We have had a busy couple of weeks since the last update.  Demand continues to be high for the Ad Chap service and we have been working hard to get the new technology infrastructure in place to support it.  We have successfully changed our database vendor and made many performance enhancements to the code and database during the process.  This was the first step in getting the foundations for the new systems in place.  The next phase involves adding more servers to the cluster and getting the grid infrastructure in place with new load balancing system.  We have it implemented in our test environment and have completed the lions share of the testing now.  Starting on Monday we will complete several days of stress testing on the new servers and if that goes smoothly then we will be up and running with greatly increased capacity by the end of next week.

We know that everyone is having trouble getting into the Ad Chap facebook application.  This will be solved with the upgrades next week as well.  The facebook pages and your stats will be getting dedicated resources.  This will be able to scale the ad serving portion and the facebook app pages separately as needed.

New features have been on hold for the last couple of weeks while we work on the infrastructure changes.  After that is implemented, we have an exciting set of releases that will be coming your way.  New features will be coming for both advertisers and publishers over the coming months.

Advertisers.  With the new capacity coming up, we are going to be offering volume discounts on CPC advertising on the Ad Chap network.   We will announce the details next week.

Due to the breakage of our database nodes over the weekend, plus overwhelming demand on the Ad Chap service, we will be running at limited capacity over the next few days.

We have upgraded the affected servers to much more powerful machines today but it is still not sufficient to handle the request loads.

The facebook application is currently working sporadically due to limited database requests getting through and will remain in this state for the next couple of days.

Ads are still being served but many are finding slow load times. Clicks on the ads are going through and are still being registered and logged. Anyone with clicks in the system can be rest assured that they are still getting impressions and clicks. Publishers are still getting clicks received but may experience slow ad load times as mentioned.

We suggest to larger publishers to not use the Ad Chap system over the next few days, this will lighten the load on our servers considerably. We will post again when we have more capacity for larger publishers.

For those making payments to buy clicks, if your payment is not automatically credited, it may be due to the payment not being handed off properly to our site due the current overload. We will manually credit all payments that do not go through.

Many have asked why we can not just add database servers. The short answer is that, with the breakage of our database infrastructure (plus other factors) we are not happy with our current database vendor. We are currently working hard to change database vendor plus complete testing on a new clustered grid database architecture. This new architecture will allow us to scale much better and provide the platform for Ad Chap to grow well into the future.

The projected timeframe for the new architecture is by Friday at the earliest but most likely next week.

In the meantime, we give our sincere apologies to all of our customers for the limited availability of Ad Chap over the coming days. We hope you will continue to consider us as your facebook Ad provider once we are through these issues.

Over the weekend we had an issue with one of our database nodes.  The issue caused data to be written in two places and it will appear that some publishers are missing clicks and both publishers and advertisers are missing some history.

During this period, we have all of the data in the second database and no data, history or money has been lost.  We are in the process of migrating this data back to the main database and over the next couple of days you will see it be restored to your account.   If the number of clicks and impressions jumps all of a sudden on your account, don’t be alarmed, it is just us restoring the weekend’s data.

For Advertisers, many received more clicks than they should have.  These extra clicks will not be debited from your account and Ad Chap will pay for them.

It has not quite been two full weeks of operation and we have already had more than 2700 publishers and advertisers try the Ad Chap service on facebook.

We have decided to extend the free clicks promotion for advertisers to try out the system. From today the free clicks promotion will give 20 free clicks to new advertisers of Ad Chap. So if you have not tried out Ad Chap yet, click here to add the Ad Chap facebook application and try it out for free!

Over the weekend, there have been reports by a couple of customers that the same user ID has appeared to click on the same ad multiple times.  We have looked into the issue and provided a response and explanation of what was causing, what ended up being a display problem in the stats page.

For anyone interested in this specific issue, our response can be found here in the facebook developer forums or here on the Ad Chap facebook application forum (you must have a facebook login to view).

We want to let you know that we do have security measures in place against click fraud and we are serious about combating against it for our customers.  In addition, we have extensive history logs and if we find any click fraud we will rectify the situation and take necessary measures to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  If you suspect click fraud on our systems please let us know immediately at support@adchap.com and we will investigate as soon as possible.