Subject: The state of T-Board
Author: Tomash
Posted on: 2019-03-15 19:58:00 UTC

There's a few things that need to be cleared up before we can pack up and move to T-Board, if that's what we eventually want to do.

The main one is hosting.

T-Board currently is hosted on Heroku's free plan. The main drawback to this is that we can't have more than 10,000 database records (that's posts, users, etc.). Even accounting for the fact that we post slightly less than we used to, this would still mean kicking stuff off the Board much more often than we'd like (I think). For reference, all the Other Board (and T-Board) content (which is mainly RPs) comes out to about 6500 rows.

One other problem with the current hosting is that, if no one accesses the T-Board for a while, it gets shut down and hen turned back on the next time someone shows up.

The solution to both of these problems is to find another place to put the thing. (For technical people, T-Board is a Ruby on Rails app backed by postgres.) It really isn't clear where though. Someone's basement server? The cloud? Something else entirely?

So, question 1: Where should we host a permanent T-Board instance if we decide to move to one?

Once we've got proposals for that, we'll have problem 2: money. A lot of these hosting options will cost money. My general sense is that the sort of virtual private server the current Board runs on would be somewhere between $5-10 a month, but that there might be cheaper options (there's definitely more expensive ones). (Someone's basement is way cheaper, but has its own issues.)

This leads to question 2: If we need to pay for our new space, how're we going to manage that?

In the T-Board's case, we might be able to offset some (but probably not all) of the costs by running ads. I'm personally not really a fan of tracker-heavy flashy ads, but I figure Google AdWords would be a relatively unintrusive addition to the site if we decided to go there.

And so we have question 3: If we move to T-Board, should we have ads on it, and, if so, what kind of ads?

That all covers the major issue I'm seeing.

I've got a few minor technical things I'd like to clean up with the T-Board (adding a less painful way to delete stuff, bringing our web framework up-to-date, etc.). Between me and Delta, I suspect we have enough post-day-job programming time to keep bit-rot at bay. That being said, I'm open to more help if anyone's around to offer it.

One other thing to note is that, with T-Board, we have effectively complete control over how our community space works. (The only downside to this is the possibility of long threads about how the links should be a different shade of red or something.)

This leads to question 4: What are your feature requests for, issues with, or complaints about T-Board?

- Tomash, your local neighborhood wizard Tech-Priest programmer

Reply Return to messages