Keyvan Nayyeri

It’s December 1st and it’s a good time for announcements and such stuff, especially when you’ve gotten off from the hell!

The last time that I gave an update on Waegis status, I outlined my main plans for the future of the service, and stated that Waegis will become completely free for all users without any limitations.

A few minutes ago, I announced the new version of Waegis that offers a completely free service to all users without limitations in which I also deployed some other changes that are mostly hidden from your eyes as public users.

In the past few months I’ve been in touch with some buddies and Waegis users who left valuable feedback and comment on the site and service, and helped me enhance it smoothly. Having some conversations with these contacts, I realized that almost all the internet users are looking for free services regardless of their need for having it or not. For example, on Waegis over 95% of clients could easily use the free account type without any problem or limitation but many of them were focusing on the commercial model of the service rather than the quality or other parameters that should be more important than anything else; however, this looks like a psychological matter for internet users that is not limited to Waegis and internet owes this to Google as the pioneer in breaking many borders on the web.

I put these reactions together, and thought about the future, and finally decided to move on with a completely free service, and focus on the extensive usage of the service among the users rather than the income of commercial users; therefore, today I published the new version that drops all limitations to allow users enjoy the service without thinking about such stuff anymore.

The other change on the site and service was the modification of the codebase which mainly includes a huge amount of refactoring and simplification in features to improve the maintainability. I reduced the number of code lines and tried to keep the necessary features to have a simpler project in hand.

Besides, I also applied a large number of replacements in some areas to use LINQ in various parts of the software even though none of the database operations are done with LINQ to SQL or Entity Framework. In the new version all the XML operations are done with XLINQ and LINQ features are actively used for manipulating the data and collections on fly.

In the near future I also enable the statistical reports that are already available but hidden, and need more data to work better. The other upcoming change is the addition of new spam rules and some updates in existing rules to improve the quality. This requires more testing and some experimental research to have the most effective rules on board.

Here I must thank Hamid and his company, Axosoft, for sponsoring Waegis and investing in the project. Their support is invaluable for the survival of the service and its progress. Axosoft has done such a great job in supporting many .NET community sites and projects, and you have seen their name on almost all the famous .NET communities and blogs. They also helped me invent our own .NET powered spam filter and allowed the community to have its independent solution for this purpose.

Honestly, hosting charges for Waegis are high and without the help of Axosoft it was difficult to make the service completely free, especially when competitors that have big companies in their back don’t offer a free service at all. At the time when I started Waegis, I required a trustable and scalable hosting solution, so got a bundle multi-server solution from MaximumASP. They proved to be such an enterprise Windows hosting company with a great quality and I would admire that, but I also would state that I need to find a cheaper replacement for Waegis. Now that Waegis is free, there is no income and I should manage the service in a way that it doesn’t suffer from a lower quality.

Unfortunately there was no cloud hosting option available from any company when I launched Waegis, so I was compelled to use a clustered solution. With the advent of cloud hosting companies and completion of our initial contract with MaximumASP, I’m going to move Waegis to a cloud solution; therefore, if things go well, most likely I’ll move Waegis to a new hoster in the next couple of months, but don’t worry about downtime because there won’t be more than 5 minutes of downtime in the worst case!