
Jos
on October 30, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 243 Comments

Almost two years after its launch, we have redesigned Mininova.

The new design is not completely finished yet, but you can see it in action at http://beta.mininova.org/.

We are planning to publish this new layout, which should make Mininova less complicated and easier to use, along with some new features/improvements. Some of these features are already implemented, like:

  • Better “General information” of torrents.
  • Redesigned Upload page.
  • The download content of a torrent is shown as a folder tree (example). This tree view works best with modern browsers, which have CSS3 support. The icons we used are from the well-known Silk Icon set, made by Mark James.
  • The website now uses the UTF-8 character set. That means, for example, that torrents titles can now contain Chinese characters. More interesting news is that pasting the contents of an NFO file in the torrent description works great now (example). Just paste the NFO characters from your favorite NFO viewer between [nfo] and [/nfo] tags in the description area on the Upload page.

Some sections, like the Advanced search, are not working (correctly) yet. These things will be fixed in the future. The beta page is more about showing the new design.

Before we update the main website, we want to hear your opinion about the new look. Please comment on this blog post to let us know what you think about it and what could be better. Please also report all bugs and errors you discover.

Technical updates

Published
by
Niek
on September 14, 2006
in Mininova technical
. 211 Comments

Hi all!

We received quite some complaints from users lately that the site was very slow. In order to fix this we just placed an extra search server and upgraded an existing webserver (apparently, one of its hard drives died, so read/write operations were very slow).

As a result, everything should run smoother than ever now! In the case that you spot some bugs or performance issues, please let us know.

Cya!

Update Oct 2: We added 2G RAM to one of the search servers, this should improve the overall site performance.

Forum back online!

Published
by
Niek
on August 15, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 113 Comments

Hi guys, this is going to be a quick post: I just wanted to let you know that the forum is back online (on a new server)!

You should be able to login as usual on http://forum.mininova.org/. Have fun, and please let me know if something isn’t working as it should.

Banned?

Published
by
Administrator
on June 21, 2006
in Mininova technical
. 216 Comments

Some time after we started mininova there were a few people that thought that uploading spam torrents would be a good idea to advertise their “GET A FREE XBOX 360” links (or PSP, or HDTV, or well you get the point ;)).

At this time we banned 3651 people (some of which are people who received multiple bans). To see if some country has more (persistant) spammers than others, I decided to compare some statistics.



If you compare these percentages with the number of visitors:



You notice France ( ;) ) doing a great job and Germany probably has a few nasty spammers :) (or they have more of those “free stuff” sites).

These stats actually prove nothing but hey, statistics are always fun :).

The piecharts are generated using the cool php script from peters1.dk. (Gnuplot, which is used for all the graphs on mininova.org, doesn’t support piecharts)

The Pirate Bay down

Published
by
Administrator
on May 31, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 1025 Comments

Today is a sad day for our friends at The Pirate Bay. This morning, the Swedish police took down all TPB servers (Stockholm traffic graphs). Additionally, it is reported that two or three TPB admins are held in police custody.

Although we and TPB guys have a totally different view on copyrights, this is certainly not what they deserved. That the MPAA thinks differently, is not a big surprise.

If you want to stay up-to-date on the situation, please bookmark this URL.

A final note: due to all these struggles, we might experience some downtime. One of the reasons is that more users visit Mininova now that TPB is down. We try to place an extra server as soon as possible.

Update (June 3): And TPB is back up & running! Hopefully they’re safer here :)

Fixed: Problem with SQL server

Published
by
Administrator
on April 30, 2006
in Mininova technical and Mininova-related news
. 90 Comments

We are experiencing some problems with one of the SQL servers, so everything is running on 1 atm.

We hope te get it all running asap!

UPDATE: It’s fixed!

New Server Installed!

Published
by
Administrator
on April 6, 2006
in Mininova technical
. 118 Comments

Just a quick post to get the old one off the fp ;p.

After having some problems, everything is working great again. And the speed is very good, so no more frustrations in the evening and having to wait minutes before the page loads :).