Received a “fan” mail today.

Hello

I purchased earings for my wife for Christmas following a “bargain” on your website for Cudo.com.au

The fact is after 1 month, the item is still not received. Apparently I am not the only customer to whom that happened, a few other people are in the same situation.

So I strongly suggest that you take care with the ads on your website as your responsibility could be involved too.

Emphasis mine. Probably referred to this offer here and this forum discussion. With most inquiries I usually just reply saying that OzBargain is just an online community for shoppers to discuss bargains, and they should really contact the merchants directly (in this case, Cudo.com.au).

However, as deal postings can sometimes be seen as “ads on your website” (although that was just one community member sharing a deal he/she found interesting), thus the visitor concluded that “OzBargain is in some way responsible”. IANAL but can that really be the case? “Common sense” says no, especially over a deal that wasn’t well received in the first place. However we live in a land that often defies common sense…

Almost 4 years ago I blogged about OzBargain’s RSS statistics. The conclusion? Email is king. 4 years later email still rules, despite the wealth of options people get notified these days (Facebook, Twitter, iPhone apps, etc). OzBargain daily newsletter has been powered by Google’s FeedBurner since pretty much the beginning. However there were some issues:

• It lists out all the deals, and usually only the last 10 deals posted (where we get ~50 deals posted a day).
• Only deals, and OzBargain is more than just a list of deals.
• Not much you can do with turning the look and feel.

So for the last couple of months we have been developing our own in-house email newsletter solution, which moocher announced in August. If you do not have an account on OzBargain (what?!!!), you can still sign up to the new OzBargain newsletter from the front page — the sign up box is on the right hand side under Subscribe to Our Daily Newsletter. However if you are a logged in user, you can go to Settings – newsletter for more fine tuning.

You get:

• Top deals posted over the last 24 hours.
• New forum posts
• New comments in your commented posts (registered users only)
• Deal reminders (registered user only)

Delivery started at 7AM Sydney time every morning so you can check out some of the best deals before work :)

Google+ pages for business was introduced yesterday, and now OzBargain is on Google+ :)

It is still not as flexible and useful as our Facebook page yet. Moreover Google+ has been pretty vacuum currently — great place to post something guaranteeing no one is going to see it. But anyway, I am a Google fanboi so here we have it, and we’ll figure out what to do with it… Later.

Spotted an interesting article at SmartCompany today: Australia’s eCommerce superstars.

Here is SmartCompany’s list of Australia’s best independent online-only retailers in alphabetical order. Our list includes market leaders, established players and some rising stars. But all are setting the pace in a dynamic sector.

Some are well-known names on OzBargain — CatchOfTheDay, DealsDirect, Kogan, etc. Some have never been listed — OKme.com.au?

I LOVE Redroom DVD, especially for their free Tuesday deals (where you usually can get their coupon codes on OzBargain). One of their kiosk machine is within 10 minutes of walking distance from my place, and 1 DVD is probably the maximum I can watch these days due to general busyness.

It did make me wonder sometimes, that how Redroom DVD can be sustainable with some many cheapskates like me. Maybe I have overestimate the percentage of cheapskates in Australia (which means a lot of work to do here at OzBargain to convert them :) Or maybe they do make money from those at OzBargain, sometimes…

You see. I have been using Redroom DVD for quite a few times now and have never paid them a cent (they do have my credit card details)… Except yesterday. Being a cheapskate does not mean you are immune from forgetfulness. Borrowed The Social Network on Tuesday (great movie by the way), intended to return it on the next day, but only remembered at 7:15PM on Wednesday!

So there you go — $2.99 to Redroom DVD for being forgetful. Well worth it though for how much I have enjoyed their deals so far.

OzBargain has been on its previous theme for almost 4 years. There has always been some minor alternations here and there, but nothing major. We did however, introduced some revamp last week with a new logo image:

I won’t call it a completely new themes though — anything between the header and the footer pretty much stayed the same. Hopefully that will give OzBargain a fresh image in preparation of up-coming Christmas shopping season.

The unexpected event today.

I have probably only spent my own money on Apple hardware once — it was 2003 and I rode on the hype of MacOS X and bought an iBook G3. However I still remembered playing all the computer games and doing BASIC programming on an Apple ][ back in the 80′s. What this guy did has influenced you and me and whoever is using a computing device today, regardless whether it’s an Apple or not.

Rest in Peace, Mr. SPJ

Got an SMS message this morning (sent from my monit instance to my email to SMS gateway at SMS Global, thanks to previous free SMS deals), saying that the OzBargain server hosting the deal-thumbnail images and internal “foxshot” system is DOWN! Currently OzBargain does around 600GB/month of traffic from those thumbnail images, and is hosted on one of my VPS at Linode‘s POP at Fremont California, with Hurricane Electric as data centre. That specific DC has certainly had quite a few teething issue with “power” recently (how ironic, since they are called hurricane electric), but the latest incident, according to Linode status update, is a massive DDoS that pretty much disables the network connectivity.

Hopefully it wasn’t caused by me. This is now discussed in the forums. While that specific VPS has served me well over the last couple of months, I think it’s time to move on — either to Linode’s other data centres (better stability, trusted brand, higher latency, relatively cheap) or “somewhere else”.

Received an email from some Russian guys this morning:

Your website attacked!

Attention! That`s not a joke!!!

Your website is threatened by serious danger!!!

This letter is intended only for superadministrators or owners of the website!!!

Hello, dear administrators or owners of the website

http://www.ozbargain.com.au

This is AnonymousHackersGroup who speaks to you.

It happened that your website has become a target for our group. We are going to make full-size DDoS-attack of your resource. Our possibilities and means allow to do this really effective. The result of such attack will look like entire paralyses of your site (absolute inaccessibility from the internet) and it’s total physical destruction.

It’s not difficult to guess how much financial and moral blow you will get after.

But don’t despair! We are ready to forget about your existance forever, if you do one condition:

Transfer 999 PM EUR into our account E1775779 in the payment system Perfect Money :

More details you can get here: https://perfectmoney.com/index.html

We warn you: calling to the police department won’t anyway save your internet resource from distruction!!!

No measures of counteraction will help!!!

You have a choice: to pay us or to loose your site.

Attack wil be started in 3 days after you get this message and will be irreversible until your site is totally out of order. You can save your website if only you pay money.

Sincerely, AnonymousHackersGroup

Not the first time I am threatened with DDoS this year. Actually I received two massive ones back in July (not on OzBargain but my other sites) and that was certainly a traumatising experience. We’ll see — if you see OzBargain disappears tomorrow you know what’s going on.

Saw it this morning

It has indeed took a while, and 4,000 is actually quite a small number, comparing to ~65k-70k unique visitors on OzBargain each day. The Facebook page has been staggering for a while and only recently we have automated the posting there. For now OzBargain will post on Facebook

• Top/most voted deal of the day at ~9PM AEST (that has not yet expired)
• Deals that have reached 50 votes

Please Like them and bring all the savings to your friends at Facebook :)

Duplicates have always been a problem on OzBargain. When a hot deal hits your inbox, it’s hard to resist the urge of posting that to OzBargain to share that with your fellow bargain hunters in Australia (and get voted up in the process). However having multiple entries of the same offer, i.e. dups, would usually just confuse the other members and dilute the discussion. Therefore we have always been encouraging our members to search first before post. However that has been hard to enforce.

Earlier this week we have pushed out some code changes to do full text search on the title field to check whether there exists similar deals from the last 30 days, and prompt the submitters to look them up to avoid duplicates.

Hopefully that will cut down the number of dups and make moderators’ job easier. Thanks to moocher to get that developed.

Via Sydney Morning Herald — Online grocer to nibble on supermarket dominance.

Groceryrun.com.au, an offshoot of CatchoftheDay.com.au, offers up to 200 discounted products from well-known brands and charges a flat shipping fee for deliveries anywhere in Australia. But it comes with a few catches. There will be no perishable items. The products won’t always be the same and might not be available from one week to the next, and nor will customers be able to shop whenever the need arises. The deals will only be able available on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

It’s from the same team, the Leibovich brothers, that brought us Catch of the Day and Scoopon. Currently the website looks like a mess — like those Catch-a-thon events where all the products just get dumped to the front page of the website with no obvious order — way less organised than Deals Direct’s competing site. But then again online discounted grocery is still in its infancy, and we’ll see how everything folds in the near future.

At flat rate of $11 delivery to anywhere in Australia — I’ll need to buy *a lot* of Mars Bar to get the saving back.

Well. Running OzBargain I am getting threats all the time. Quite a few threatened to sue and one death threat — but I am trying to avoid them as much as I possibly can. Anyway, got a new threat today in the form of a Report — one disgruntled merchant didn’t like his “deals” getting negged and he was at the point of closing down his Internet presence. The Report goes like this (against his own deal post).

Derogtory and a lie I am in Australia I expect both my threads completely deleted or I am reporting you to ic3 and AFP for illegal cookie stuffing

The problem is — both of his threads have indeed been unpublished so only the moderators and he can see them. So he might be thinking it’s viewable by everyone because he can still see all the negative comments.

Last blog entry: May 2010 — that feels like a long time ago. OzBargain, currently one of the top Australian online communities for shoppers and bargain hunters, started from this humble blog almost 5 years ago, after I’ve been blogging on and off the bargains I found. While the community at OzBargain continues to grow, this blog certainly feels like being neglected. There were many reasons I think, but personal busyness would rank right up there.

I’ve been thinking about “rebooting” this blog for a while, but no, it won’t be the “Bargain Blog” that it used to be. There are way better bargain hunters than I am over there at OzBargain so I won’t embarrass myself posting the crappy deals I found. Instead, this blog would just be about OzBargain — development of it, running it, issues I’ve encountered, occasional amusement, etc. Or maybe a bit more — who knows.

But hopefully I can keep it up. Let’s start with some updates first.

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Found this page on Wikipedia last week.

Thanks to “Eno1″ on Wikipedia for creating the page!