Regarding our recent site outage

It’s been a long night/morning for us here at Dribbble HQ. We profusely apologize for the downtime, and can’t thank you all enough for your patience while we get back on track. Last night at approximately 8pm EDT, our database server went belly up and we’ve been working non-stop since then to bring the site back up. 

Here’s what we know now, and what we’re doing to move forward:

• We had corruption in our database. The exact cause is unknown but our leading theory is that we experienced a memory corruption problem where a chunk of memory got wiped and replaced with zeros. We continue to investigate.
• This site is back up and running, but we’re a bit tentative as we are still unsure of the root cause of the problem. For the time being, we’re running much more frequent backups and working toward a more robust database architecture.
• We spent much of the night trying to salvage the latest data, but ultimately had to rollback to a backup copy of our database from roughly 2am EDT May 14, so most of the work that was posted yesterday has been lost. This pains us to no end are we are deeply sorry for that.
• We’ll be restoring lost data regarding pro accounts (orders and status) and looking to see what other information we can retrieve. If you went Pro yesterday, hang in there, we’ll get your status upgraded as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience as we work our way through this recovery. We’ll keep you updated as we step through this process.
• This episode has exposed a lot of flaws in our production architecture and our ability to react to crises and we’re going to work hard to correct them.

Thanks again for your understanding, patience and support. Rest assured, we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep Dribbble running smoothly again.

Pay with Stripe

We’re excited to announce that we’re now offering Stripe as a way to make credit card payments for Pro accounts or Jobs on Dribbble. Until now, PayPal had been the only available payment method, and it continues to be an option along with Stripe. If you live outside the United States and have had difficulties making purchases in the past, or if your business has had trouble using a company card, give Stripe a try!

Thanks to Stripe Checkout, we were able to integrate their functionality in to our site with incredible speed and ease. Plus, instead of sending customers to a third-party site to make a payment, Stripe Checkout offers a simple popover box to pay instantly without ever leaving Dribbble. All payment information is securely processed by Stripe, and the results are immediately returned to our servers for processing.

Our new developer Tristan spearheaded the integration, and he was pleasantly surprised with how easily Stripe could be worked in to our existing code and UI. When we told him we’d be mentioning him in this post, he replied, “Aw shucks, Stripe is going to know I have a crush on it.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Four On The Floor

March winds have been blowing for only a few days, but it’s already been a monumental month here at Dribbble, as we just signed two key free agents. It pleases us to no end to announce our first full-time hires, Samuel and Tristan, who will be helping us grow and improve the Dribbble community, site and platform.

Samuel Fine has been contracting with us for several months and after making himself indispensable around here, he now officially takes on the full-time role of Community Manager. From his bio:

“Samuel serves as champion for all Dribbblers, great and small. He works to make your day better by responding to user questions, comments, and concerns via email and social media. He also oversees Dribbble’s Equipment Shop, monthly newsletter, and occasionally contributes to the official blog.

A native of Northern Michigan, Samuel lives in Salem, Massachusetts with his wife Tess and their cat Beans. Off the court, he builds HTML5-powered mobile apps, participates in citizen-science projects, and is equally likely to be found on Steam or at the flea market.”

Tristan Dunn has been contracting for us for the last month, and now will join us as a full-time Developer, working remotely from his native Louisiana. Tristan previously worked with thoughtbot, Meebo, and Google and has already had an enormous impact on our software development efforts. From his bio:

“Tristan is a developer and arguably a tolerable designer. He is from and lives in Louisiana, yet enjoys cold weather more than you might expect.

He’ll be helping make your experience on Dribbble even more enjoyable, and giving Rich a bit more time to dunk.”

BTW, a quick but spirited fist bump of appreciation to you, the Dribbble community: We’re able to make these hires because YOU have supported this operation. We’ve never raised venture capital or other funds—this startup is 100% organic and made possible by your patronage. Thank you for your continued support in helping us grow and sustain this project. Your impact has been profound.

We couldn’t be more thrilled to add two talented folks to the team, bringing our total headcount to a whopping… four. And we’re equally excited about the great things we’ll be building together to help make Dribbble even better. Welcome, Sam and Tristan!

Evolving Our Community Guidelines

We’ve just updated our Terms of Service and Player’s Handbook with new rules and guidelines as to what constitutes appropriate content at Dribbble.

Historically, Dribbble has been a relatively open publishing platform. It’s self-organizing in the sense that members can create their own community by following (and blocking) other members as they see fit. For the most part, we’ve tried to stay out of the business of deciding what content is and is not appropriate by crowdsourcing this responsibility. This model appears to works well for services like Twitter and Facebook; combined with our small population and invitation system, we believed it was working well for us.

That self-organizing nature is likely here to stay, but recent events shifted our thinking about community and our role in managing it. We better understand that:

1. There is much stronger sentiment of Dribbble as a single community versus separate, sub-communities (a la Twitter, Facebook), and thus we have more responsibility to provide guidelines for Dribbble as a whole.
   
2. Some people have expressed that they do not feel welcome or comfortable at Dribbble due to the nature of some of our content and comments. And we hate this.

Today, we’ve made changes to our Handbook to clarify what types of content are inappropriate to post on Dribbble, in order to make it a more welcoming and inclusive community for designers and fans of all ages. Specifically, we’re going to be more aggressive in removing content that doesn’t meet these new guidelines. We can’t guarantee we’ll catch every inappropriate shot or comment that’s posted, but we think expectations are now much clearer and more conducive to fostering community.

It’s important to point out that inappropriate content has been a small fraction of what’s posted. The vast majority of work shared is inspiring and the reason for Dribbble’s success.

Adding manual and automated mechanisms to better enforce our guidelines will be an ongoing process. It won’t happen overnight, so we ask for your patience as we continue our efforts to grow gracefully.

Thank you yet again, Dribbblers, for creating such a special place. We’re trying hard to keep it that way.

Search Like a Pro

We’ve just rolled out an update for Pro members that makes finding designers on Dribbble even easier. Starting today, sorting and filtering  members by location, skills, availability, and other criteria is packaged up into a nifty, portable widget.

We’ve streamlined our Find Designers section to make it quicker and easier to find folks to follow and hire. But we’ve also added that same functionality to other member lists throughout the site (e.g. followers, fans, lists, etc.). Click the new Pro Search icon at the top of these lists to access the sorting/filtering widget to narrow down the list.

Want to see who your favorite Dribbbler follows near Chicago that does illustration? A few clicks and… presto. You now have the power.

Anyone can go Pro for $20/year to take advantage of the new Pro Search. We think it’s pretty powerful, and will enable Dribbblers and fans more ways to sift through the talent that shares their work here every day. Enjoy!

Please bear with us…

You might’ve noticed a few features disappearing here and there on the site. Please bear with us, as we’re battling some performance issues that are proving difficult to diagnose.

Suggestions, Colors, Pro Stats, and shot views have been temporarily disabled while we try and get things back on track. Those features are especially taxing on the database, so turning them off for now will help the rest of the site stay afloat. Don’t worry, we’re still tracking shot views, we’re just not reporting them on list and detail pages for the time being. Once restored, the counts will be accurate.

Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience, and know that we’re working extremely hard in restoring full functionality as soon as we’re able. Follow our Twitter feed for updates.

Thanks for your patience, Dribbblers.

Double Dribbble

The rise of high resolution displays has put Dribbble in a unique position. As a site that constrains its image uploads to fixed pixel dimensions, how should we handle images that appear on HiDPI (e.g. Retina) devices? Many Dribbblers are designing (and have been for quite some time) @2x for iOS apps. Others are creating @2x assets for the recently-released Retina Macbook Pro. And still more are concerned about making their work look as sharp as possible for devices that support HiDPI now and in the future. Apple has led the way with Retina displays, but other device makers are following suit. Soon, HiDPI displays will be the norm, blurring all of our lovingly-crafted 72dpi images.

To get a leg up on all of this and make it simpler for folks uploading @2x work they’re sharing on Dribbble, we’re pleased to announce that starting today, ALL Players have the ability to upload 800×600 shots in addition to the normal 400×300.

How it works

On HiDPI displays, we show an 800×600 shot in 400×300 reference pixels for twice the resolution (yes, this makes our heads hurt, too). In normal displays, we’ll show a downsized 400x300 version. In either type of display, you’ll be able to see @2x shots at 800×600 by toggling the @2x link.

We’ve also made some other HiDPI enhancements leading up to this release: crisper icons, @2x thumbnail shots (for screens that support them), etc. The caliber of work shared by the Dribbble community continues to be a source of joy and awe for us, so we’re thrilled that it can now appear @2x sharper.

Under the hood

For the curious developers out there, we’re using Scott Jehl’s brilliant Picturefill script to conditionally serve shot images at 800×600 or 400×300 depending on the device’s display. Scott’s script polyfills the proposed <picture> element which would standardize the rendering of multi-size images for various viewports and display resolutions.

How will this affect the API?

Anywhere in the API where a shot is returned, the shot object has always had an image_url attribute pointing to the full shot image. That continues to be the case, though with @2x shots, it’s now possible for a shot to be greater than 400x300. Additionally, there is now an image_400_url attribute, only present for @2x shots, that points to a resized 400x300 version (potentially useful for @2x teaser views or for apps that can’t support the larger images yet).

So there are two ways to determine that a shot is @2x — the presence of the image_400_url attribute and the fact that its width and height attributes are greater than 400 and 300, respectively. Also — please note that we don’t attempt to resize animated gifs from 800x600 to 400x300. In the case of an 800x600 animated gif, the image_400_url simply points to a resized image of the first frame of the animated gif.

We plan to make much bigger additions to the API down the road a bit, but wanted to provide basic support for @2x shots at this time so existing clients can make use of them right away.

Welcome Samuel Fine and Alana Brooks!

This week we welcome two new team members here at Dribbble HQ. Samuel Fine will be managing our support and fulfillment, while Alana Brooks will be spearheading our marketing efforts. We’re excited to get some much needed help in areas that haven’t gotten the attention they deserve under a 2-person team. Both Sam and Alana are local Salemites, and will be working with us here, part-time, in our newly-acquired digs. 

Be sure to give them a warm welcome as you start seeing them around Dribbble, as they’ll be helping make it a better place.

We’d also like to give an official farewell to our former intern, Bruce Spang. Bruce worked with us for 2 years while he attended Salem High School, helping us on the development front. He left for college earlier this month, and will likely start a multi-billion dollar corporation that we’ll all be working for someday. Thank you, Bruce, for your contributions and service on the court, and best of luck at school and beyond.

Mo’ Pro, Yo!

Just over a year ago, we launched Dribbble Pro to make power features such as attachments, stats and projects available to designers. A bit later, we added the Hire Me button through which thousands of work inquiries have been sent to Dribbble members. Following that, we released Find Designers and subsequently made Pro accounts available to anyone, providing a search tool that any designer, fan or employer of designers, can use to find for members of interest by skill and location.

Seeing Pro features get enthusiastically adopted—there have been thousands of projects, attachments, work inquiries, and location searches—has been truly rewarding. It’s also been a great year for Dribbble as a business. A year ago, we spent a lot of time worrying about how to survive. Now with revenue from Pro accounts and Dribbble Jobs for Designers, we’re focused on how to thrive. We can’t thank you enough for your support in helping us make that leap.

But we can make Pro better. To kickoff the second year of Pro accounts, we’ve launched two new features. For Players, we’ve added attachment and project views to your Pro Stats. Views were made available on individual attachment and project pages not long ago, and now we’re excited to roll these into Pro Stats as well.

We’re also introducing what we think will be an extremely popular feature: Lists. All Pro members (Players, Prospects and Scouts) can now build public and private lists of Dribbble members. You can add members to a list from their profile as well as their player card. Lists not only allow you to organize members of interest into meaningful groups, they offer another powerful way to discover designers by browsing anyone’s public lists.

Our favorite aspect of lists: They also produce shot streams from list members, making it easy to follow subsets of designers. With them, you can quickly tap into the work of designers in a specific area of interest, or view a more targeted stream of shots on days when your Following stream feels overwhelming.

When signed in, you can access all of ‘Your Lists’ from the ‘You’ menu in the header. When viewing your Following page, you can also get to any individual list using the ‘Your Lists’ select menu on the right, which will appear after you’ve created a list.

We’re already using lists at Dribbble HQ and slightly giddy about them. We hope they are just as big a hit with Pro members. Thanks yet again for your paid support of this amazing community. We will keep working hard to make it worthwhile.

All-Pro

We’re happy to announce that Find Designers, a powerful tool for searching designers by location, skill and other criteria, can now be accessed by anyone. Long available to players (designers invited to post their work) who have purchased Pro accounts, we’ve explored a lot of product and pricing options to expose this feature to a wider population.

Find Designers is clearly a power tool for employers seeking design talent. However, we also wanted any designer—or fan of designers—to be able to grow their local or skill-based creative network. As such, we attempted to make it affordable to anyone.

So how can you get access to Find Designers if you don’t have it already? Pro Accounts, which come with Find Designers, may now be purchased by anyone. To do so, simply sign up if you don’t have an account, or sign in if you do, and navigate to the Accounts / Pro page. There you can see a full description of the Pro feature set and a prompt for purchasing.

Please note that we’ve raised the price for Pro accounts by … one dollar. Anyone can go Pro now for $20 per year.

The other piece of this release is that we’ve tried to improve our sign up process with clearer concepts and messaging. We’ve introduced Scout accounts, which replaces Spectators as the term for non-designers at Dribbble. If your focus is to find, follow or hire designers, sign up as a Scout. If you’d like to be invited to share your work on Dribbble, you can still sign up as a Prospect.

To those who already have Pro accounts—thank you yet again. It was your support that allowed us to survive the early days and your support that enables us to work full-time on this little project that has gotten bigger than we ever expected. CHEERS!