We’ve added some video tutorials to the site, showing how to accomplish common tasks, like using the shopping cart, searching for products, checking out, and retrieving download tokens. These initial few are just the first 7 out of a planned series of 29 topics that will be produced as video tutorials in the next few months. As more of them are produced we’ll announce them here.

To see the tutorials, go here:

http://www.scubbly.com/help/tutorials/

You’ve seen it already on other e-commerce platforms; anonymized purchase data is used to generate suggestions. Just last night, we added this feature to Scubbly: when you view product details, below the product description you might also see a section titled “People who bought this, also bought…” with a list of up to 5 other products that have been purchased by the same buyer.

Of course, this only happens if a buyer purchased more than one thing, and this was one of them. Since the overwhelming majority of sales at Scubbly are one-off purchases, not very many products have any stored association.

How it works

It’s powered by a simple “association matrix”. Product A might be associated with Product B, and that association has a “strength” or “score”. Associations between products can be visualized as a 2-dimensional grid or matrix, where the number of potential associations between products is ((n^2)/2 – n), where n is the number of products at Scubbly. With over 50,000 products currently being sold at Scubbly, that number is an astronomical 1.25 billion. If two products are associated, the score is greater than zero. The more times a product is purchased with another product, the higher the associated score between them.

Using an ingenious algorithm invented by Scubbly, these suggestions are compiled in real-time. The moment a purchase is made, its anonymized details are propagated into the association matrix. It sounds a lot more complicated than it really is.

Enjoy!

Done! We’ve restored all the products that we had archived. Everything we can restore, has been restored.

Sellers: please go check your store and assess. If any products are still missing, they can’t be reconstructed so you’ll need to upload them again. This affects products that were uploaded after June 1, but that had had no sales from October to present.

You should also check if your store has things tucked into the correct sections, and replace any “tags” that may have gone AWOL.

Reconstruction of historic transasctions is still underway, and is going quite well. But it takes a lot of time. We expect to have it finished on time for the payout on Feb 1.

… we found 19 more products to restore. Those will be restored late tonight or tomorrow morning.

We’ve also completed some of the mundane tasks associated with moving to a new server. Scubbly was down last night for approximately 15 minutes while everything was upscaled (more RAM) and rebooted.

Thank you to the staff at RackSpace for helping with this frantic transition, working long into the night and wee hours of the morning.

At this point, all Scubbly services are functioning normally.

Sellers: Please look around your store and check each of your products to make sure they look all right. If you’re unable to log in, it means your account credentials may have been reset by our staff; contact us and we’ll set you up with a new password. If you’re a seller who signed on after June 2011 and you haven’t made a sale in the past 4 months, your account is likely gone and irretrievable. You should register again to create a new account.

We’ve found another 76 products that can be restored from a backup. It’s manual cut-and-paste work, but I think they’ll all be restored tonight.

And some more good news… We’ve recreated balances for every seller who has had *any* sales in the past 4 months. The reconciliation rows haven’t been added to accounts yet, but at least we’re positive that everything will be accurate.

As announced earlier, Scubbly is on a new server now, and we’ve taken some steps to “harden” it for reliability and a new system of multiple backups. Later this week we’ll announce steps we’re taking to ensure that a catastrophe like what happened on Jan 17 doesn’t happen again.

The site is alive again. It was down for over 14 hours, the machines just wouldn’t work & we’re pretty much fed up with all the maintenance issues.

Scubbly has moved to a new RackSpace server. All the work that was done yesterday is intact there. There are still many products that need to be restored – please allow a few days for us to do that. We’ll restore as many of them as we can, based on some logs that are produced when a product is sold, that we have going back to October 2011.

If your product was created after July 1, and there were no sales of that product between October 1 and Jan 17, then we probably won’t be able to restore it.

One bit of good news: I’ve managed to extract the latest balance for all sellers who have made any sales since October 2011. The balance showing in your Account view will still be incorrect today – probably lower than it should be. That will be adjusted before Feb 1 to reconcile the transaction data that was lost.

Watch here for news

Ian

great work from all our IT crew who have been going full speed for … almost 36 hours now

email is back up; you can contact us at admin@scubbly.com, and we can write back, too! (hooray for a working SMTP service)

Last night was not a good night.

The main rack of servers hosting Scubbly.com were wiped out. The web server, and the backup drives – all of them were corrupted, and despite our efforts late into the night, they could not be restored. Massive tracts of the disk space were destroyed, and there was nothing we could do but wipe them clean, repair the ones that could be repaired, and rebuild Scubbly from source that was *luckily* still stored on one of our laptops.

So the code was saved. That’s good. In fact what you’re seeing today is a beta version of Scubbly that we were planning to launch in the next few days – a new design, and some nice enhancements to the cart checkout process.

But, the data. Oh the data… the main databases are backed up daily onto large storage drives, and we all figured that was a failsafe. I mean how often do multiple drives fail at once? Apparently one bad night is all it takes.

The latest complete data backup we had off-the-rack was from June 1, also lucky that someone had copied it off the racks and put it on a pair of DVDs… so we restored that. In addition to that DVD backup, we also have individual log files from every transaction since mid-October. There is a 3 month span from June to October for which we seem to have no surviving records at all.

From a forensic accounting point of view, we can also retrieve records from PayPal for all transactions.

What does this mean?

your balance

A lot of tedious, manual accounting work for us, that’s what. From those log files, we can recreate every seller’s balance as of the last payout – January 1 2012 – we’ll create a “reconcile” entry in every seller’s ledger, and we’ll work forward from there. It’s easiest to recreate things from January 1, since all the sellers who got their payout will have been at a $0 balance – a convenient starting point. Sellers who had a balance below $50 will have their accounting recreated from the original PayPal transaction logs.

your files

Unfortunately, there is another problem. Sellers who uploaded new products in the latter half of 2012 have their binaries stored in the secure distribution cloud: our rock-solid impenetrable fortress of data housed at several locations around the world. But the records of those products in our databases is what really matters – without those pointers connecting a “product” to a “bitstream”, they’re orphaned out there on the storage cloud and we don’t know what they are. Shucks for building the cloud with that kind of security, eh.

But we can recreate those products from the transactions logs. So if a product has sold some time between mid-October and last night, then we can recreate them. It will take many days and we’ll likely need to hire some extra help to do it… but it’ll get done.

If your product was uploaded after June 1, and it hasn’t had a single sale since October, then I’m afraid it’s likely lost for good.

Scubbly is OK today

We got the site back up and working again this morning at approximately 5am. Everything is hooked up, and you can use Scubbly today to sell your files. As far as we know, everything is OK… if you notice anything that isn’t working? Please let us know ASAP.

deadline: Feb 1

The ultimate deadline for all this repair work is the February 1 payout. By then, all accounts need to be reconciled and accounted so the balances are accurate and the payout goes to those who have earned it.

I’d like to emphasize that this wasn’t a security breach. No personal data was leaked, and this wasn’t the result of an external attack. This was an IT catastrophe that – needless to say – we’re going to be taking steps to ensure never happens again

Another payout went out last night, to all sellers and affiliates who had more than $50 in their balance. Congratulations to everyone who is using Scubbly profitably!

Something I notice month after month, is that the sellers who earn a payout do so consistently, month after month. Once a seller establishes a pattern of attracting buyers, they do so every month consistently. There are almost no sellers who experience “ups and downs”, earning a payout one month but not the next.

Those that do experience ups and downs are selling particularly “seasonal” products, which is understandable. One such seller (not mentioning names) has but one product, and it’s materials for a course they teach. So naturally at the beginning of a term, there’s a flood of sales as the students get their materials, but then sales stop abruptly until the following semester begins. That’s not the pattern I’m talking about.

Those that don’t earn a payout (not making sales) typically have completely idle accounts, their products lie silently and unnoticed on Scubbly’s distribution servers, taking up space. While there’s nothing catastrophic about that, it certainly isn’t ideal. If you’re putting a product up for sale on Scubbly, wouldn’t you want to earn income from it?

The difference between the successful and unsuccessful sellers is a simple one. The successful sellers are marketing their products. Some have well-established websites using Scubbly’s Widgets and Instant Links. Others have developed direct-links to their Scubbly products on forums, blogs, wikis, and special interest groups. Some use PPC advertising, banner ads, and other online marketing platforms. And I know of several who do face-to-face marketing at conferences, speaking engagements, and the like, sending people to Scubbly to buy their products.

If you didn’t earn a payout this month, ask yourself why. Are you doing anything to bring your products and potential buyers together?