Unfortunately I can't help pay, but I do have adblock....

Subject: Unfortunately I can't help pay, but I do have adblock....
Author: Aeon
Posted on: 2019-03-16 15:34:00 UTC

...on one of my browsers.

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Does everyone know that the site that hosts the Board... by twistedwindowpane on 2019-03-15 01:19:00 UTC Reply

...is going to shut down in October?

I accidentally just typed the address for the main site instead of the full address for the Board and was prompted with that message...
https://disc.yourwebapps.com

Where are we going to go? What are we going to do? How are we going to archive all this? We've probably already got solutions to these problems, I just wanted to bring it out into the open (again).

Also, I noticed that you can put in your email address and stuff will be sent to you to maintain your site, I think. At least one oldbie needs to do this.

-Twistey

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That's a big oof right there. by Neo Skater on 2019-03-22 00:11:00 UTC Reply

I really liked the old Board and am sad to see it going. Then again, the T-Board was designed for this situation and we have the wiki in case of a real emergency, so the PPC won't go anywhere anytime soon.
That's ... bad. by OpinionedAngel on 2019-03-17 03:56:00 UTC Reply

Is there another site we can go to? I just want to know if there are any updates...
Ouch. by Iximaz on 2019-03-15 15:16:00 UTC Reply

...I mean, there's the T-Board that Tomash designed as preparation for this day, but I'm going to miss this one. :(

I could chip in for hosting a new site as well—I've finally got a proper job with regular hours and everything.
Oh. Wow. Wow. by Neshomeh on 2019-03-15 15:10:00 UTC Reply

That's a real kick in the teeth. o.o

I guess I'm not completely surprised this is coming... as people have been telling us for years, this system is old. There may not be enough demand for it to be sustainable anymore.

Well, if need be, I'm at a point in my life where I can chip in for proper hosting if we need it, and happy to do so.

~Neshomeh is going to go try not to think about this much.

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I found out a couple of days ago. by Huinesoron on 2019-03-15 11:17:00 UTC Reply

To be honest I'm still in the 'denial' phase...

hS
Ooh, good catch. by Delta Juliette on 2019-03-15 05:24:00 UTC Reply

Certain technical Tomashes have backup scripts, so we haven't lost data in years, and a replacement kinda exists too - we were talking offline about how to stand up a replacement.

Don't worry too much, we have people on the case. :)

I assume... by Huinesoron on 2019-03-15 11:19:00 UTC Reply

... the working plan is to stabilise and speed up T-Board? Actually it looks like it's running a lot faster these days than it did when it was new, so well done there.

hS

That's the default plan, aye. by Delta Juliette on 2019-03-15 16:17:00 UTC Reply

I'm open to other options, and a need-by date of Halloween isn't bad, but maintaining and properly hosting the T-board seems like the most straightforward option.

The state of T-Board by Tomash on 2019-03-15 19:58:00 UTC Reply

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

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About sites with required sign-up by twistedwindowpane on 2019-03-17 14:41:00 UTC Reply

I think that if we had a site with required sign-up, meaning you’d have to get an account to join, sure we’d keep various perpetrators of drama at bay, but it’d probably also discourage some newbies. I know I wouldn’t be here if the Board had had required sign-up, because *insert backstory about what I was like when I joined and how that may or may not have contributed to my family hating the PPC here*. Willis wouldn’t be here either, even if I was here, because the required sign-up would only make joining more intimidating, and he was hecka intimidated about joining as it stood.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not as much of a problem as I thought.

-Twistey

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Maybe, but... by Neshomeh on 2019-03-17 15:20:00 UTC Reply

Sign-up on the T-Board just requires a valid e-mail address, I think, like almost every other site there is. Pretty basic, standard Internet stuff. It's not like we're doing a background check. Being cautious about giving out information is good, but that's why you have an "Internet" e-mail address that's different from your "real life" e-mail address, with no real personal information attached. {= )

Though, I'm not sure you're actually talking about that. So, what are you talking about?

~Neshomeh

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Fair point. (nm) by twistedwindowpane on 2019-03-18 00:51:00 UTC Reply

Money shouldnÂ’t be a big issue. by Hieronymus Graubart on 2019-03-16 14:04:00 UTC Reply

I don’t know yet how to set up a regular payment in foreign currency when the exchange rate is varying, but there has to be a way.

I wouldn’t mind seeing ads on the T-board, but since I’m very good at ignoring ads, I wouldn’t contribute much to generating money this way.

HG
If $10 a month is indeed the upper limit for hosting, by doctorlit on 2019-03-16 13:27:00 UTC Reply

then I can easily afford the full cost of hosting on my own. The minimum wage is slowly increasing in Arizona each year, I live cheaply, and I only have my own stomach to support. And I agree with Iximaz that ads would suck—and may not actually generate much revenue for the advertising company. I mean, it's pretty much just us who use the Board, and I know I never clicked on any ads here.

So yeah. Money's not an issue there. I've got our backs.

—doctorlit, having your back right now

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I don't think it should all be on one person. by Neshomeh on 2019-03-16 20:11:00 UTC Reply

I wonder if there's a way to set up a PayPal account or something that a few of us (chiefly the admins) would have access to, that those of us in a position to do so could set up autopayments to, and that anyone could drop a tip to if they felt like it. "Buy our Board admins a coffee!" sort of thing. {= )

Alternatively, we could make like public radio and do a pledge drive yearly or as needed. That way, contributing period to period would be totally flexible. Situations can change, after all.

All that said, I'm not personally opposed to something like Google ads, and could even be persuaded to make a point of clicking on one occasionally if that's all it would take to fund the Board.

~Neshomeh

P.S. doc, I know how you eat, please spend the $10 a month on some vegetables. {= P

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I'm just saying, I'm good for it. by doctorlit on 2019-03-17 22:22:00 UTC Reply

Incidentally, I don't really trust sites like PayPal that would need to have my credit card number online. I would much rather pay by mailing a check somewhere . . .

I don't trust ads much, either. I tend to assume all of them are downloading something nasty onto my computer, so I would continue running an adblocker as well.

You know, I used to be super into carrots for a while. It drove my coworkers nuts, not only because of the crunching, but also because I refused to peel the skin off the outside of the carrots. I mean, the carrot flesh is basically the same all over, right? But veggies and fruits just aren't very filling, so at some point, I switched from carrots to apples as my token plant food. Apples are juicier, which helps more with my constant state of imagined dehydration. So yeah. I'm on team fruit at the moment. Perhaps, someday, I'll get tired of apples and switch back to carrots for a while.

—doctorlit, a former carrot man

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But have you considered all the rest, though? {= D by Neshomeh on 2019-03-18 23:09:00 UTC Reply

... So I was going to find a nice picture of a beautiful variety of veggies to post here, but my Google search turned up a short political satire article I found pretty entertaining, so I'll just link to the whole thing:

http://vanderbiltpoliticalreview.com/vegetables-a-liberal-conspiracy/

Eat the rainbow! ~~Join the conspiracy!~~ {= D

~Neshomeh

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Well, I do like corn cobs. by doctorlit on 2019-03-18 23:33:00 UTC Reply

Unfortunately, corn cobs have to be cooked, and I don't have the time or patience for heating things in a non-microwavey way, barring my once-a-week pot of breakfast spaghetti.

Aside from carrots and corn, all other vegetables are gross-looking.

—doctorlit, pickiest of eaters

So you like the sweet ones. by Neshomeh on 2019-03-18 23:48:00 UTC Reply

Try beets. You can cook them in the microwave, just like potatoes (and probably all the root vegetables). Poke some holes in them, put them in a dish with a little water drizzled on, nuke for about ten minutes depending on number and size, with a rotation in the middle. Once you peel them, they're bright red or yellow (golden beets are a thing if you want to stick to the yellow-orange spectrum), and they have cool rings when you slice into them. {= D

Lately, I've been doing a once-a-week pot of kitchari, which apparently is a traditional Ayurvedic healing dish, but I like it because it's got Indian spices, but isn't really hot-spicy, and I can take it to work and eat it cold without it making me feel cold. I've been making it with lentils and split peas, rice, beets, carrots, and turnips, plus the spices and a bit of ghee for toasting the seed ones. Way better nutrition than peanut butter and jelly. It's kind of changed my life.

~Neshomeh

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Thoughts as a Non Tech Person by GoodModAddict on 2019-03-15 20:34:00 UTC Reply

I don't pretend to understand how Web hosting works very well, so our Designated Tech Squad(tm) can feel free to correct me.

The main problems I see with hosting T-Board in someone's basement is that we need to trust the person hosting and the server (ideally) needs to be reliable; it's not really useful if the whole thing crashes when more than 10 people access it at the same time. Both of these are things to consider with paid hosting, too, but I think it's more likely to be an issue with cheaper/free hosting. I have no idea what kind of computational resources the Board/T-Board take; for all I know, someone could load it onto a Raspberry Pi for under $100 and then forget about it, but I somehow doubt that.

If we go for paid hosting, I think that ads are something to consider, but it depends on how the ads work. Most likely, ads generate revenue based on views, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of us use some sort of ad blocker. Hmm.

In any case, the first thing to do would be to gather information on how hosting works and how much it would cost.

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On Hosting out of someone's basement by Thoth on 2019-03-17 15:00:00 UTC Reply

Yeah, running off a Pi would be nice, but last I checked T-Board tends to grind even on its current setup under a heavy workload. This could probably be fixed (i dunno), but it hasn't been yet. To make matters worse, Rails is generally just very expensive RAM and computation-wise (although not as bad as it once was: Twitter used to use a frankly insane amount of RAM with each request because Rails would fire a large number of exceptions as part of normal operation (falling off the end of a list while iterating, deliberately, and then just catching the exception)).

So, hosting. EC2 is the standard, and it's pretty cheap on an hourly basis, as is Amazon's associated storage. Thing is, of course, that we're running over years and stuff. That adds up. However, assuming PGSQL and Ruby don't do anything stupid, the compute time we use in a given year will be a lot less than a year's worth of compute: in theory, they ought to be spending most of their time waiting for requests, that is, doing nothing. In light of this, I suspect we could comfortably run off a T2 small, or maybe even a micro, which costs a few cents per hour. Storage is ten cents per GB per month. I suspect $10 a month would cover us. Take that with a grain of salt: I'm not an admin. So we're probably looking at $15-20 a month, maybe? Probably less? Plus DNS costs, unless we get a free subdomain off someone (quite a number of services offer that).

Seriously take this with a grain of salt. I got all of this by squinting at EC2's website and guessing.

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OH GOD DISREGARD THAT by Thoth on 2019-03-20 22:45:00 UTC Reply

AWS charges actual hours, not compute.

Hmm... by Snowy the Sane Fangirl on 2019-03-16 17:17:00 UTC Reply

If I had a server or the equipment I'd definitely volunteer to set one up, but that would require me going out to buy things for it and I can't really do that right now. I doubt the T-board would crash most servers (that are set up decently), as it's primarily text-based and that usually doesn't take up that much processor power.

Anyhow. I could definitely help pay for hosting. I would be okay with ads, but I rarely click on them and intermittently use adblock so yeah.
I'd rather help pay to host than deal with ads. (nm) by Iximaz on 2019-03-15 21:07:00 UTC Reply

Unfortunately I can't help pay, but I do have adblock.... by Aeon on 2019-03-16 15:34:00 UTC Reply

...on one of my browsers.

If you use adblock, we don't get any ad money (nm) by Thoth on 2019-03-17 15:01:00 UTC Reply

Whoa... (nm) by 61516 on 2019-03-15 02:24:00 UTC Reply