Quote:
Originally Posted by Jace
are you serious? jesus christ man
when will all this be done? and will the upgrade cost much?
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The intelligent bandwidth limiter should be out in a month or so, with a preview or test
version in about two weeks. That actually depends largely on how long it takes
to make the admin area pretty. I'm not too good at doing "pretty", but webmasters
want pretty software and sometimes buy neater looking systems over more
effective systems that don't look as nice, so from now on we'll try to put a pretty
interface on top of the intelligence. It's funny , the technicl part has gone through
several iterations of "good" systems, each getting better, over the last few years,
but we still can't come up with a decent name. I hope after years of R&D off and
on released isn't delayed just because we don't have a better name than "intelligent
bandwidth limiter".
A technology test version of Strongbox is available now that previews the biometric system.
The biometric information is logged and shown in the reports for the webmaster to see,
but not actually used by Strongbox to decide whether or not to allow access.
Running on some very large sites, this version is providing the data for us to run the
statistical analysis on so we can see how to score the biometrics. It's amazing
when you graph different parameters how clear the "knee" in the graph sometimes
is and it shows exactly what certain settings should be, often very different from
what your intuition tells you. For example that's why the default settings like max ISPs
are higher than you might expect in Strongbox - the graphs show that with many different
parameters being considered setting each one a little higher than you'd expect reduces
false positives to almost zero while the combination of parameters catches most of the
traders. Anyway that's the current state of SB4 - we're adding more and more of the new
ideas to live sets running the test version so that we can analyze real data from real sites.
The official launch is probably still a few months away, depending on how much tuning
is needed on the bandwith limiter once it's out in the real world.
Although it hasn't been decided for sure, the upgrade cost will probably just be the
difference between what you paid for your Strongbox 2.x system and the price of
the new SB4. SB4 will go for somewhere between $150-$250, probably closer to
$150, including 30 days free email and telephone support. An optional support
contract will run between $39 and $59 per year for those who don't want to rely on
the forum and online self-support tools like the troubleshooter wizard we're building
into the wiki.
Webmasters have been telling me for years that the price of Strongbox is too low,
and it is, for most webmasters. I want to keep it affordable for newbies too though,
and give all webmasters a great value, so pricing is always troublesome for me.
I always love to hear what you guys think about these things. Right now I'm thinking
that good resources on the site like a good owner's manual and the forum will allow
webmasters with lower budgets to afford good protection while an optional support
contract will bring in some funds so we can keep working on new ways to help the
webmasters who might save a hundred dollars a day in bandwidth.