Once More, With Feeling

[Ragnar]

Any members who return will have noted that after the running out of bandwidth to the 1st, the site went offline at 9am GMT on the 2nd. Nor was cPanel or FTP accessible.

Numerous ticket alerts went out; but only today after trying another support center was the matter resolved.

As can be ascertained, the forum was --- as expected --- moved to another server ( this was predicted for before the 31st and to take less than an hour ). Unfortunately they did not update the nameservers at the same time.



It took less than two hours to sort out once contacted today: I should like to pay generous tribute to their having an old abandoned ticket center up at the same time as a new unannounced real one --- both of which accepted tickets, yet only one could be seen by them --- but I really can't.

 

[Inappropriate Behavior]

When I said the 31st felt like a nice relaxing (paraphrasing) snow day (other thread), I sooooooo didn't mean it!

 

[Jennywocky]

There seems to be a lot of forums going down over the last three days... poor members were going through e-talk withdrawal.

 

[Auburn]

Jenny! you has 999 posts! one more to go!!

 

[EditorOne]

I agree, this is not the only forum to reach bandwidth within the past week or so.

Is there any need for an informal volunteer financial contribution program to defray costs? One of the living history forums I've belonged to for years finally had to ask for help; prior to last week it was just one guy paying the bills because he liked to be useful. Now it's like $100 a month and he can't do it. Are we OK here? I'm not really sure who is behind this forum.

Some of us might be able to cough up modest donations if needed.

 

[Melkor]

I'm all for making the rich fat Americans pay!
*Points at Noddy and inappropriate behavior*
Us lowly Irish/German/European folk should not be made to pay for the internet taxes imposed upon us by our own bastardised colonial experiments!
Also, is it my stalker traffic taking up all the bandwidth?
*Adorns 3D glasses*
I will fight back if need be...

 

[Auburn]

I do wonder how many pageviews the average member uses up per day. I know that I at least view 100+ a day.

And does the auto-refreshing homepage count as a pageview? If so, that feature alone is probably consuming a massive chunk of that bandwidth, since I often see (on the users online page.. o.o) many users who leave the homepage open for hours.

 

[Vrecknidj]

Some of us might be able to cough up modest donations if needed.

I'd appreciate being kept in the loop about this. If the site keeps going down, and it's just a matter of a few bucks, I'll donate. I don't know who runs the show around here (financially speaking), but I have a PayPal account and I'm willing to spring for a few bucks.

Dave

 

[EditorOne]

"I'm all for making the rich fat Americans pay!"

I'm pretty sure this site attracts poor, skinny Americans. The rich fat ones are all too busy exploiting the rest of us to spend time on an introspective intellectual forum of wafflers and neo-Hamlets....

 

[Inappropriate Behavior]

I'm all for making the rich fat Americans pay!
*Points at Noddy and inappropriate behavior*

Well you got two out of three right, that's an improvement!
*pats Melkie on the head*

You can't ask me to pay because I am a small post creator and the small posts I create are the key to this forum's future. What we need to do is cut bandwidth spending by cutting Euro-style entitlements! Although paradoxically we do need to continue to spend lavishly on forum defense (if we don't continue to spend more on forum defense than all other forums combined then the ISTJs will win somehow). Also we need to switch to a gold standard because gold (an inanimate object with purely subjective value) is so much smarter than paper (another inanimate object with purely subjective value) currency.

Also, we need to see your proof that you are on this forum legally. A long form birth certificate that we're just going to claim is a fake will do.

/end silly political satire that most people outside the US won't even get.

 

[Claverhouse]

Whilst I appreciate that having gold in all circumstances is going to be better than not having gold, I'm never quite sure what exactly survivalists will do with say, 1000 krugerrands in the near-apocalyptic future. Certainly one can swap one, or ten, for a tankful of gas or a rifle or a hundred mice or refraining from being massacred by Somali-type thugs, but who --- apart from the thugs --- will set the rate of exchange ? And why would it be better in the wasteland than anything more immediately useful ? And why are gold devotees on the internet trying to sell us the gold they say is so valuable for the US dollars they say are rubbish ?



I daresay admins will discuss voluntary contributions, so long as we don't go pay-per-view and no privileges are returned for the honour of giving...






Claverhouse

 

[Oblivious]

I would tolerate a reasonable amount of advertising.

 

[Melkor]

Well you got two out of three right, that's an improvement!
*pats Melkie on the head*

You can't ask me to pay because I am a small post creator and the small posts I create are the key to this forum's future. What we need to do is cut bandwidth spending by cutting Euro-style entitlements! Although paradoxically we do need to continue to spend lavishly on forum defense (if we don't continue to spend more on forum defense than all other forums combined then the ISTJs will win somehow). Also we need to switch to a gold standard because gold (an inanimate object with purely subjective value) is so much smarter than paper (another inanimate object with purely subjective value) currency.

Also, we need to see your proof that you are on this forum legally. A long form birth certificate that we're just going to claim is a fake will do.

/end silly political satire that most people outside the US won't even get.

I don't have a birth certificate because only one of my parents was half human.

I don't get it E.B....0-0


@Editorone: Neo hamlets.

Brilliant.

 

[EditorOne]

"I daresay admins will discuss voluntary contributions, so long as we don't go pay-per-view and no privileges are returned for the honour of giving..."

Precisely. Privilege is for the rich, fat plutocratic oligarchic bullying simpering authoritarian ummm privilege seekers. I'm working on post-apocalyptic prole myself.

 

[Cogwulf]

A lot of forum posts that I visit via search engines link you to a simple text archive of the page at first. I imagine this would save a hell of a lot of bandwidth for these sites.

Does this site have such an archiving feature already, and would it be easy to implement if not?

 

[Minuend]

I can't change my avatar, invalid file it says =~(

 

[Fukyo]

I can't change my avatar, invalid file it says =~(

Bump, image upload still not working.

 

[Ragnar]

Prolly due to the move. Server moves do have unintended consequences...

These changes will make your site run faster than ever AND provide protection 24/7 from DDos attacks (distributed denial-of-service) through our new DDos mitigation hardware.

Your sites new home includes an upgrade to the latest Dell enterprise class server hardware featuring SOLID STATE DRIVES in RAID-10 with un-matched I/O, and 3.16GHz Dual Quad-Core processors.


Sounds nice.


If it hasn't settled down, and the uploading problem persists after a few days, I may ticket them to glance at their php variables.



Typically it's something in the host's php variables as vbulletin uses these variables for its own temp files. Check your phpinfo under your admincp to see where the temp variable is and then check with your host as to whether it is set to writable or not.

Chasing Exotics



Still, we can see what happened to the tickets over the New Year...



On an entirely related note, I recently saw the /tmp/analogue dir was using about 40% of the storage space. This may well be normal for all I know; but it is one of the reasons no new games have been uploaded for months, as running out of bandwidth is one thing, but not enough space is serious.


***


Re donations: ok, this may come, if restricted to say no more than $5-6 in a year for anyone, and all donations are anonymous but announced --- since most will be unable to donate and we don't want a two-tier membership --- but I've been looking at Paypal and this is very dull reading: they like to complicate things for non-US bank accounts; but their fees seem cheapest...


'The prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully' famously said Dr. Sam Johnson. Our present contract is paid up to October with URLJet, but it looks like costing more in the future than was paid 15 months ago. We are on 10GB space / 100GB bandwidth.

The cheapest will be $24.95 a month for 10GB space / 200GB bandwidth; and the next rank is $34.95 for 15GB space /300GB bandwidth per month.


Frankly there will be no point in downgrading to a lesser host such as GoDaddy: and a semi-dedicated server or VPS would be much more expensive and require monitoring beyond the our admins' time or desire. URLJet has kept the forum going pretty well since October '09.

 

[Auburn]

Unrelated to this but...

Ragnar, I really like how you've kept the same avatar for as long as I can remember. :3
Somehow it seems to act as an anchor in my mind. It's sorta become the image I associate to the core of the forum. It's nice to know some things don't change. I think if you changed it I'd feel disoriented about where I was.. ..and if this was truly the same place I once joined long ago.

Glad you're around, and thanks for all you do.

 

[Melkor]

*Passes through with a mop, and cleans up Auburn's saliva. Silently and unnoticed*

 

[Minuend]

Still no avatar change possible.

 

[Ragnar]

As You Were

URLJet has investigated the folder permissions etc., and now states things are back to normal.

If someone --- not an admin --- could confirm they have changed/uploaded something, that would be dandy.

 

[Kuu]

Well, the avatar upload is not working for admins as well...

 

[Minuend]

I still get an "invalid file" message when attempting to change avatar

Edit: Beaten

 

[Kuu]

Ok, it's working now.



Even our permanently broken banner is working now, and I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

 

[preilemus]

My first thought upon logging in.


"What the hell is that?"



And what a stupid motto. No shit a path leads somewhere. I'm ashamed to live under that thing :x

 

[Ragnar]

Since I have only just seen it, and have not made this alteration, I suspect hackers.

 

[Ragnar]

K, I erased the path in: style manager / STYLE NAME / Style vars / image paths For Dark Castle; and shall hunt it down in each Style.





Besides which, even had it not looked top-heavy, it was misaligned just faintly: which over time would drive me mad...

 

[Ragnar]

Thae avatars appear to be working; but there is still an issue with the image uploading attachment mechanism.

We await our host's next move.