BodySpace Official News Blog

"The Forum avatar issue has been resolved! The fix addressed both the disappearance of avatars and the synchronization issue with that of a user’s main profile picture. If you reset ("Set As…" function) your profile picture, your avatar should now show up on your Forum posts and reflect the new profile avatar (presently, an action is required to trigger the fix). The "Do not use an avatar" flag has been permanently removed. Note: We will be running a series of queries this week to turn on all user avatars in the event that some users do not see this forum thread/notification.

Thanks and please let me know if you run across any other issues! Once again, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience!"

Jed Reese
Community Product Owner
Bodybuilding.com

Please be aware of these two BodySpace notices from today:

1.  "We plan to have a scheduled site maintenance this weekend.  There will be a complete site outage lasting approximately 15-30 minutes this coming Sunday, June 21st, 2009, sometime during the window of 8:00 p.m. and Midnight (MST -0700)."

– Reece, Bodybuilding.com Development Team

2.  “The release of the Inspirational Profiles feature has been a great success!  You are able to show who inspires you, and other people can easily find these members when visiting your profile. You are highlighting BodySpace members that really inspire you in your fitness life. These are members that have completed transformations, contests, overcome illnesses, have great BodyBlogs, have created helpful BodyGroups, and left you comments that have been inspiring, motivating, and life changing!

With that in mind, it was hilarious and lulz were had by all when a group of forum members decided to make stealth_swimmer the most inspirational male member (no pun intended), but since it was not done with the right intentions, we had to remove the votes.”

– Brandon, BodySpace Product Owner

Attention all Bodybuilding.com Members:

The following sections of Bodybuilding.com will be completely offline from 3:00 p.m. MST on Sunday, May 3, 2009 through 12:00 p.m. (Noon, MST) on Monday, May 4, 2009:

• BodySpace
• BodyBlogs
• BodyGroups
• Workout Tracker
• Product Reviews
• Forums
• Photo Galleries
• My BB.com

During this time hardware and software will be upgraded to better serve and support the growing Bodybuilding.com online community.

The following sections of the site, however, will still be available to serve you during that time:

• SuperSite
• Store
• Chat Room
• Newsletters
• Careers
• Bodybuilders
• Teen Bodybuilding
• Contest Database

Thank you for your patience and cooperation!

Administration Staff

Heya folks,

Several behind-the-scenes security fixes and minor changes to photo uploads were done today.

The only thing that will affect most people will be that animated GIFs are no longer allowed.  If an animated GIF is uploaded, it will be automatically converted to JPG, thus only using one frame of the animation.  Likewise, all photos that aren’t already in JPG format (like PNGs and BMPs) will also be automatically converted to JPG.

These improvements will result in faster page loading times, consistency amongst main profile photos, and decreased image storage requirements (since JPGs are compressed whereas BMPs are not, for example).

Kudos go out to our programming team and our BodySpace product owner, Brandon Poe, for these upgrades! 

Here’s the latest news update from our BodySpace Product Owner, Brandon Poe:

“Hey BodySpace,

We have completed another set of new features to BodySpace! The Community Development Team added 8 new Social News Feed items (events) that you can track on my.bodybuilding.com, and your BodySpace Profile Social News Feed, and your BodyGroups Profile Social News Feed. We have also added more value to your Weight and Body Fat feed items that will show your gains or losses.  Once you add or change your weight, for example, from a previous value the new feed item will show the change from your previous weight or measurement (the progress)!

For example:

A.  Username123 changed Weight from 210.5 lbs. to 208 lbs., a 2.5 lb. loss in 4 days!
B.  Username123 changed Weight from 210.5 lbs. to 212 lbs, a 1.5 lb. gain in 7 days!

For BodyGroups, you will now be notified when:

1.)    Someone joins a BodyGroup

2.)    Someone leaves a BodyGroup

3.)    Someone creates a BodyGroup

Sample:

You will also notice verbiage changes in the once called “Short Goal” we now call it the “Overall Goal.” There are no functionality changes to this feature, but we feel the new verbiage makes it clearer and more known that this is the summary of all your goals. This is a great way for all your BodySpace friends and visitors to quickly catch up on your Fitness aspirations.

And last but not least, we have made a policy change to the Profile and Progress Picture upload criteria. Only one Progress and Profile photo per day, per user, will appear on the BodySpace main page."

Please leave us comments and let us know what you think of the latest batch of usability improvements!

For those users that have been experiencing BodyBlog bugs where you couldn’t activate your blog, or couldn’t see the admin links, or were redirected to the CEO blog or got a ‘page not found’ error message when clicking on them - today is your lucky day! 

These most common blog activation/management issues have been fixed.  You may need to clear your browser cookies for it to work, however, so please try that and let us know if that clears this up for you.  Also please let us know if any of those issues persist.  Please post your feedback as a comment here.

Thanks!

1/14/2009 Update: We made another change or two today for some minor lingering peculiarities, but all blogs should be working for everyone.

Detailed instructions on clearing (deleting) your Bodybuilding.com cookies are found below.  This process is working for everyone who tries it! 

Note: If you don’t wish to clear all of your cookies, that’s completely understandable.  Just clear your Bodybuilding.com cookies:

Firefox Users:

Search for “bodybuilding” in the Firefox cookies window (tools, options, privacy, cookies, show cookies), and delete the two entries that start with “wordpress”:

wordpresspass_c43a862ee74977619d2131549ff54
wordpressuser_c43a862ee74977619d2131549ff54

Internet Explorer Users:

In your Temporary Internet Files folder (tools, internet options, general, browsing history, settings, view files), delete these three text files:

username@blog.bodybuilding.com
username@bodybuilding.com
username@www.bodybuilding.com

Then log back in and…  Blog away!

Just a quick reminder to all BodySpace members:  BodySpace is not a vehicle for spam.  Any unauthorized usage such as posting competitors links on your profile, spamming users via PM with links/checkout codes for other supplement websites, dating services, etc., is not permitted, and can result in the removal of BodySpace profiles and/or forum bans for those users.  My inbox says ‘thank you’.  LOL  

Our web hosting company’s data center experienced two power outages beginning at approximately 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, 2008.  At approximately 4:00 p.m. MST, the data center made a switch to a generator.  The data center was able to transition to generator power but they experienced several minutes of downtime where the battery backup system did not fill in and the internal power grid went down during the transition.  The battery backup system did not fill in because one of its batteries exploded.

As of 8:00 p.m. Thursday evening, Idaho Power Company was still dealing with several outages across multiple grids.  The Bodybuilding.com team worked to bring everything back online as quickly as possible but due due to the power being cut while all services were running it effected most of our systems.

Many of the systems (databases) had to be validated, repaired and tested as well as many of the file systems scanned which to many hours.  Our store was the first back up at approximately 6:45 p.m. and all other systems (such as the SuperSite, forums, BodySpace, etc.) following that with the last becoming available at 2:45 a.m., Friday, November 21, 2008.  At 9:00 a.m. MST this morning, the data center was going to switch from generator to conditioned utility power.  As a precaution to keep our system from taking another power hit, we stopped all critical services for approximately 20 minutes during the transition.

Steps are being taken to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

P.S. it really sucked. 

So are we! 

It seems that the porn spammers of the world have finally found BodySpace, and are flooding our BodyBlogs with hundreds of thousands of porn link-riddled spam messages.  Ugh.

If your email inbox is therefore getting hundreds (or thousands!) of email notifications from this activity, you can turn off email notifications for blog comments via your Blog admin panel.

Also, if the comments are actually making it past moderation and being displayed on your blog, you can tighten up your spam restrictions so that they can’t pass, also via your Blog admin panel.

Here’s what the blog comment moderation page looks like:

Give it a shot, and give your inbox a break!  We’re working on a method to globally address this problem, but it’ll be a few more weeks before it’s implemented.  In the mean time, by adjusting your settings you can minimize the hassle that these unscrupulous vermin of the web have thrust upon us. 

Some members have noticed a few login issues and problems with their BodyBlogs last night and today.  These issues are being fixed as I type this, so please hang tight.  This hiccup was caused by some background code upgrades, and should be resolved soon.  If you’re still seeing some issues, please let us know!

8/18/08 Update #1:  There were two lingering login glitches left over from Friday, which was causing some users to not be able to login.  This was fixed this morning, so if you were having this problem, please try again.  

8/18/08 Update #2:  There was also a BodyBlog glitch discovered (thanks to John Davies from the Beijing 2008 Olympics Blog!) which was causing some users not to be able to activate their blogs.  This has been fixed - please log out, then log back in again.  Sorry for the headaches, everyone!

8/8/08 UPDATE: Please note the the official BodySpace Photo Guidelines (available in the Help section) have been updated to include a sentence on the recent issue of heavily-doctored photos at photofunia.com, dumpr.net, and the like.  These are not acceptible on BodySpace if the avi causes confusion, and will be deleted by BodySpaceAdmin without further notice and the user possibly negged by BOZZ in the forums.  (LULZ!)

More discussion about this in the ‘misc’ section of the forums:

http://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=109724731

Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?  Hmmm…  Okay, bad news first:  the ‘friends’ module is currently disabled, and will be off all weekend.  (It’ll be fixed on Monday.)

Also, we’ve been having ’sidebar’ issues all day today.  So if it looks like you’re logged out, you might actually still be logged in.  Confusing?  Yes.  Critical?  No.  You should still be able to use BodySpace just fine over the weekend (it shouldn’t prevent you from logging in or out, you just may need to do so from the main site instead of from BodySpace.)

Okay, time for the great news!  In the BodySpace Workout Tracker (BWT), you can now add/change an exercise on a previous workout (add a forgotten exercise, for example), and also do the same on a saved workout template (in your workout library.)  Kudos go out to Wayne for the BWT added functionality! 

As many people reported, the Advanced Member Search tool has been offline for a few weeks.  This was due to some database load issues, but everything has been fixed, and the search tool is now back online! 

Many of us have noticed (and reported) various BodySpace problems today, and we are working on correcting these issues as we speak.  Thus, please consider BodySpace to be in "maintenance mode" today.  If something doesn’t work quite normally, please just try again later, as we are tweaking some code and server settings to make everything run better.

Some of the items reported today:

Blog comment CAPTCHAs not appearing - FIXED.
Broken images - FIXED.
Workout tracker giving error messages - FIXED.
Long load times and timeout error messages - FIXED.
Report & forum emails not being delivered - FIXED.
Can’t connect error messages - FIXED.
Forums and blogs down sporadically - FIXED.

3/25 - 4/09/2008 UPDATES:

The programming team is working on optimizing our BodySpace code for speed.  Previously, the code worked, but it wasn’t coded in the most efficient manner (too many database calls, not enough caching/data warehousing, etc.)  During this process, some modules will be turned off and on for testing and optimization.  Please pardon our dust!

Slow blog load times - FIXED. 
Visitors counter stalled - Temporarily turned off for performance reasons.
BodyPoints not accumulating - Temporarily turned off for performance reasons.
BodyBlog RSS feeds not working - FIXED.
BodySpace advanced member search not working - FIXED.
Lifting Stats not working - FIXED.
Missing latest blog post on BodySpace profiles - FIXED.
YouTube videos not embedding in blogs - FIXED.

These are some of the error screens you might be seeing:

These will be fixed soon.  Thanks for your patience.  Once everything is back to normal, if you are still seeing a maintenance message, you may have to refresh your profile or blog (CTRL+F5, or CTRL+R in your browser) to see the current version.

BodySpace experienced a minor hardware failure last night with the server’s RAID disk array, and while no data was lost, some of it was crosslinked between users, which is why a small subset of users have reported seeing someone else’s photo on their profile, etc.  (This was not any hacking activity, but a glitch in the real-time data restore & synchronization procedure when the new harddrive was installed.)

If you were in the middle of writing a blog post during this time period, it’s quite possible that the post was not saved, as the database was not logging new activity during the restore.  Everything else, however, should still be there.

This is obviously being inspected, and hopefully everything should be back to normal ASAP for those users.  If you are seeing anything weird like this on your profile, please report it ASAP:

bodyspace@bodybuilding.com

Thanks, and we’re sorry for the hiccup.  Incidentally, the drive that failed was also contributing to the recent slowness on BodySpace since the weekend, so once everything is back to normal, BodySpace should be faster, too. 

3/5/2008 UPDATE:  frozen profile views are also related to this and will be back to normal tomorrow.

3/7/2008 UPDATE:  frozen visit counters are back to normal, but profile visitor list still being worked on.  Hang tight.

3/10/2008 UPDATE:  profile visitor statistic lists are now being updated again.  Yeah!

As silly as this sounds, we’ve received enough complaints about lots of photos of lots of different members on the site to warrant this addition to the Official BodySpace Photo Guidelines.

Please take a second to read the details of the new rule (effective immediately and retroactive to existing photos) in the BodySpace “Help/FAQ” section:

http://blog.bodybuilding.com/BodySpaceAdmin/category/help/

Yes, we are currently experiencing a problem with the photo galleries, wherein some users cannot delete existing photos from their galleries, whilst other new users cannot upload any:

This is being worked on, and should be fixed within a day or two, so please hang tight.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

(For those interested, this is a direct result of BodySpace being so popular, so much so, in fact, that we’re running into minor scalability problems such as running into theoretical (and obviously real-world) file system limits on the number of subdirectories within a folder, etc.  We’ve encountered this problem before under a different set of circumstances, and the fix is underway, but just takes time.)

11/08 Update #1:  We are planning to implement the fix for this issue on Monday, 11/12.

11/08 Update #2:  Oops, it’s already fixed!  (Thanks Zeke and Cory!)

The login problems that many users were seeing last night and this morning have now been fixed.  This was a hardware issue (failed NIC) with one of the servers, and the problem has been corrected.  Sorry for the partial downtime for some users (this didn’t affect everyone).  

Everything should be working again now. 

Kudos go out to Kelly for fixing a longstanding problem with the Search By Location section of the Advanced Search page on BodySpace.  We used to have it, then it was disabled for performance reasons, and now it’s all been optimized, and it’s now back!

http://bodyspace.bodybuilding.com/search.php

Enjoy! 

UPDATED History:

10/30/2007 - Location searching reenabled (again).
10/20/2007 - Location searching re-disabled.
10/10/2007 - Location searching reenabled.
5/15/2007 - Location searching was disabled.
12/8/2006 - Advanced Searching (including by location) was introduced.

Just a friendly reminder to all: BodySpace is not an advertising outlet.  We’ve been getting lots of complaints recently about people spamming via PM for personal training services, recruitment for other fitness networking sites, and websites selling clothing apparel and/or supplements.

As per rule #8 in the forum/BodySpace rules, these type of advertising activities are not appropriate.

If you happen to own a company that sells stuff, you are, of course, most welcome to use our site.  A single link to your website on your BodySpace profile would be appropriate.  However, PM’ing your link out in your signature file would not be appropriate, nor spamming your link in profile comments, or actively recruiting customers via our site.

Likewise, if we see too many of the same t-shirt logos on the BodySpace main page, we will start removing those photos, since it sends the wrong message about who we are and what we’re trying to do.  Thank you all for your respect of this rule.