The PPC Posting Board - Latest posts

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.

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

Please consider, y'know... not roleplaying someone supporting the Holocaust, even if they're doing so reluctantly as a strategy. It's perfectly fine for Heinrich (good call using first names to avoid unnecessary use of certain names) to want to stage a coup just because you're considering not taking Germany to its glorious destiny of conquest; you really don't have to keep bringing up the rest of it.

On an unrelated note, most Mormons have been officially against polygamy since 1890, and I don't think you'll find anyone in the main LDS church supporting or promoting it nowadays. The small Utah spinoff cults are a different business, of course.

hS

It's an AU, right? What's the point of an AU if you're just going to stick to the script? {= ) Buck the system, throw your government into chaos, and let us come in and sweep up the mess. I see no downside to this!

~Neshomeh

Nothing risque actually happened, so I guess I'd be warning for... skin above the knee and below the shoulder? I mean, I could directly warn for corsets, but that's kind of a spoiler. It's not really NSFW... I could just tag it as 'risque'?

Help me out here?

hS

I get that peace and the end of a dictatorship would be wanted. But approval of literally making love instead of war is pushing the Germans out of character. Polygamy and polyamory will still be widely shunned by almost everyone but Mormons and fangirls in the twenty-first century! I sense that someone is trying to manipulate the news to sway me. Who is this spy going by "HG"? I already know, of course, but I'd like you to come forward yourself.

And also, Heinrich is going to coup my butt if I don't support this master race-lebensraum-Final Solution garbage.

-Twistey

For an innocent Willis's sake?

-Twistey

He's not trying to be intimidating; he's just seven feet tall and socially awkward.

Still, no harm, no foul - pretty sure he's agile enough to just dodge and run.

hS

"One does not simply intimidate my boyfriend," she called after him. "I know much better than you do what that does to him."

-Twistey

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.

Not that version, but the more sciencey one which jumps from watching the Riders of Rohan to astronomy:

Traditionally, the limits of human visual acuity are tested with a pair of stars, Mizar and Alcor, a double-star system in the constellation of the Big Dipper. The Arabs, who gave the stars the names we conventionally use, called these stars the 'horse and rider'. It is possible - just - for a keen-sighted person to resolve Alcor and Mizar as two separate stars of unequal brightness, rather than as a single star. Alcor and Mizar are separated by 12 minutes of arc, so this stands as the limit of human naked-eye resolution. Objects closer together than this will only ever be seen as a blur. When you turn your telescope on the problem, it turns out that Mizar (as distinct from Alcor) is itself a double-star. The two stars are separated by 14 seconds of arc, well within the abilities of Legolas, if not Aragorn.

This comparison gives us an impression of how the world was seen through the eyes of the Elves. Aragorn at his most acute would only ever have seen Alcor and Mizar as a double-star, but Legolas would easily have seen it as a naked-eye *triple* star (Alcor, and the two doubles that make up Mizar), an object unknown to human sight. The starry sky was of great significance to the Elves, and no wonder - they would have seen far more in it than human beings ever could.

Elves. Is. Weird.

hS

Well, here I go. :) I've been around for a few months now, more or less, and I feel that my time has come to ask you guys for Permission. This is the doc with the agent bios, my planned first mission, and the two writing samples, beta-ed and tidied up.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1avB9y94ULTFtAGyZcBgNcOaW8Umzmczw-StakmGMolw/

...where Tumblr users tried to figure out the science behind "What do your elf eyes see?!" I am not a math person or a deeply-invested Tolkien person, but the post amused me enough that I still snicker occasionally when I remember it.

(I'll link it here but be warned, it has some NSFW language in it.)

...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.

That description actually brings home the fact that the elves, and the Eldar in particular, would have been deeply weird to our eyes. We all know that elves were tall, but 'tall as a young tree'? The Noldor averaged seven feet, which means the tallest of them could have two feet or more on a tall human. Mix that with 'lithe' and slender, and you end up having to imagine people who look almost stretched - and who are, despite that, immensely strong (I don't know how strong your arms would have to be to shoot down a Fell Beast with a single arrow from the ground, but yikes) and almost impervious to harm. If you or I ran around mountainsides in only 'light shoes', we'd end up with bruises and even cuts. Legolas didn't even notice.

And don't even get me started on Legolas' proven ability to walk over deep snow without sinking! It seems like Tom Loback's creepy alien elves may not be too far off the mark after all.

(For what it's worth, I can't think of any elf who was described as anything other than grey-eyed. Tolkien liked grey eyes.)

hS

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.

In a funny coincidence, I was just reading about him to check my memory that he (most likely) would be grey-eyed in the bookverse. The wikis aren't terribly helpful about that, but they DO have a general physical description of him that Tolkien apparently wrote in protest to portrayals of him as "pretty" or "ladylike."

I hadn't seen that before; it's interesting! It does seem to suggest that elven bodies wouldn't be inclined to get all swole since they can already be "immensely strong" while also being "lithe," but OTOH, it's all relative, isn't it? For an elf, a swimmer's physique might be considered totally ripped. {= )

In other news, Agent hS is adorable and I want to give him a hug for doing a good job. ^_^

~Neshomeh