Monthly Newsletter - February
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Recent Issues
- New Features
- Bugs Fixed
- Going Forward
- Tip of the Month
- Site of the Month
- A random joke
Introduction
Welcome to the (late) february newsletter. We have much to discuss and explain in this edition of the EasyWebstore News including many bug fixes, performance improvements, a few issues and of course some new features added.
We hope that all of our merchants are enjoying a good start to the year.
For those of you still awaiting store implementations we are very grateful for your patience and understanding while we have been dealing with the backlog. We are about 75% of the way through the backlog now and all of those remaining should be receiving some contact or updates within the next 2 weeks.
If you do not wish to receive news updates regarding the EasyWebstore service status you can unsubscribe by following the link at the bottom of this email.
Recent Issues
PayPal / Maestro - 3D Secure
PayPal have now started enabling 3DSecure as mandatory on some merchants accounts when taking Maestro payments. As such we have now enabled the PayPal's Cardinal integration to allow merchants to use 3DSecure with their PayPal Pro account.
We have a knowledge base article here that explains the process of enabling this on your store.
Server Performance
We have been fighting this problem for several months now and I believe we are finally making some headway. Let me explain in detail the various contributing factors that have been resolved to bring server resource usage down considerably and improve overall server performance.
Simple Answer:
Bad Robots are now being blocked and we have made some improvements to our systems software to improve performance.
More Technical Explanation:
First and foremost was the issue of badly behaving robots and web-crawlers. These robots were not obeying the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
This meant that they were crawling pages that we had told robots not to crawl (because they are high-load pages) and also they were hitting the sites many times per second.
In order to stop these badly behaving robots and still allow good robots (such as GoogleBot) to crawl your stores we had to come up with some way of detecting them. In all cases robots should, when requesting a page, send some kind of identification to the site. This identification is known as a user-agent string. Unfortunately, this alone is not enough to identify a robot since the user-agent string can be changed or set to anything.
This being the case there were many bad robots that were pretending to be google, msn, etc. As such this was my first mission. Each of the major search engines provides a method to 100% identify their own robots. This is called a Round-trip DNS Check and is explained for GoogleBot here.
Now that we can identify with 100% certainty which robots are from the major search engines, any that are pretending to be from them are now being blocked.
The next problem was that there are many bad robots out there that would pretend to be a normal web browser such as Internet Explorer or FireFox. To block these we are now employing a method that will positively identify these robots and block them for 48 hours each time they hit any store hosted by EasyWebstore. Unfortunately, due to many of these operating on normal ISP networks we cannot put permanent blocks in place for them.. but if they continue to hit stores hosted by EasyWebstore they will continue to be blocked.
In addition, any robot blocked on one store will be blocked across all stores.
Secondly, we have tracked down and removed references to many missing images in a lot of templates. On top of this we have changed the way the custom error pages behave so that when anything other than a page would return a 404 error it will not try to generate a full 404 page and will instead just send the error code.
This means that 404's on images and media files will no longer process a full page load and rather just notify the browser that the file is not there.
In summary, prior to these changes being made server loads would be averaging around 70-100% CPU utilisation. We are now seeing an much lower figure of around 30%. A huge reduction!
Old mail server
The old mail server has now been decommissioned. We will shortly be turning off it's DNS & NameServers also. Any stores who are pointing domains at the nameservers:
ns1.maximumasp.com
ns2.maximumasp.com
These should be changed to:
ns.rackspace.com
ns2.rackspace.com
Once that is done open a support ticket and tell us your domain and store username and we will ensure it all links up correctly to your store.
Payment Callback Failures
The most recent issue on our list is the payment callback failures last week. As detailed in it's news release this was caused by some callbacks being passed from payment processors to us with blank user-agent strings. The .Net way of handling this was to throw an error. we are now catching the error and the problem should be resolved.
New Features
Partial order dispatching (Beta testing underway)
Orders can be partially dispatched. This process will allow merchants to dispatch parts of orders selectively. Remaining items on partially dispatched orders are copied to a new order and notes are added appropriately to orders to allow them to be matched up.
If any merchants would like to participate in the Beta testing of this feature please contact support.
Note: Beta testers will be required to submit detailed bug reports for any bugs they experience. Do not ask to be a beta tester just to get the feature as there may still be issues with it.
Customisable Invoices and Delivery Notes
Store generated invoices and delivery notes can now be customised in the advanced template editor. If nothing is entered in these new templates the system will fall-back to using the old style invoices and delivery notes.
If you would like to have your invoice layouts customised please contact our sales team for a quote by email or on the phone on 08546 44 93 64.
Bugs Fixed
- 26th Feb 2010
- Fix: "multiline" product specification column upload problem
- Fix: Small bug with CSS importing on website style importer
- Fix: Related products bug - not showing when stock control done at option level
- Change: Amended how shipping coupons are described on order details and emails
- Fix: PayPal & Barclays ePDQ Cart Callback errors
- Fix: HSBC callback errors
- Fix: changed heavy 404 page to show for only htm and aspx (asp) files
- Fix: Search paging bug where it was possible to page to page "-1"
- 25th Feb 2010
- Fix: Numerous bug fixes to style importer
- Change: Cleaned up old styles directory
- Change: Bot Trap added
- 24th Feb 2010
- Fix: Standardised 404 error handling
- Fix: Prevent an error on homepage when no root category selected in display settings
- Fix: A bug on style import where css was not imported if css was contained in a reference with a .css extension
- Fix: Intermittent concurrency errors when using PayPal for checkout
- Fix: Removed "wishlist" status orders from drop down on order details page
- Fix: Several bugs when setting / resetting customer groups that a customer belongs to
- Fix: Special teaser lists' "HistoryInDays" attribute was not being honoured
- Fix: Checkout page redirect behaviour when empty or no cart checkout attempted
- Fix: Throws 404 now when category pages are called with out of range values / content ids (used to error before)
- Fix: Now return false if exception / timeout is thrown when checking SE indexing status
- 9th Feb 2010
- Change: Crawl-delay to 1 in Robots.txt for all crawlers
- 8th Feb 2010
- Change: updated Robots.txt to include and allow crawlers from
- User-agent: ShopWiki
- User-agent: BecomeBot
- 29th Jan 2010
- Change: Updated Robots.txt to block all bots except Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves.
- Also blocking media-grabbing bots from these SE's to reduce bandwidth usage.
- Used Google-specific "Noindex" command for areas restricted from google. (i.e. admin). Used standard "Disallow" for all other bots.
- Used wildcard filters for bots that allow it to protect image, js, axd, mp3, swf, css and zip files.
- 28th Jan 2010
- Fix: Excel sheet uploader to catch error with misnames single sheet spreadsheets
- Fix: Switch order status when viewing orders - stops an unneeded postback, slight performance gain
- Fix: Related products not showing when product had advanced product options
- Fix: Allow T&C's checkbox caption to be specified in templates
- Fix: Allow .xml files to be uploaded as template support files
- Fix: Mail Order Works on entering shopping cart. Error should no longer occur but will fail silently if it does.
Going Forward
Over the next month we are going to be focusing primarily on clearing the last of the backlog and further performance improvements on our system. Once this is all out of the way we will then resume additional development of new features.
Tip of the Month
If you have a tip you would like to share with our readers please submit it by email to newsletter@easywebstore.net
The tip
If you are having problems with your store, try our troubleshooter in the support centre
The troubleshooter will be updated with common problems that we get asked about all the time and may help you find the answer to your query/problem without the need to contact support.
Site of the Month
This months site of the month is:
Home and Furniture - http://www.homeandfurniture.co.uk
Home is a family run business that has been in the furniture and interiors business since 1993.
A Random Joke
I once owned a diesel car and on my first trip to the garage I made the ultimate mistake... I filled it up with unleaded.
Not being very good with engines I did what most people today would do.. I called the RAC. 40 minutes later they turn up in their big orange van with it's flashing lights to let everyone know what an idiot I was.
The guy gets out and comes over... asks what the problem is.
I explained and then he says, "Have you got anyone you can call for a lift home? I can't fix it here."
I could only think of one person... the one person that might understand... I called my Dad.
Sure enough about 10 minutes later he arrived and asked me what the problem was. I explained and the look of shame he gave me was unbearable.
"Why did you put petrol in it? Didn't you know it was a Diesel?", he asked.
Feeling rather silly I replied, "I've never owned a desire car before".
His reply I will remember all of my life... He put his hand on my shoulder and said, "Son, you don't have to own a sheep to know what not to put in it".
Out of Hours Emergency Contact
For those who missed it...
There is now an out of hours emergency contact via SMS Text Message only. You cannot telephone this number!
Text "EWSSUPPORT" followed by your message to 07786200690.
Note that this is for out of hours emergencies only. i.e. Store down, checkout not working, unable to take payments, etc.
Any non-critical messages to this number will be ignored.
Non-critical support requests and in-hours problems should be submitted to our email ticket system via the Support Centre or by emailing support@easywebstore.net. Alternatively during office hours you can call 08456 449364
Thank you for reading
The EasyWebstore Support Team
