Server downtime and community solutions

[Fat Boy Kyle]

As everyone knows the Guild has been down an awful lot recently. Whilst there has been threads that have discussed this problem (including the thread that shall not be named) and I hear that its also been discussed on the IRC, I personally have been unable to find any posts from the Mods that summarise the issue. I understand that one probably does exist but, correct me if I'm wrong, there isn't a thread dedicated to the subject.

What I'm hoping this thread will do then, is give the mods a chance to open dialogue with the members regarding solutions to the problem. I think it would be unfair for the community to simply demand the mods fix this without offering some sort of aid. To begin with, is there anything preventing the guild from starting some sort of crowd-funding to cover the expenses of upgrading servers? I know I personally wouldn't mind donating a few pounds to see the guild prosper a bit more. Given that there is supposedly around 11,000 members, you would imagine that some reasonable amount could be obtained.

unless

That is presuming that servers simply cannot handle the amount of users. I suppose there's little we can do if this is down to a DoS attack by a 'rival' site or the Guardians of Peace

Also I don't know how it effects the guild, but I know my friends website suffers a lot due to ad-blocker. Is this the case for the Guild? If so, perhaps a community drive to persuade members to pause it for this site would help? The ads on this site are hardly intrusive after all.

[Ellri]

The problem with crowd funding isn't finding people willing to fund. Its a known fact that they exist and are most willing. The problem is that Mahz as of yet has not been willing to let others help him fund it.

so far as we know, adblockers don't affect the server... they're on the user side.

From what we've heard, the core of the current issues was a semi-recent tweak to the server cache that didn't do as it was meant to. He knows about the issue and has identified it, but has as of last we heard not found the solution. We do know the mods don't have as much communication as they'd like with Mahz on occasion.

EDIT: see notice herein: http://www.roleplayerguild.com/topics/73463/posts/ooc

[Fat Boy Kyle]

@Ellri
I see. I trust that Mahz's reasons are good and understandable, but I hope that crowdfunding isn't a concept that has been permanently buried. In regards to ad-blocker, I didn't imagine it would affect the servers but I'm aware they can affect the revenue that the ads bring in.

And thanks for sharing the news. I actually happened to have spotted it straight after posting this! Still, I hope this thread provides opportunities to discuss other matters too. I'm sure servers aren't (or won't be) the only problems that present themselves to the guild.

[Jerkchicken]

The simplest solution would be to get Mahz to admit he can't do it alone and get more people to work on the damn site. Instead of keeping it a one man project which seems very impractical and unfeasible.

[HeySeuss]

The truth is that what we can do is extremely limited at this juncture. I am in much the same position as all the users -- the site that hosts my RP's is going down on a frequent basis (and we expect more of that, as per RPGN) and the fix is incoming, but not here. I wish I could give more, but we're pretty much in the same position. We're wondering when and hoping soon.

[Jerkchicken]

Yup

Outside of saying "I know how to code in the languages the site is using!" And offering your services not a whole lot of things to do outside of complaining and speculating

[The Red Zephyr]

From what I understand, funding is not an issue on our end as much is it is on Mahz's He's intent on taking care of the guild himself, and, as far as I know, is refusing both monetary and programming assistance. The aforementioned "thread that must not be named" in the news section argued about discussed the problems and possible solutions to great lengths.

I wholeheartedly support a thread specifically for the discussion of these issue, but I think it would be better placed in Off-Topic, where more people will see it.

[HeySeuss]

The Red Zephyr said I wholeheartedly support a thread specifically for the discussion of these issue, but I think it would be better placed in Off-Topic, where more people will see it.

That's how the mods see it too. Off-topic is a good place to do a thread about this and we are not automatically shutting them down -- we didn't want to shut down the first one, either.

[Fat Boy Kyle]

My apologies. I admit that I wasn't sure where to put this thread, or even really how to properly word it. I hope it doesn't come across as complaining.

The Red Zephyr said
The aforementioned "thread that must not be named" in the news section discussed the problems and possible solutions to great lengths.

I found that thread only seemed to gloss over the practical problems of the site, and was more just a bickering ground. Perhaps it would help for those that really understand the issues (ie Mahz) to lay them out so at least there's the potential for people to offer advice, solutions or their services. It is of course possible that there is nothing the community can do, but we won't know that without discussion.

[Dinh AaronMk]

Surely fifty dollars could buy Mahz a cheap XP server to use as backup or whatever's clogging the pipes.

But for sure we need more than Mahz working on this. This site is mostly loading text, it should be that big of a deal. Not when image boards or boorus like Derpibooru deal with several hundred of uploads a day. But they also got three or four volunteer server admins across three servers, which they claim each have their own personalities...

So whatever, Mahz needs to break down and gives some programming control to someone who knows more than I do and maybe crowd fund out for an extra server. A cheap one at least.

[Jerkchicken]

Or perhaps he can find some sort of open source forum software thing to act a more stable skeleton/base while he customizes it in his freetime rather than just making everything by scratch

[Dinh AaronMk]

An alternative would be to implement a page cut-off for then umber of RPs on the forum. Once something gets to a certain non-existent page it is deleted for good. This would theoretically save some data, even if it is all text. The forum could probably be stabilized if RPs passed a certain page are deleted forever on Free and Casual alone.

[Dinh AaronMk]

An alternative would be to implement a page cut-off for then umber of RPs on the forum. Once something gets to a certain non-existent page it is deleted for good. This would theoretically save some data, even if it is all text. The forum could probably be stabilized if RPs passed a certain page are deleted forever on Free and Casual alone.

[Jerkchicken]

Perhaps but I highly doubt this an issue of running out of space as it is some coding error regarding something in the cache process

[Dinh AaronMk]

Jerkchicken said
Perhaps but I highly doubt this an issue of running out of space as it is some coding error regarding something in the cache process

In any event in the event of this being some manner of memory issue or there being a possibility of being one (given the slowness of the site) it may be a good idea to look into. Plus if an RP is on page 50 or whatever of that board there's a good chance no one cares anymore.

[La Inquisidora]

All I know is, this is an issue that needs some (civil) discussion. I know people who don't even host their RPs on this forum simply because of the connection issues.

[Mahz]

The problem with donations is that they aren't recurring. Donation-based systems also just don't bring in much money. I also just don't need the money.

The limiting factor with the Guild has been my time, and donations aren't going to pay my wage to work on the Guild and address its problems.

The real problem is that 1) the Guild's core code is one year old and can't scale anymore and 2) I'm the bottleneck for *everything*, even trivial bugfixes and typos.

At the moment, I'm rewriting the Guild's core to factor in everything I've learned about scaling the Guild this past year. I'm making some fundamental changes so that it has no scaling issues. That addresses point #1.

To address point #2, I'm rewriting the logic in Javascript and using Postgres (SQL) for the database. And then I'm open-sourcing the codebase so that tech-savvy community members can contribute patches to the codebase and I can merge them in. Javascript and SQL are two of the most commonly used web technologies, and that's intentional. I want there to be an almost zero barrier to entry to helping out with the Guild. Even if you're a newbie programmer, you should still be able to submit a patch for something like a typo or a templating glitch. More experienced developers can implement more high-profile patches. I'll be able to review these patches, test them, and merge them in.

I'll provide an update once I hit my first milestone: inviting users to test the code on my development server.

[ML]

Mahz said
The problem with donations is that they aren't recurring. Donation-based systems also just don't bring in much money. I also just don't need the money.The limiting factor with the Guild has been my time, and donations aren't going to pay my wage to work on the Guild and address its problems. The real problem is that 1) the Guild's core code is one year old and can't scale anymore and 2) I'm the bottleneck for *everything*, even trivial bugfixes and typos.At the moment, I'm rewriting the Guild's core to factor in everything I've learned about scaling the Guild this past year. I'm making some fundamental changes so that it has no scaling issues. That addresses point #1.To address point #2, I'm rewriting the logic in Javascript and using Postgres (SQL) for the database. And then I'm open-sourcing the codebase so that tech-savvy community members can contribute patches to the codebase and I can merge them in. Javascript and SQL are two of the most commonly used web technologies, and that's intentional. I want there to be an almost zero barrier to entry to helping out with the Guild. Even if you're a newbie programmer, you should still be able to submit a patch for something like a typo or a templating glitch. More experienced developers can implement more high-profile patches. I'll be able to review these patches, test them, and merge them in.I'll provide an update once I hit my first milestone: inviting users to test the code on my development server.

If this happens, I will love you forever

[Rina]

Thank you Mahz! I'm excited to see how thing will unfold with things becoming open-sourced.

[Fat Boy Kyle]

Ma-aahhhh-aaaazzzzz! Master of the universe!