Earlier today, FriendFeed emailed me with a report on multiple comments with the same content coming from multiple users and it had been tracked back to Gridjit’s IP address.

I immediately shut off all of the interactive services as a precaution so I could perform an extensive security audit. After a day’s worth of research, I have figured out what happened and it wasn’t a security issue. It was a bug in the code that caused the multiple posts based on certain query patterns.

I apologize for this issue and I am taking steps to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

On a positive note,  I had the opportunity to dramatically improve the security and auditing functions of Gridjit. I’m in the process of working with FriendFeed to get Gridjit’s API access restored and hopefully all will be back to normal sometime tomorrow.

I’ve contacted all of the users who I know were affected to let them know what happened. Apologies again.

Due to some issues that came up early this morning, I have turned off the ability to post statuses, comments, likes from within Gridjit. I have also temporarily disabled access to the account management screens.

I know that’s pretty much everything you can do from an interactive standpoint within Gridjit, but I want to ensure that the system remains stable while I work on these issues. So for now, you can use Gridjit to visualize conversations and as soon as the other features can be re-enabled, I will do so.

From a timing perspective, I currently estimate that I will be able to turn these features back on in the next day or two. If anything changes, I will provide updates here.

I apologize for the inconvenience and I hope to provide additional details later.

One of the biggest requests I’ve had over the last few days was a way to make it easier to log back in after logging out. Until just now, the login functionality was hidden behind the invitation screen so you had to re-enter your invite in order to login. This was annoying to all of us (include me) so I’ve fixed it.

You can now log in from a link on the front page. Sorry for the initial headaches!

I’ve set up a page on Get Satisfaction so users can provide feedback, suggestions, and report any issues they encounter. Please feel free to use this page or continue using support at gridjit dot com.

Thank you to everyone who has signed up for the Gridjit alpha over the last few days. Given the little time I have had to put into marketing it, the response has been very strong. I’ll keep getting invites out as soon as possible. Thanks to everyone for their patience!

The new Gridjit has been deployed to the live server and a small number of people have been given invites to start playing around. I’m still working to get things stabilized. Once things are a little more stable, I’ll start adding more people to the alpha release.

It’s a big relief to finally have the new code deployed. A huge number of changes have gone into the new code base and it’s a much more robust platform. The FriendFeed support is the most noticable and the overall design has been greatly refactored, hopefully making it more enjoyable and easier to use.

All in all, the new development took about two months because of a lot of travel that I did for business. If I had to guess how much actual time went in so far, I’d estimate at about a month.

If you haven’t signed up for an invite yet and you want to get in early, you can sign up at Gridjit.com.

Stay tuned for more news!

Gridjit is a social portal for your web universe.

The old Gridjit blog was at ambient, my personal blog under a category for Gridjit.

This is the new spot for news, updates and fun things that you can do with Gridjit. I look forward to hearing from you!