SConrad

I trawl the forums every now and then and remove spam. Please keep reporting it as it makes it easier to find.

 

I've also asked K'aeloree about what he wants to do for a longer term solution. It's up to him to decide how to handle it.

Ok, i made a small donation from Paypal, and it's unclaimed for 3 months. It's weird. I feel bad now. 

Thank you. I have now claimed the donation. For some reason, I did not get an email notification. Very much appreciate your support!

While I understand you reasons, I'm concern about the fact that even biggest SHS/G3 disaster in the history, does not cause any action from admins side.

Actions taken in response to this disaster:

• (Slightly) more expensive server acquired with 4x HDDs, set up using RAID 6 to tolerate two possible concurrent hard drive failures.
• Automatic regular monitoring of hard drive health. Email alerting is in place for when things go bad.
• Automatic backups are now verified to be working. Email alerting in in place for when things go bad.

While that may not be the list you want to see (and hey, suggestions welcome), I'd hardly say it did "not cause any action from admins side."

How about getting back to this topic before next downtime will happen? While G3 get new admin, SHS don't even have active moderators and an impression like it's abandoned.

👋 *waves*

I don't necessarily disagree that we couldn't use more active moderators, but that's more K'aeloree's department.

SC, you don't have to do this. You do it out of love. Gotcha.

We all love it too. Else, we wouldn't be here (and grousing).

So yeah, we ALL have to pony-up more on the financial support. Agreed. I will do my part. (Give me some time, though, heh.)

More donations was not the intended outcome of my post: understanding was. I'm actually relatively comfortable with where things are, the recent mishap aside (which I've taken steps to ensure it's much less likely to happen again).

It would take significant effort to make meaningful changes even if there was an influx of cash. I appreciate the gesture though.

Ads are the devil's tools, sure -- but maybe it's time to introduce some.

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page. It's been there for quite some time.

If we permanently lose just one of these sites, there's gonna be panic in the streets. If two are lost... I don't even wanna contemplate.

"Permanently" is a strong word and at least from SHS/G3's perspective, I highly doubt we'd come close to anything as bad as what we just had--which amounted to a few months' of content. Not that a few months' worth of content isn't important, but it's a far cry away from the site being permanently gone.

But I do wish "The Dons" (sorry for the mafioso reference) would come together and think about how they can groom the new bloods, then pass on the management of the sites to them.

Between costs (and lack of alternatives) of mod hosting, old and painful forum software, and the amount of time required... it's hard to see meaningful change happening no matter who's in charge. We've had chats about how we can make improvements, but so far we've only been throwing a few ideas around.

Next-- Well, someone has to say it, might as well be an oldhead...: is it true that G3 and SHS are hosted on the SAME SERVER(S | farm(s))???
 
Careless!
 
I know all about cost-savings and priorities and all that. But really, that is the, er, um, weakest 'reliability option' I've never wanted to hear.
 
Come on, guys & gals, you can do better than that.

Yes, it's true and of course we can do better than that. But hosting SHS and G3 is not cheap and despite donations and a tiny bit of ad revenue, I still pay for most of out out of my own pocket. It's now been over 10 years since I founded SHS and seeing how I've been paying for its hosting the whole time, and the simple truth is I have chosen to optimise for cost effectiveness over reliability.

I'm well aware that it isn't ideal and that our server setup could be improved for both reliability and performance. But with my limited time and desire to spend less money, that probably won't happen anytime soon. So if someone is happy to pick up the tab, I'll consider handing over the cost and headache of running SHS and G3 to them. Any takers? Didn't think so.