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| John Buckman : forum messages they have written | |
BookMooch Blog : John's official BookMooch Blog
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Yesterday server down
Sorry about the lack of warning, but yesterday BM was down for a few hours as I pulled out the old dead servers, from 15 years of being in the same server colocation space. I also bought a big battery backup and plugged BM into it. There was a power outage a few months back that rebooted all the servers, and BM was down from that. I wanted to try to avoid that in the future. Here's my in the weirdly surreal colocation space where BM lives. 
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John Buckman
3 years ago
16 comments
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Update on Amazon
So... it looks like Amazon.co.uk has still not approved our accesskey. And Amazon.com perma-banned us a while ago, with no way to even discuss it. After the warning period expired, I tried creating a new ID, and it was deleted because it was "associated with a recently deleted account". I might be able to get Amazon.co.uk to work, but that's a lot of work for me, to not get amazon.com and to likely get banned again. So... for now we have to do without Amazon. Here's how:
- you can search (as always) the BookMooch database
- you will have to "hand enter" a book if it's not in the bookmooch database yet. http://bookmooch.com/m/add_manually I did some research and I have an idea for a work around. It's going to take a bit of re-enginering from me, but my idea is:
I'll write a browser toolbar widget (like the moochbar http://bookmooch.com/moochbar )
so you can search on Amazon.com itself, and
when you find the book you want, tap the "moochbar" and it'll copy the data from the Amazon web page you were on. :DSo... hold tight guys, I think I can find a workaround to Amazon's API. -john
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John Buckman
3 years ago
66 comments
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new feature: upload files and images
There's a super-secret feature I've had all to myself for some time: the ability to upload files (and images) to BookMooch, so they can be included in forum postings and book descriptions. To access this feature, go to:
http://bookmooch.com/m/files I haven't previously published this feature, because I was worried about abuse (ie, hosting pirated music or something). But, it's only available to members, so let's give it a try and see how things go.
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John Buckman
5 years ago
11 comments
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A bit slow
BookMooch has been a bit slow these past 24h, and I'm working to fix the problem. The cause: TONS of different TCP/IP addresses crawling the http://bookmooch.es site, going to every page. It's very hard for me to block this, because I can't see any logic to it. However, I did notice that a lot of the slowness is from these "Crawlers" hitting every single "zip code" on BookMooch. Since this is a very USA-focussed feature (5 digit postal codes) it doesn't make sense for these crawlers to be even asking for this data on the bookmooch.es site. So... to solve this problem for the time being, I have disabled the "zip" pages, and also the "member history" pages, when you are *not logged in as a member* If you are logged in as a member, you won't see any problem. These "web site crawlers" are not logged in as members, so I can try to discriminate against them, and not give them access to the slowest pages on BM. -john
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John Buckman
6 years ago
24 comments
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Not loving Amazon
64 days ago, Amazon shut down our "affiliates" account that allows us to fetch book data from them. My attempts to communicate with a human (by email or phone) went nowhere. Their original reason for banning BM was that they believed we were advertising on social media and had links directly to Amazon. That didn't make any sense but of course, there's nobody you can talk to. I worked around that by creating a new account. Today, Amazon has shut down my new account, as they've figured out that it's related to BM. Sigh.
| | We have taken this step because we have previously closed an account that we have determined belongs to you or a person affiliated with you or acting in concert with you for violations of the Associates Program Operating Agreement, the Product Advertising API License Agreement, or one of the other Associates Programs operated by our affiliates. |
The good news is that BM has 10 years of book data from Amazon.com. The bad news is that I can't now get new book data from Amazon.com. I can, however, get new data from Amazon.co.uk and the other non-USA Amazon sites (shrug). I'm going to keep trying to find a way to talk to someone at Amazon, but I'm not hopeful. If you follow the news, you'll find lots of people find Amazon a bit difficult to "work with". Technically, because of this annoyance, what I have now changed is that searches for books that don't exist on BM will use the Amazon.co.uk database instead of Amazon.com. It's not a perfect solution, but it's not too bad. Already existing books will continue to link to Amazon. Many American editions are listed at Amazon.co.uk. My opinion is that this is what happens when 40% of American Internet purchases go to one company, and I'll leave it at that. Only Google, it seems, can win in a fight with Amazon: http://www.businessinsider.com/roku-google-vs-amazon-youtube-fight-2017-12 -john
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John Buckman
6 years ago
43 comments
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Amazon search problems
A few days ago, Amazon sent me an email that we were not complying with their terms of service, citing something about our linking to Amazon from social networks. That makes no sense since I don't do this. They subsequently canceled our Amazon API access. BM uses Amazon as a source for new book data. At the moment, I've changed BM to use amazon.co.uk, as there doesn't seem to be a problem there. I'm working to resolve this problem with Amazon, but it might take a while, or not get resolved at all. In the meantime, if you encounter a page that should work on BM but doesn't, please post info about that here. It's likely that my moving us to use amazon.co.uk wasn't executed perfectly by me, and some bugs remain. Really sorry about the troubles! -john
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John Buckman
6 years ago
31 comments
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Mooching for the Internet Archive
I've been a long time fan of the Internet Archive and their many amazing projects. Their founder Brewster Kahle recruited me for the EFF, where I eventually held the Director position for five years before moving to Hong Kong two years ago. Brewster has a long standing project to scan books and make them publicly available. He's working with libraries around the world to do this. However, he has a list of 300,000 books he wants, but can't get from any library they work with. Incredibly, 61,000 of those books are in moocher's hands, has having been passed among members in our decade of operation. And another 563 books are available right now. Brewster has created an Internet Archive BookMooch Charity Account and I've started him off with 50 points from the "public libraries charity" pool that you guys have been giving too. Here are two ways you can help: - if you have some points to spare, give them a few so they can keep mooching & scanning.
- Download the spreadsheet of books they want, and see if you have any on your bookshelf. CSV FILES: ISBN list or complete spreadsheet.
I'll also help Brewster import the 300,000 books into his wishlist, so that as they appear for mooching, he can get ahold of them
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John Buckman
7 years ago
11 comments
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