From Hackulous:
WARNING: READ THIS ENTIRE POST BEFORE YOU REPLY TO IT. IF IT’S OBVIOUS THAT YOU DIDN’T, YOUR ACCOUNT GETS MUTED. Sorry to be a Prick, but the number of people making the same terrible suggestions over and over without reading my replies on why they won’t work are MORE than crazy.
So.. Hi I’m Kyek, I wrote and maintain Appulous, and there’s been a massive outcry about this troll bridge. A lot of you love it, but just as many of you hate it. So I’m making this post to address what some of the hater-crowd has been saying. Hopefully it will clear up any confusion . So, with no further delay:
“The Installous Troll Bridge…”
If you’ve ever said this, you’re exactly who I’m trying to block from Appulous before we move to our new servers. Installous downloads and installs IPA files. That nice display that lets you browse apps and screenshots? That’s all Appulo.us. It’s a website. You get the EXACT SAME THING if you load http://appulo.us from Safari on your iPhone/iPod. All Installous does is loads the site in a self-contained browser for your convenience. So the troll bridge has NOTHING to do with Installous. The apps you get are NOT provided by Installous. Installous is just the name of the program you’re using to install them. Appulous is where you’re typing the passwords, and it’s what’s giving you the apps.
Now that we’ve made this clarification, read on.
“You should just shut Appulous down instead of doing this troll bridge crap”
So you don’t know the troll bridge password, so you want it shut down entirely? How does that change your Appulous experience? You can’t get in, and so the solution is to … not let you in?
Most of the people in this camp are just pissed at the people who are on all the popular password-sharing sites and holding the password over people’s heads. So the real solution to that problem is to not hang out on those websites 
. The Appulous “inner circle” knows the answer nearly every single time, and they’re the ones responsible for OVER NINETY PERCENT of the links posted to the site. So I can completely shut the site down and there will be nothing new for you to look at once it gets moved… or I can keep doing this, and you’ll have pages of new apps when it returns. The benefits to keeping it up are pretty obvious.
“Why not only allow members in?”
The Troll Bridge is the simplest webcode there is. Almost NOTHING needs to happen on the server side. It checks if your submission is equal to the answer, it sets a cookie if it is. At no point does it touch the database server, the cache server, the PHP compiler, or any text files. The whole thing is served from and is entirely contained by a miniscule block of RAM. That page can handle millions and millions and millions of simultaneous users.
If I were to force a log-in to get into the site, NONE of that would be true. Everyone would be trying to log in (including those who don’t have accounts, since the first person to guess Kyek’s password would be king) and suddenly there would be absolutely no benefit to the restriction at all. The server would be pounded just as much. Not to mention the FLOOD of requests I’d be buried in, whining “please please please just let ME make an account! You don’t have to open it to everyone else!”
“Why not restrict it to just donators?”
Legally and morally, I will not charge for access to Appulous no matter what words you use to spin it. Aside from that, though, the above answer still applies. Checking for donator status is just as heavy as anything else.
“OMG The troll bridge isn’t even working because every time I get the password it’s just slow again”
Correct. That’s because every time you get the password, you’re getting it from a website with at least half a million viewers. You know what’s hilarious? Check the Appulous RSS feed when the question is so hard that no one knows the answers. Almost EVERY TIME we’ve gone awhile without the general public knowing the password, that’s when the grand majority of apps get posted to Appulous. People are getting in, it’s fast for them, and it’s working. They’re just smart enough not to end it by posting the password.
The site is nice and fast for those who have been with it since the beginning and those that contribute, and right now, that’s the goal. I’m sorry if this is insulting, but if you fall into this category, the entire point of the troll bridge is to not let YOU, yes, specifically YOU into the site so that it stays fast for those who know the password without needing to constantly refresh some webpage. So if you’re whining because you can’t get in, THE TROLL BRIDGE IS WORKING.
“Come to this website we have the answers the fastest!” or “Follow this twitter account, I post the answers immediately!” or “Subscribe to this youtube video! I post all the answers as annotations!” or “Join my facebook group for Appulous questions!!1!!”
You’re a douchebag.
“Do you seriously think this is helping anyway? You have 800,000 people pounding the troll bridge trying to figure out the answer when you could have much fewer than that actually using the website.”
If 1.5 million people pounded the troll bridge, it would still be less load than 200,000 people using the site normally. Look two paragraphs up.
“When will this finally be over?!?!”
I don’t have a date yet — as soon as I do, I will post it. It could be as early as tomorrow, it could be a few more weeks. The host I’m counting on right now is working on upgrading his server cluster’s software so that it can run Appulous, since Appulous uses some bleeding-edge stuff. You’ll get the details when I do.
“OMG This is so unfair I’m moving to another site!”
…Ok? If you can’t get past the troll bridge and you’re really looking to try out some apps, then by all means, look somewhere else. But one last time, let me impress upon this one fact: You, yes YOU, are acting like the troll bridge will be up forever. It will be taken down as soon as we move to our new server cluster, which could be as early as this week.
“Where am I supposed to get apps now?!”
Apple has this cool thing called the iTunes App Store. You should check it out! Sure, it’s nice being able to test out apps before you buy them, but there are many apps by reputable companies/developers that should be pretty safe without testing first. What’s that you say? You don’t ever want to pay for anything, ever? Well then Appulous doesn’t cater to you anyway, so you really don’t have any space to complain. No, I’m not looking to lock Appulous down so that pure pirates can’t use it (that would be impossible anyway), but I can tell you to shut your trap because the try-before-you-buy crowd is my first priority.
“I paid for an AppScene account and because of this troll bridge I can’t use it!”
I understand your plight, because this is definitely frustrating. I totally get that, and it sucks. But here’s the issue: what would you do if I took the troll bridge down? The site would come to a screeching halt like it did in the days before I put up the bridge, and you wouldn’t be able to get into a single page anyway. WITH the troll bridge, at least a percentage of you can use your AppScene accounts. Either way, though, I do apologize. The situation kind of blows. The up-side is that you’ll have a bunch of new apps to grab with your account as soon as the move is finished .
“I don’t even speak English, what am I supposed to do?” <– some other language
Sorry — I don’t mean to discriminate based on language, but the group of people I’m trying to keep Appulous fast for DO all speak English, and so that’s going to be the language that I post in. As I said above, look on the bright side: the people who are getting in before the general public are cracking and posting apps so that you’ll have some new stuff whenever the troll bridge is taken down.
“What about a text-only site? Can’t you cut down Appulous any more to handle all the traffic just temporarily?”
Not really, sorry :-/. Images aren’t really what’s slowing us down. I could rip out the entire user system which generates a decent amount of load, but then no apps could be posted. I’d rather restrict the site and have lots of new apps ready for after the move than go for an undetermined amount of time with zero new submissions. But I’ll continue playing with these ideas.
“I have servers! Use mine!”
I already have servers — they’re being set up and configured. What’s more, they can withstand the constant barrage of legal threats that get sent to them. If you’ve not gone back and read my posts about the legal issues that surround Appulous’ hosts and datacenters, you need to do that before you start offering your services. Very, very few people are in a position to stand up to Apple’s lawyers.
“There’s got to be some other way to limit traffic. There’s got to be.”
Sure there is. I could split up traffic by IP address and only let certain addresses in for an hour every day. But the troll bridge is WAY more fun, and the people I want to have access to the site have unfettered access all day long with it. Maybe I’ll take down the troll bridge and change to IP-based filtering if the servers take longer than expected, but for now we’re doing well
“Sure, Appulous might be faster, but Hackulous is slow as balls now.”
Yeah, that was a really shitty side-effect that I should have seen coming. I made some optimizations to the server and TDDebug has worked a good bit of magic to speed things up too, and we’ll keep working on it. People who say this, though, tend to think that both Hackulous and Appulous are my websites. So for the sake of correctness, please understand this: Appulous and Hackulous have similar names because the owner of Appulous (me) and the owner of Hackulous (Genius) are friends and thought it would be hilarious to name all the good iPhone resources something *ulous. The sites are ENTIRELY separate and the only link between them is that Genius offers Appulous Support forums so that I have an easy way to communicate with my users. Appulous belongs no more to Hackulous than it does to xSellize or ifortner or any other forum. In fact, the entire reason it’s Appulous and not Hackulo.us/appdb is because when I developed it, I *wanted* it to be a completely separate database that all forums could use.
“Even after reading all that I’m going to flame you because you’re an asshole for doing this.”
Look, here’s the bottom line: Without the troll bridge, Appulous is down. You couldn’t use it anyway, because the page wasn’t even loading anymore before I put it up. If you can’t get in with the troll bridge up, you can’t get in with it down either. Appulous is a free service and you are absolutely in NO WAY entitled to be able to use it. I’m going to work as hard as I can to restore full access as soon as possible, and you’re going to have to be ok with that. If you’re not… hey, leave. You’re a leech, and your presence here doesn’t improve the quality of the site anyway.
So that’s that! As I said, if you come back with some argument that I’ve already responded to here, you WILL be muted. I have very little patience for people who want answers but don’t want to take the time to read them.
Cheers!
Kyek
written by blakei21
