Celestia Forums

The forums at the Celestia Motherlode site seemed to work pretty nicely for everyone while shatters.net was down. Would it make more sense to host them there permanently? Have the shatters.net forums been sluggish lately? Were they better over at the Motherlode? I don't mean to suggest that we must move the forums. But, if there's a consensus that the Motherlode forums were an improvement, it seems like something to consider if we can migrate the shatters.net forum database to the Motherlode forums. They both use phpBB--albeit different versions--so I don't know how realistic this would be. Anyhow, I'd like opinions: if the forum database could be moved, would you rather see the forum move over to the Motherlode or remain on shatters.net?

Harald and Joe--would you even be willing to continue to host the forums at the Motherlode?

--Chris

Wow Chris,

You are the last person I thought would say something like that. I had also come up wih the idea of having the forum permanently there, but now everybody seems to be back at shatters, and I think it would be rude to make them move forums again.

Michael Kilderry

Just my two cents on this one.

The motherlode was quite nice for a while with its styles and stuff, but i must say that i think the forum here is good and i am content with it the way it is.

So my mind is more or less clear, i think the forum can stay here without any problems, but if the majority wants to move it (with all content); well then it will move and i will go with it, of course.

Regards,

Guckytos

I have nothing against having the forum at any place. However, I used to store provisionally the posts of interest for me in the hard disk of my laptop at working time and then I can read more carefully at home. Unfortunately on my PC, MS Explorer refuses to store "The motherlode" posts while there is no Pb with Shatters Net posts. (I am ashamed , it is probably a small Pb that I don't try to solve because I don't know why).
MB

My strong preference would be to leave the Celestia forum exactly as it is and where it is.

It's just the right amount of "laissez faire", with not too strict management structures, ... Even with the high number of registered users this forum has worked mostly fine so far. Creative contributions require a certain amount of "freedom" of writing . More rules would make many things more rigorous and "administrative". Selden does a great job as a "soft" moderator ...

The only change perhaps could indeed be a suitable renaming and definition of "Purgatory" as e.g. was suggested by several people further up.

Bye Fridger

chris wrote: if the forum database could be moved, would you rather see the forum move over to the Motherlode or remain on shatters.net?

Well, the ML has one advantage - it?s faster than shatters.net. Apart from that, it was nice to have it as a backup (two sites is better than one site).
So, unless the traffic load to shatter.net becomes too much, i?d say to keep everything as it is.

-rthorvald

PS: i actually like "purgatory". A little humour can?t hurt anyone

but maybe get some more themes (I personally like Solaris)...otherwise, I think THIS is it's home...

Regards,
Sean

The technical issues shouldn't be a serious problem - I believe the DB structure is at least similar, probably identical for all releases of phpBB2. There certainly will be upgrade instructions available. In fact, you should consider upgrading to the current version too for security reasons.

But to be honest, I don't want to moderate or manage them again. Of course this doesn't rule out to host the forums on the ibiblio servers.

The speed of shatters.net seems to be good enough (for me at least) - I rarely have a problem with it. And the DB-servers on ibiblio aren't completely reliable either. Maybe it would make more sense to check if there are some big files on shatters.net which cause much traffic and can be moved off the server, such that some bandwidth is freed for the forum. But I am just assuming that this is a bandwidth issue, which may not be true.

Regarding themes/styles: as I wrote before, this shouldn't be a problem... installation is quick and easy.

My suggest would be to store a copy of the forum database on motherlode, and to elaborate a way that this copy could be updated on a daily or weekly basis. Thus makes it possible to do a soft switchover to the 'backup server' in case there are any problems in the future.

Of course then there also has to be an update functionality for the original database after the shatters.net server went live again.

maxim

Would it be possible to mirror them? So we then have one forum at two locations.

I think I would then use the libiblio one for its speed (4 times as fast for me) and the theme was cool to but this is not what matters to me.

Dominik

I basically agree with what Harald wrote. Hosting the forums is no problem, but I have no desire to moderate them.

There are two advanages of having the forums on the motherlode. One is the speed, which is not an issue for me on DSL in Chicago, but was excrutiating when I was in Mexico. The other is just support. There are 5 people with access to the motherlode server, (placed in different timezones for maximum "up" time ) so problems can be fixed sooner, not that we expect many problems with Chris back home now.

It might help if people who have lots of speed issues with shatters but find cml.net as a big improvment let us know. And if you are willing to moderate the forum and have some experience doing so, this will help us make an informed decision.

@Chris: you should upgrade the board to the latest version, to prevent the type of thing that happened whiel you were gone. And if you feel like it, throw some more themes up. I use the Icicle one to remind myself when I am logged in, but I find dark schemeseasier on the eyes.

Cheers,
Joe

alphap1us wrote: One is the speed, which is not an issue for me on DSL in Chicago, but was excrutiating when I was in Mexico.

Hm, this reminds me of something: Chris, if you haven't done that already, you may want to enable gzip-compression for phpBB (Administration->General Admin->Configuration) - if the server has enough CPU cycles left, this should speed things up.

It wasn't enabled on the CML, but I was never worried about the bandwidth for a couple of HTML pages on that beast.

Harald

In my opnion, Celestia is centralizing towards the motherlode anyway, so I belive the forum should be there too. As I mentioned there, the motherlode should be your one-stop site to the celstia universe. But that's just me. On the other hand mirrored sites is not a bad idea.... it would avoid the duplicaction of post and topics referring add-ons and related issues, while keeping both adresses working.

PS. I like the other themes as well, but that would be last on my list.

As long as nothing changes...I personally do not care for too much moderation limiting my abilities as a user...such as editing ones own posts...etc...All in all chris you might want to consider moving all hosted sites/downloads to the motherloade over moving the forums....Forums do not take up that much bandwidth like downloads do...I can speak only for myself that I dont mind moving my addons over to the motherlode...Fridger on the other hand might want some other option if it comes down to moving...

And if you are willing to moderate the forum and have some experience doing so, this will help us make an informed decision.

Willing YES
Experience NO
Time YES

I think I would be able to do the job, but english is not my first language so if we ever open a german subforum I volunteer for that one.

if the server has enough CPU cycles left, this should speed things up

Not if the client is runing celestia, the uncompressing may be then needs more time then the saving gains

motherlode should be your one-stop site to the celstia universe

This is a good point, but like all things ther is a down side. The centralizing will make us woulnerable against the sort of things wich hapened lately.
To overcome the down side mirrors would be needed, IMHO I would not start to make one-stop site to the celstia universe with out mirrors (I am a little in the bussines so am I a litle paranoid, d?formation professionelle).

Dominik

PS: If the Forum gets mirrored no new modrators are needed, or have I missed seldens retirement

Slalomsk8er wrote:

if the server has enough CPU cycles left, this should speed things up

Not if the client is runing celestia, the uncompressing may be then needs more time then the saving gains

We're getting OT, but:
The time to decompress gzip-encoded streams is neglectable for the client - even my slow 900 MHz Athlon can decompress a 10 MB HTML-file in 250ms. Compare that with the time a webbrowser would need to render such a huge file, or with the savings in transmitting about 1MB instead of 10.


Regarding the idea of a "one-stop" site for Celestia:
Is this really needed? After all that's what hyperlinks are for... There are some very good arguments for gathering lots of addons in one place, but IMHO they doesn't extend to the forum, which can be pretty much anywhere. This is also true for the various documentation - all of this can easily and effectively be linked to.

Harald

Dominik wrote:PS: If the Forum gets mirrored no new modrators are needed, or have I missed seldens retirement

Not yet
But there are times when it can be extremely frustrating.

Don't flame me if I'm wrong but...

Does anyone considered the costs that Chris is bearing about the shatters.net forums bandwidth?

I suggest to move almost everything of public domain on Motherlode. Instead I would like if someone promotes a public support subscription for Celestia, or at least that the author enables the donations system of sourceforge.

Paolo not logged in.

Paolo not logged in... wrote:Don't flame me if I'm wrong but...

Does anyone considered the costs that Chris is bearing about the shatters.net forums bandwidth?

Not to mention having to deal with malicious page-vandalizing crackers. "Un-root" indeed...

dirkpitt wrote:

Paolo not logged in... wrote:Don't flame me if I'm wrong but...

Does anyone considered the costs that Chris is bearing about the shatters.net forums bandwidth?

Not to mention having to deal with malicious page-vandalizing crackers. "Un-root" indeed...

The bandwidth isn't a problem at all. The page-vandalizers on the other hand . . . At least this vulnerability appeared to be pretty limited, and didn't require too much effort to fix. I'd be more stressed about it, but the important things are backed up and shatters.net will be moving to a new hardware and a new OS soon.

As far as moving the forums, it doesn't seem like there's much interest in switching to the motherlode, so I'll leave them on shatters.net. I'll upgrade phpBB and add some new themes when I upgrade shatters.net. That will happen in a couple weeks when I get about 10 days off for Christmas.

--Chris