Public files offline

Some of you may have noticed our downtime for the past few hours (we're back online now, thank goodness). I'm fuming right now, so I'm going to keep this short and post more of my feelings on my personal blog (http://www.iseff.com), but I wanted to give a brief overview of what happened:

A few days ago, we were notified of a user who was using our new public files feature to host a virus. Great -- a scumbag had started using our service. We took the appropriate action and ultimately removed the account.

Apparently it happened again (different account, though I'm sure it was the same user as the IP range is very close and it's the same file), and this time our ISP simply decided to block our web server's IP. Thanks, guys, for notifying us first. Oh wait, you didn't.

So today, we had some downtime.

Accordingly, we're revising our public files feature to first run a virus scan of the file. If the file is infected, we will not allow the file to be marked as public. The scan will only happen when you request to make the file public (or on modifications of a public file).

Unfortunately, this isn't yet implemented, so we've removed the feature until it is finished.

I'm extremely sorry, and upset, that I have to do this, but unfortunately just one bad apple ruined it for everyone for a little bit.

Hang tight while we work on this problem and bring back public files.