We are currently undergoing another spell of heavy ill-intended traffic from around the world. This means that a lot of you will be met with a “you have been temporarily blocked” message when you visit 23. Hopefully, we’ll be able to go back online very shortly though.

We sorry for the disruption…

Update: We had about 90 minutes of downtime over the night due another spike in traffic, but after this everything has been running smoothly. To summarize a little, we’ve just entered our sixth day of denial of service attacks from multiple sources. Such attacks are basically organized efforts to drown out real web traffic to and from service such as 23 with a lot of random traffic. Over the past four days, this has resulted in a combined downtime of about two hours, and we’re actively trying to manage the fall-out.

One of the nicest additions to the newly released 23 is the social theme editor. Where you can create your own theme, in our new one-click styling engine. You choose your favorite 2 colors, changing the primary and secondary color of your 23 account (the green color of the header and the blue link color) and customizing the look of 23 account. Your theme is added our collective theme pool, so that we can all enjoy each other’s themes. You are also able to see who and how many other users are currently using your theme.

While we’re very pleased with the styling engine, one thing is missing… The Dark Theme!

With our styling engine the background remains the same, and photos are always shown on a white background. Many people have been asking for a dark theme with photos shown on a dark background, making them pop. In the spirit of 23, where anyone can style their own account, and add personal flair, we challenge you to make the best custom dark theme ever. The rules are simple:

1. Style your own 23 account in dark colors using CSS.

2. Your styling must include a dark background behind the photos.

3. Send an email to team@23hq.com with a link to your account to enter the contest. All submissions must be in by July 14th.

The challenge will be judged by 23s new product designer, Benjamin. First thing back from holiday, Benjamin will decide on the coolest theme and appoint a worthy winner.

The 1st Prize is a 250 Euro gift certificate for Expedia, for the winner to venture out into the world with a camera, returning with a series of magnificent photos. The winning theme will in addition to being a part of the 23-themes also be included in The Tour of 23. The two runners up will each receive a gift certificate of 100 Euro to an Amazon of their choice.

So get creative. We look forward to seeing your work.

One of the more subtle differences in the newly released 23 is our emphasis on favorites: You’ve been able to select your favorite photos from the community for a long time, but with this release we’ve added a lot of neat details.

Who has selected this photo as their favorite?

On every photo page we list the people who have selected the photo you’re looking at as their favorite, and there’s even a little star to click on if you want to add the photo to your own collection of favs. This gives you a great view of the community, and it gives you a chance to dig into other people’s favorites.

See which of your photos have been favorited

Under the Favorites tab there’s a new option: To list all of your own photos that have been faved by other 23 users. This gives you a quick way to se who your real friends are! (as opposed to all the fake ones who don’t support your photo stream.)

You can also visit other 23 users’ photos and see which shots have been faved.

Select your favorites when browsing large photos

We love the new view of large photos. Since the new 23 design is much wider than previously we got a chance to add thumbnails from the previous and next photos in a flow alongside gorgeous, large photos. Since this view lends itself to finding favorites, we’ve also added a small faving link to the page. Nice, right?

Select new favorites when you’re browsing through other people’s favs

We’ve made sure that it’s easy to add and remove photos from your collection when you’re browsing other people’s favs. There’s always a little star to click: Click it once and the photo’s a keeper. Click it again to remove the photo from your favs.

Order photos by times selected as favorite

In the bottom of every photo overview you can choose how to order the photos — that goes for recent photos, tags, albums, within photogroups and so on. On that list you’ll find the option to sort photos by “Times selected as favorite”. This comes in handy when you want to spot great (and popular) shots.

Getting favorites as RSS

Finally, you can now subscribe to favorites via RSS, or you can view the favs through PicLens.

As you might have noticed service at 23 has been spotty at best over the past ten hours. The reason is that we’re undergoing our second serious denial-of-service attack this month. Such a malicious attack is designed to bring down a web service by overwhelming it with traffic.

We’re obviously doing our very best to keep 23 up and running, and we sincerely apologize for any problems this may cause our users and visitors.

Update Friday morning: At the moment we’re getting about 100 times as much traffic as on any normal Friday. This obviously renders 23 unreachable for the moment. We’ll keep you all updated.

Update later Friday (13.36 in Copenhagen, Denmark): The malicious denial-of-service attack of these last few days is keeping strong. We’re coping, but obviously our dear photo sharing service is still not accessible to most of our users. The is unfortunate and, again, we’re so, so sorry for all the trouble this is causing.

Update Friday evening: Things are looking up, and we’re beginning to accept visitors again. Hopefully, all gateways will have opened within a few hours.

A ’see also’ update: Guan’s pretty apt summary

We’re happy to report that we’ve just added support for Piclens.
Piclens creates a cool full-screen 3D experience of photos, and lets you click and drag your way through your pictures on 23 and additionally giving you a really nice slideshow-like function. Piclens is a simple browser addon that works in both Firefox, IE and Safari and on PC and Mac.

To install the plugin go to PicLens. Back on 23, scroll over a photo and hit the small “play” icon and piclens will opens the the 3D universe

With the recent design update on 23 we’re officially welcoming another person into the warm embrace of Team 23. Benjamin Bernhard Pedersen has been the driving force behind the new looks and will be acting as product designer on all of our products in the future.

As we announced yesterday we’ve been working hard to build an even better 23 for all of you. And today we’ve released all that new goodness into the wild. We’ll post more about the new features over the new few days, but for now I’ll present the new layout — and of course, I’ll urge you to see it for yourself.

Wider spaces, better navigation

When you fire up your 23 account you’ll see that we’re taking up a little more space on your screen. This means that you’ll see more photos on every page, and that visitors get a much better overview of your photos.

We’ve also cut down on the navigation: All your options are now available from one simple toolbar, and in each section you can navigate subsections through neat little tabs.

Welcome back

From now on, we’ll always welcome you back when you return to 23. From the welcome page you can find your latest photos — but much more interestingly you can also dive into your community. The dashboard gives you a nice entry point to everything from recently uploaded photos to your contacts and conversations.

Choosing your own colors

We’ve always let users style their own photo sharing accounts using CSS, but a lot of people have been asking for an easier way to make their profiles truly theirs. To accomodate these requests, 23 now includes a one-click styling engine: All you need to do is select your two favorite colors and your account is customized for you! Try it out

The new theme builder is social by default. All the custom color themes are automatically shared with the rest of the community to help everyone become truly colorful.

More languages for more people

We’ve been happy to receive a lot of help from users of 23 in the run-up to today. These kind people have been nice enough to help translate 23 into their local languages, and the site now speaks in about fifteen different tongues.

This local approach to photo sharing is reflected in the new 23 as well: From today, we’ll be speaking locally to visitors. This happens both by auto-detecting the visitor’s language and by showing local photos on the front page, in Just In and in the new site footer.

So, welcome to a new 23…

We’ve been building up to release a bunch of changes on 23 for a while now, and this weekend it’s finally happening! Look for a both a face lift and some nice new features under the purdy make-up.

I’m not just writing this to make you jump up and down with giddy excitement; this post also serves as an announcement: First, we may experience a bit of scheduled downtime over the next few days. If everything runs smoothly it’ll be limited to less than an hour.

Also the new releases changes in both the way we handle themes and the way our web documents are structured. This means that existing, customized themes will no longer work as expected. This issue will be handled by disabling all current themes, and when we’re back up users will be able to reactivate their custom CSS. Since the site layout will have changed the existing CSS might not work as expected. We’re really sorry about this inconvenience but hopefully the new design and the new (and more powerful) theme engine will make for a nice consolation prize.

To sum up: If you’ve styled you 23 account with CSS some action might be required. If not, just lean back and wait 23 to become even better.

At 23 we live off of the creativity of our users, and our services would certainly be dull without their input. Usually this involves taking and sharing photos, but at times users are actually helping us out by doing our jobs.

A few weeks back IkoTikashi took it upon himself to implement some features not yet offered by 23. The tools include a way to browse your favorites grouped by user, a way to browse Just In with larger photos, and a new way to look at your contacts by country. Very nice indeed.

This week Iko has taken up another task: Blogging interesting photos from the community. This is something that we’re always meaning to do but which is constantly falling through the cracks. Perhaps we should take a cue from our users?

23 has been a bit sluggish in its response times this morning. The reason is that our servers have been under siege from a Denial of Service attack. Be assured that we are doing our very best to keep the photo sharing running smoothly.