iSpot & EML project blog

This week has been mostly occupied with configuring the back-up and recovery server solution. Although this has consumed a fairly sizeable chunk of time things have been going smoothly and there should only be a day or so of time left to spend configuring this. The result is that we should have a complete back up and disaster recovery solution for iSpot that we should be able to switch to fairly easily and quickly. Backups are going to be taken of the live site (files and database) at hourly intervals, so in the event of needing to implement the disaster recovery solution, the maximum amount of user data that we would potentially lose is one hour’s worth.

Richard G has also spent some time implementing some changes on the ‘Content of interest that has changed page’. I have been preparing a code for a change next week (Tuesday 1st December) after which time the XML files produced by iSpot as a result of S159 student submissions will now be picked up via a web service call from Moodle. This will remove the email and manual import procedure.

I have also spent a small amout of time looking at spam users. As well as potentially using the http://www.stopforumspam.com/api service to check for spam users on our exisiting database I noticed that many of the spam users have been registering with the same first and last name. After running a SQL query to find users that meet this criteria the query returned 249 results (i.e. different users). After manually checking through this data it appears that these were all spam users. A new database table has been created to hold spam users and these 249 records have been removed from the live users table on to the spam users table. I came up against a problem when testing the functionality to call the stopforumspam.com api in that there is a maximum daily call limit (from a given IP address I presume) to the API. I hit this limit during development today which resulted in me not being able to continue testing as I would have hoped. I hope to have the module to check the stopforumspam.com database when users register on iSpot put live on Monday or Tuesday of next week.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 27th, 2009 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Progress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.