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Delivery of Sidewinder toys on it’s way

A new delivery of Dildos by Sidewinder Creations (English / German).

We expect it to arrive in a few business days.

It does include custom made toys that can be configured and ordered directly in the YiffyToys web shop.
You can track the delivery here.

(Yes, postings in the category „Disturbing Dildo Deliveries“ are basically copy&pasted.
There is just nothing original to write about such a thing but many people are waiting
for toys of a specific manufacturer to come in, so it’s important we post these.)

This announcement in:

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Your data is safe with us.

In light of today’s federal court verdict against some merchant using a platform where customer data would automatically be shared with multiple service providers we want to make one thing clear:

We are using our own server.

Not only a virtual server but dedicated hardware.
We run our own web server,
database,
cache
and even our own Email service.
Including a second instance to test every update, change and improvement before applying it to live systems.
We constantly monitor things and keep on top of all security updates.

The only 3rd party providers are payment- and shipping providers.
These you can freely choose during the checkout process.
Including choosing to pick up orders at events and pay in cash or via SEPA back transfer without any payment provider in-between.

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New Toy: Boma the shiny, smooth horse

At Eurofurence 30 we restocked the Canadian Stream’s Toys
and also picked up 3 sizes of a new one: Boma the horse

As a nice contrast to our realistic horses,
these are very smooth, shiny and minimalistic.
In pure Stream’s Toys fashion.

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We survived EF

A week has gone by since Eurofurence 30.
The yearly Con Crud has nearly passed.
While still registering higher then usual traffic, we managed to curb the AI crawler avalance that slowed down the YiffyToys shop server.
All regular toys are counted and sorted. All discrepancies accounted for.
YiffyToys Shirts and table cloth are washed and folded for storage.
We can even see the floor in our storage again.
All manufacturers who sent us reduced-price toys for the rummage bin on our table received their counts.
Cash is counted and the books are up to date again.
Orders to restock our shelfs are already out or will do so in the next few days. Including a few custom toys people contacted us about.

The only tasks remaining are to send back unsold, reduced toys and make photos of a few new toy models we picked up *hint*.
Inspect the truck, that got a severe dent by a foreign object on the Autobahn.
And rest. Finally get some rest.

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Slow YiffyToys server

Since the first day of Eurofurence 30 last week, we are experiencing very slow response time.
This comes from a high number of requests being thrown at our server.
We are regularly informed about his happening by an external hosting service sending out emails when our most important URLs are not accessible.

The problem

They seem to start daily around midnight and go on until the late afternoon.
Requests come from a very large number of IP-Adresses.
Initially they where getting lost in the layered navigation of our categories being filtered by colours, sizes, species,…
Now they seem to have shifted to the search function. Doing complex product searches.
Both are already forbidden by robots.txt with an additional rate limit for requests.
These are being ignored.

Impact

Apart from the obvious impact of slowing down or preventing customers from using the shop or this blog,
this also limits us in using the backend of the shop and for our inhouse-tools to load data about products and sales for printing packaging, storage labels, invoices and postage.
It also limits payment providers from calling back our shop to inform us about the status of payments.

Our response

We are keeping an eye on the logs.
At first we improved server response times by optimising our PHP and Database settings.
Then we included „rel=nofollow“ to links in layered navigation, preventing web-scaping bots from following these links
We are currently investigating ways to rate limit access to the advanced search function on the server side.
This is an ongoing issue and we will update this blog posting.

Result

So far a complex and technologically expensive rate limiting of access to the advanced search function of the shop seems to keep the situation under control.

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Slowly returning from Eurofurence

We returned from EF30 last night.
The truck was unloaded and everything sorted into rough piles of boxes.
Including multiple toy deliveries we have received at EF in person.

Getting operational

Today we shipped the first few orders and did the yearly post-EF inventory count on the few boxes these orders touched.
We still haven’t started sorting our rummage bin of discounted toys apart by manufacturer
to compare against the records of toys sold.
All of this will take a while to sort out.

Slow website

During EF we had problem due to badly written AI bot scraping out website and getting lost in the many way to filter and sort search results.
We still can not block them but managed to make the website a bit faster.
There is a way to give such bots more of a hint to not go places but that will require plugins of the shop system to be modified. Nothing we can do in an evening.

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Neotori restocked

A new delivery by Neotori (English / German) has arrived.
All toys are back in stock.

(Yes, postings in the category „Disturbing Dildo Deliveries“ are basically copy&pasted.
There is just nothing original to write about such a thing but many people are waiting
for toys of a specific manufacturer to come in, so it’s important we post these.)