Update on the changes to brps.js

After the post about potential upcoming change to brps.js. As of writing this post, the change has been taking effective.

For last two weeks, I tried to block bad IPs, which I found some blogs use bots repeatedly to bloat their viewer statistics. And the scale is quite high, by blocking subnets, the CPU cost reducing from $3+ to $0.

However, it's still not enough, datastore operations still cause $0.03 a day at least. Which, obviously, I wouldn't want to pay for. Heck, this is free app, I won't pay for anything to service.

It's a shame, crappy blogs cause me to take some measures in order to keep this service free.

Blocking IPs is not a good idea because they come from everywhere and many legitimate requests are also blocked. So I decided to do something on the client script.

I thought I would redirect, but I would like to try to make the list loading manual first to see if that would reduce requests.

From my experiences, I know less than one percent of people would really want to read you related posts list. The actually number is lower. Some people probably not notice you have such list on your blog if your blog looks like being splashed by colorful inks.

Anyway, at this moment, you should see a button instead of a list. I have updated the documentation, you can actually use own text for the button or set up automatically loading as before. But please, if you don't have no good reason, please don't turn on autoload.

It would be better if you can switch to the newer client script.

There might be a change to brps.js

This only affects brps.js users.

Long story short: In order to keep BRPS free, I most likely would redirect brps.js script to gas.js.

Currently, brps.js uses 96% of overall processing and GAE will start to use new charging model, which is certainly cause BRPS using all free quota and more. Please read this post for little more on it.

Basically, you don't need to do anything, at least not now. But some feature might be missing, I am not quite sure if two scripts have same features. It's been too long since last time I read them.

This is just a quick update. If you see something wrong with your widget on November 1st, you know what's going on.

New client script!

New client script! Faster and No Key required and No Bans!

No needs to ask for unblocking, no need to get the key. You just install new code, only three lines, too!

Here is quick list:

• It's faster. Because it do not use BRPS database, therefore BRPS do not need to search for labels via Blogger API. It directly uses Google Search with labels as search keyword.
• It supports multi-blog, even multi-site, because it uses Google search operator site:example.com | site:someblog.blogspot.com | ...
• It can now work on any page of your Blogger blog, but it will use all labels from that page to do the search. In other words, the search keywords can come from labels of different posts on that page which user is visiting. It will only use top 20 frequent label to query.
• No Key required! No blocking!

Go get it!

[Apology] Blocking by mistake

As of 1/6/2010, I modified the Blocking Policy, I added

"Failed installation/script removed blogs — Script installed without key or incomplete installation. Blogs have removed the script. (Added on 1/6/2010)"

At beginning of this year, many blogs have reach 3-month reviewing period. So, I started to review those blogs which haven't got accepted or blocked. I found out many of them are not using Key or installed the script incorrectly causing BRPS not working. I don't bother to notify the blogs owners, I don't have that free time to do so. Besides, the error message has been showing up for more than a month, how could a blogger not checking there own posts after publishing?

The second part of the addition, "Blogs have removed the script," it's also true that many blogs have removed the script after installing. I see no harm to block them since they don't use BRPS anymore, by blocking them so they won't show up after 3 month for reviewing.

But I made a huge mistake, because I check HTML source code in home page. If you install the script into your Template, not by adding a new HTML/JavaScript gadget, then the script wouldn't show up, they would only show up in a single post page.

I forgot that part, therefore I must have blocked some. By the time I found out, I had no idea how many had been blocked by that mistake.

So, if you install the code into your Template, just go ahead to ask for unblocking. I will check up as soon as possible. (I will still review first to check your content)

Sincere apology to you.
Sorry, again!