jp1 wrote:Shortly before the outage I had a "Most expensive games you might actually own" article pop up on Yahoo. It was a direct ripoff from this site, although it did reference the site...so maybe that had something to do with it?
Either way, it is a hard pill to swallow from a user perspective. The site operates far less reliably than I can recall since joining. I'm sure it doesn't generate the kind of revenue it did back then either, but it can't really grow if the extra traffic knocks it offline for several days. Imagine the experience from potential new members who may have been trying to come check the site out from the aforementioned article.
It wasn't a traffic issue. According to the webpage of our host it sounded like they lost a major cluster, knocking a bunch of sites offline, and it took them days to get it back up. If it was just a traffic surge it wouldn't have taken so long to recover.
What sort of redundancy is provided that has a three day recovery time? The claims on the server website seem dubious to me, especially when considering all the negative online reviews for poor reliability.
BoneSnapDeez wrote:Bros, what the deal with the auction deadlines?
+1
At this point, I feel like common sense dictates an extension. However, we still need a hard answer on an end date.
The ASO thread on webhostingtalk was quite juicy. I haven't followed the scene closely for a long time, but I have a dev server on Linode that's generally rock solid. I would definitely stay away from any EIG owned company.
I don't know if it's even possible for the Racketboy site's meager income to cover hosting costs that can guarantee more up-time and better database reliability, but maybe we could drum up a funding campaign to move this thing, because where we are seems to be having issues.
marurun wrote:I don't know if it's even possible for the Racketboy site's meager income to cover hosting costs that can guarantee more up-time and better database reliability, but maybe we could drum up a funding campaign to move this thing, because where we are seems to be having issues.
Honestly, I'm waiting on a recommendation from my developer... if it's a simple spec upgrade, it should be reasonable....
I suggest that we block shortened URLs on the forum.
There's no point to shortened URLs on this forum. You can either use the URL tags, or the forum will automatically shorten a long URL in the post. In either case, you can still hover over the link to view the actual URL before clicking.
Shortened URLs, on the other hand, can redirect to malicious sites or something NSFW. Since the forum has two built in methods for shortening URLs (one of them being automatic) I feel like we should just block tiny URLs to protect our members and readers.
This kind of blocking would be extremely hard to automate, I would think. There are so many URL shortening services. How would it even work? Certainly we shouldn't commit to doing this kind of thing manually.
Don't forget that YouTube itself shortens it's URLs when you try to share videos.
The answer would be to prepare the URL's automatically by unpacking them during the parsing process and then running them through whatever shortener the site uses.
There's any number of ways to enforce it beyond that, but I'm not sure if any of it is worth the time?
