If you are an Adsense Publisher, then you must have noticed that since yesterday, adsense stats are not getting updated properly. In fact for a few hours yesterday, they weren’t at all updated.

Rest assured this is a wide spread issue and Google Adsense Team is working to resolve this, in fact they have posted about this on their Adsense Blog:

A number of you have informed us that your reports are substantially lower than usual today, or aren’t being updated. Our engineers are currently investigating the issue and working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Please be assured that your account data has still been tracked, so this issue will not affect your earnings or payments. Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for being patient.

On that note, we’d like to let you know about the new Known Issues page, where you can check for updates on this reporting issue and other existing issues. There can be occasional hiccups in our system, but we hope that this new resource will help increase transparency and keep you informed. Whenever possible, we’ll also try to include temporary workarounds and updates about each issue as we work to resolve them.

While it is a relief that it’s just a front end reporting issue and stats are being collected in the background. Google Adsense Team should have been a little more proactive and should have posted this earlier, when hundreds of Adsense Publishers were wondering, what was going on.

Microsoft has decided to pull the plug on Yahoo! acquisition, Microsoft’s CEO Steven Ballmer in an open letter to Yahoo!’s CEO Jerry Yang, has described the reasons why Microsoft believes acquiring Yahoo! is no longer in their best interest:

Dear Jerry:
After over three months, we have reached the conclusion of the process regarding a possible combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!.

I first want to convey my personal thanks to you, your management team, and Yahoo!’s Board of Directors for your consideration of our proposal. I appreciate the time and attention all of you have given to this matter, and I especially appreciate the time that you have invested personally. I feel that our discussions this week have been particularly useful, providing me for the first time with real clarity on what is and is not possible.

I am disappointed that Yahoo! has not moved towards accepting our offer. I first called you with our offer on January 31 because I believed that a combination of our two companies would have created real value for our respective shareholders and would have provided consumers, publishers, and advertisers with greater innovation and choice in the marketplace. Our decision to offer a 62 percent premium at that time reflected the strength of these convictions.

In our conversations this week, we conveyed our willingness to raise our offer to $33.00 per share, reflecting again our belief in this collective opportunity. This increase would have added approximately another $5 billion of value to your shareholders, compared to the current value of our initial offer. It also would have reflected a premium of over 70 percent compared to the price at which your stock closed on January 31. Yet it has proven insufficient, as your final position insisted on Microsoft paying yet another $5 billion or more, or at least another $4 per share above our $33.00 offer.

Also, after giving this week’s conversations further thought, it is clear to me that it is not sensible for Microsoft to take our offer directly to your shareholders. This approach would necessarily involve a protracted proxy contest and eventually an exchange offer. Our discussions with you have led us to conclude that, in the interim, you would take steps that would make Yahoo! undesirable as an acquisition for Microsoft.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

• First, it would fundamentally undermine Yahoo!’s own strategy and long-term viability by encouraging advertisers to use Google as opposed to your Panama paid search system. This would also fragment your search advertising and display advertising strategies and the ecosystem surrounding them. This would undermine the reliance on your display advertising business to fuel future growth.
• Given this, it would impair Yahoo’s ability to retain the talented engineers working on advertising systems that are important to our interest in a combination of our companies.
• In addition, it would raise a host of regulatory and legal problems that no acquirer, including Microsoft, would want to inherit. Among other things, this would consolidate market share with the already-dominant paid search provider in a manner that would reduce competition and choice in the marketplace.
• This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.
• It could foreclose any chance of a combination with any other search provider that is not already relying on Google’s search services.

Accordingly, your apparent plan to pursue such an arrangement in the event of a proxy contest or exchange offer leads me to the firm decision not to pursue such a path. Instead, I hereby formally withdraw Microsoft’s proposal to acquire Yahoo!.

We will move forward and will continue to innovate and grow our business at Microsoft with the talented team we have in place and potentially through strategic transactions with other business partners.

I still believe even today that our offer remains the only alternative put forward that provides your stockholders full and fair value for their shares. By failing to reach an agreement with us, you and your stockholders have left significant value on the table.

But clearly a deal is not to be.

Thank you again for the time we have spent together discussing this.

Sincerely yours,
/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Going through this public letter, it is apparent apart from the costs, it is Yahoo!’s decision to display Google Adsense in its search engine results which have really turned off Microsoft.

I believe a huge opportunity has been lost to provide advertisers and publishers a real alternative to Google Adsense, which eventually have had happen, had the acquisition gone through.

Jelsoft has finally released the gold i.e. stable version of vBulletin 3.7.0. It is a pretty important release and adds quite a new features to the already featured packed vBulletin. I have been looking forward to this release and would likely updated BCMTouring Forums as soon as I can find a good skin for it, because the existing skin would require too much effort to be ported to 3.7.0.

Here is the official release from Jelsoft regarding vBulletin 3.7.0:

Today, the vBulletin team is proud to declare version 3.7.0 to be our stable, supported release.

vBulletin 3.7.0 is available immediately from the Members’ Area to all customers with active vBulletin licenses, and will be offered as the primary choice to those making new purchases.

This release supercedes the 3.6.x branch as our primary product. vBulletin 3.6.x will continue to be maintained for a limited time, as outlined in the end-of-life announcement posted today. We recommend that all customers with active licenses upgrade to vBulletin 3.7.0.

There are many new features and improvements to existing functionality in vBulletin 3.7.0 over vBulletin 3.6.x, most of which have already been described in the release announcements for the various pre-release versions, and in the First Look thread that was posted at the beginning of the beta process, but here is a brief list of just a few of the highlights.

* Inline spam management & prevention
* Thread tagging
* Search cloud / tag cloud
* Thread prefixes
* Reciprocal friendships between users
* Public visitor messaging on profile pages with ‘conversation’ feature
* User picture galleries with user comment facility
* User-created social groups with invite only and moderated membership options
* Extended member profile pages
* Customizable member profile pages with admin-controlled styling abilities
* Inline editing of custom user profile fields
* Lightbox viewer for attached images
* Viewable and comparable history maintained for post edits
* Extended re-authentication for inline moderation actions
* Notices system for navigation bar
* Multiple human-verification systems including reCAPTCHA, image verification and Q/A
* User change history
* Social bookmarking integration

PHP and MySQL Requirements

vBulletin 3.7.0 requires at least PHP 4.3.3 and MySQL 4.0.16 (These are the same requirements as vBulletin 3.6), but we strongly recommend that all customers run PHP 5.2.5 with APC and MySQL 5.0.51 or later. Major performance benefits can be had by taking the recommended route rather than simply satisfying the required versions.

What is a ‘Gold’ Version?

When talking about software, the term ‘gold’ is not related to the color of the application. Rather, it refers to the practise of burning the final version of a software product to a CD-R so that it can be sent to a large scale CD press for large-scale distribution. It is used to indicate that the code is ready for deployment to customers. The official name of this new version is vBulletin 3.7.0.

Installing or Upgrading vBulletin

Anyone who has installed or upgraded any version of vBulletin 3 before will be familiar with the process, but for those who are new to the system, the vBulletin manual has all the details for installing and upgrading.

Template Changes

A large number of templates have been changed when compared with vBulletin 3.6.x. It will be necessary to revert affected customized templates or otherwise carefully integrate the changes into your custom versions or new features and existing functionality will be adversely affected. A complete list of the templates you have customized whose original version has been changed by the 3.7.0 upgrade is available within your Admin Control Panel after the upgrade is complete.

Bug Reports

As with any software, bugs will appear. If you find a problem that you believe to be a bug, please don’t post about it on the forums where the development team may never find your message, but instead use the dedicated bug tracker to make a report that can be tracked through to completion.

Before reporting a bug, please ensure you are able to reproduce the problem on a board using a default, uncustomized style with all plugins disabled.

Roughly 24 hours ago, I changed my hosting from Knowhost’s reseller plan to Knowhost’s VPS plan.

While both the servers were located in the same data center, ip address had to be changed and that included to the ip address of the custom nameservers I use. While I had gone ahead and lowered the TTL value of A records in my DNS zone (tutorial here), since it involved changing the nameserver ips, I ended up loosing some traffic. Since even though the ips in A zone were supposed to be refreshed every 15 minutes, same wasn’t the case with the nameserver ips.

The good thing is, I decided it to do it on weekend, when the traffic is already low so I didn’t lost as much traffic as I would have, had I switched during weekdays and I also kept my sites alive at the older account to ensure there was little loss of revenue.

So if you are planning to switch hosts/servers, make sure you do it during weekend and keep the old account alive to ensure those who come looking for your site, find one, even if it is at the old host.