4PDA.to

Performance indicators

As of July 2015, 4PDA.ru site attendance was 11 million people per month.

The editors estimate the audience of their site at 220 thousand unique visitors per day, and taking into account the mobile application at 400 thousand visitors per day.

Technical Platform

Anton Zhilyaev, technical director in an interview with Roem.ru (July 2015):

A couple of years ago, the site really worked on the WordPress, but it turned out to be unable to work optimally at high loads. Now only the structure remains from it, we completely rewrote everything else. The same thing happened with the forum. The standard IPB forum at high loads turned out to be extremely slow. As a result, we wrote our own platform, which replaces all the loaded elements of the forum. At one stage of refinement, we increased the speed of the forum in the range 156 - 214%, depending on the module

The numbers are really big. When we made comparisons, we had to double-check the data several times. They themselves could not believe in such indicators. By the way, there was another stage of optimization that gave an increase in the area of ​ ​ 28 - 34%, but even this does not stop us. Now the process of optimizing speed is constant

We write all ourselves. We have a great development team, very talented guys. Actually, I'm a developer myself. There were attempts to attract outside forces to the development, but we very quickly abandoned this method. Too expensive in terms of money, time and effort are developers whose level does not even reach ours. But it turns out, unfortunately, always in the process of work. Who outsourced the development will understand me.

We work on 14 servers^[1].

History

2021: The site is blocked by Roskomnadzor for violating Match TV rights and moves to the domain 4pda.to

In May 2021, access to 4dpa.ru. was blocked in Russia The fact of blocking the resource is confirmed by a record in the Register of prohibited sites maintained by Roskomnadzor. The basis for the blocking was the definition of the Moscow City Court, which is authorized to consider complaints of copyright violations on the Internet.

According to the Moscow City Court's file cabinet, the decision to block the 4pda.ru was made on the complaint of the National Sports Television Channel (Match TV). This organization discovered on one of the pages of the forum 4pda.ru the transfer of its Football-1 channel.

As CNews was told in 4PDA, the reason for the complaint was the placement by one of the users of the playlist forum of the mentioned sports channel. "We always processed all incoming applications for violations on time and always corrected these violations, however, the plaintiff filed documents with the court." - a representative of the resource told CNews. - "It was not us, but the hosting provider Cloudflare that was mentioned as the defendant in the two past cases. Accordingly, we did not have any information about these cases^[2].

received decisions in fact, but there was no opportunity to influence what was happening," 4PDA added. - "We plan to solve the situation within the framework of the legislation."

4PDA.ru now available in Russia only via VPN. Later, the site quickly resumed work on the domain 4pda.to.

Match TV, like its predecessor, Our Football TV channel, has been actively fighting the illegal distribution of their television programs since the first version of the anti-piracy law appeared in Russia in 2013.

2015

Dmitry Minaev, project manager in an interview with Roem.ru (July 2015):

Now the forum is a huge (more than 8 million people) community of diverse people and a fantastic amount of accumulated knowledge. Managing a forum of this magnitude is difficult. There are no more such voluminous thematic forums in Russia or abroad to learn from. I had to learn, as on the site, in combat mode. Now the rapid growth of the forum is over, we have chosen our part of the market and for the first time we have the opportunity to solve problems more carefully.

The project is profitable. For four or five years we invested our own funds, but when the costs exceeded the level comfortable for us, a commercial department was created. Now we are rebuilding it, since the volume of work has grown greatly. In a couple of months, 5 people will work in the department.

The crisis of 2014-2015 affected the market, which means everyone at once. From the point of view of finance, he did not affect us much, we were already ready for this. We have a very strong internal marketing agency, as we call it, which professionally works with customers of all levels, from the indie developer, to Microsoft and Google.

Our customers are the entire global market for mobile device manufacturers, Russian vendors, stores, services and, of course, developers.

2005: Creating a site

Dmitry Minaev, as of July 2015, project manager in an interview with Roem.ru:

2005, after a series of circumstances with then popular resources, several people decided to create their own "casino" with all the pleasures, which was realized. The creator of 4pda is considered a wonderful person under the nickname Imater. After a year and a half, he left the project for personal reasons, but in the memory of the project he is captured precisely as the creator. Now he is a successful and famous person in two branches at once - automotive and writing.

release of Imater, the project was in a difficult situation, as serious errors in financial calculations, hosting and the organization as a whole were revealed. Almost no one knows about this, but at that time the continued existence of the project was in great doubt. Due to errors in the calculations, a serious debt was formed, which we had to pay off on our own. For each of us, it was very serious money.

Separately, I want to tell a story about hosting. At that time, it was carried out on the site of our friend, who subsequently put the project before the fact - tomorrow you "move out" and this is not discussed. Finding a few thousand dollars for a new server in less than a day was almost an unsolvable task for us.

We managed to collect a little more than half, but at this difficult moment one of our Moderators came to the rescue - Oleg Kuzmin (OlegOK). When he received information that the project was on the verge of closure, he called me and asked - "where to transfer the necessary amount?." Imagine, unfamiliar, at that time, a person translates one and a half thousand dollars without any collateral and receipts, simply under honest word and faith in the project. In 2005, one and a half thousand dollars was a large sum for us. Thanks to Oleg, we managed to buy a new server and transfer 4pda to our own equipment. Since then, we have never depended on "good acquaintances." In fact, Oleg not only saved the project, but also helped hundreds of thousands of people.

Arsen Simonyan, Editor-in-Chief:

first version, the editorial board was myself. At that time, we had 5 - 6 news per day, sometimes useful articles that I also wrote. This lasted quite a long time, but even such a small, by today's standards, the volume of publications took me a lot of time, and without breaks for weekends, holidays and holidays

When we got the opportunity to hire "newsmen," we almost doubled the volume of daily news. Two years later, we realized that the editors required serious modernization and this moment was a turning point for her. We did not have teachers who would help us build everything right and fast, so we studied everything in combat mode. It should be said that this approach has proved to be very effective and we periodically use it in current activities, although we prefer, of course, comprehensive analysis and long-term planning.

Dmitry Minaev, Project Manager:

For about three years we held the forum in the form of a cozy place of communication "for our own." Later, we conducted about two dozen experiments of different scales to find a strategy for interacting with people who became more and more each month.

Naturally, such a situation did not like the part of the "old people," and they loudly scolded us for the fact that 4pda is no longer a cake. They can be understood, our rapid growth actually deprived them of a cozy burrow only for their own. At this stage, we left some very active users who did not agree with the actions of the Administration and specifically my decisions. Each such user considered it his duty to loudly slam the door, blame me for all my sins, predict us an imminent death and declare that he would never return to 4pda again. As a result, all these people are still hanging out with us, although they are not so active.

See also

• Media about IT and telecom (Russian market)

Notes