Did you receive this email from us today? Subject: Basecamp 3 security alert: You must set a new password. You’re not alone! You’ve done nothing wrong, and you’re in good company. 1 in 20 Basecamp users got this email alert. Here’s the full story.
Yesterday, February 5th, was Basecamp‘s 15th birthday. As a company we’ve been around for 20 years (we used to be called 37signals), but one random Thursday back in 2004 marked the beginning of Basecamp, the product. And we launched it right here in this post on this very blog, Signal vs. Noise. The blog looked a lot different then, but the spirit’s the same. And here’s a link to the original home page, as well.
A great thing about the Home screen in Basecamp 3 is that your drafts, bookmarks, and assignments are all easily accessible. Load up Home, click a link, and see all of your assignments or your drafts in one place. There’s just one problem with this approach: You have to leave whatever you’re doing to get to these links. We wanted to make it easier to find and access these “My…” links, and now you can!
Yesterday at 12:45pm central time, our ops team detected a dramatic spike in login requests to Basecamp. More than 30,000 login attempts were made in the hour that followed from a wide array of IP addresses. Our first line of defense was to block the offending addresses, but ultimately we needed to enable captcha to stop the attack.
It’s been said that your name is your favorite word. Likewise, a brand’s name is its favorite word. Pair their name with their logo, and it’s a self-love fest. You can see this play out when you order a physical product from an online store. The shipping box is often branded. Sometimes the tape is even branded. Then once you tear into it, the internal packaging is branded. Then the item, too — often in multiple places. Name, logo, name, logo, name, logo.
As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a break? Dunno. Are they at lunch? Dunno. Are they picking up their kid from school? Dunno. Don’t care.
We try hard to write good policies at Basecamp. Make them plain and easy to understand. Without out all the dreaded legalese. By humans, for humans. I particularly like our refund policy and our Until The End of The Internet policy. But I’m sure we don’t always succeed. And sometimes our policies may decay over time. Terms that are or become unreasonable linger on. Ugh.
There used to be a panicked feeling that would set in when we’d have any sort of outage or issue in Basecamp past — that stomach-dropping, heart-palpitating, sweaty-palmed feeling. But on November 8th when I awoke to a 6am text spelling out Basecamp’s downtime, I wasn’t worried.
If you really set your mind to it, you can do it. Get to the very top. Beat out all the others. That’s how I did it. I just wanted it more, worked hard, and eventually all my dreams came true. I won’t say it’s easy, but it’s up to you!
