Please can you get the server thing sorted out?

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Are you guys really not making any money with such an active user base? It can't be more than 10 grand for all the hardware you could need.

Last edited by MyFutureSelfnMe on 11 Jun 2012, 11:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

You're mistaking me for Alex. I am not a part of Wrong Planet, I am a vendor.

Ok I had the feeling you were working for Alex. Sorry.

Yeah all things considered I kind of wish Alex would sell the site. He can go months without actively participating in the discussions, which is indicative of his general level of involvement.

Don't be stupid.

Alex has worked hard for ages to get the site to where it is today

I'm sure he did at some point.

I see very little evidence he's doing anything at all related to WP these days though. He's let issues with the site fester for years and the design is getting pretty crusty by modern standards. When I prodded him about it two years ago, all he had to say was that aspies can't handle change so he wouldn't change anything.

His vendor above seems to indicate the site is running on underpowered hardware.

The least he could do is kick in some cash to keep things up to par. With such an active user base, he must have some income from WP.

From the end user perspective there is little difference between the various major forum systems so I don't see how people would be upset by a change. The administrator/moderator interface would probably be different, but that would not impact on many people.

If the main change is better performance then I doubt there will be complaints.

A better description might be - change made to this particular environment, with which people are very familiar.
As in: your home would still be your home but it would be a bit of a shock to find the furniture had been moved around while you were away and all the paint was a different colour.

In practice both could be overcome, but I do understand the reluctance to cause change like this.

As far as I understand, Alex is committed to changing the software here. I believe the question now is what exactly to change to. And then the question after that is how to make that change as seamless as possible.

Seems like phpBB/mysql running on modern hw (similar to the specs we discussed) is the natural choice.

I'm half tempted to develop my own BB system now that I see the inefficiencies in what's out there though.

There are a lot of features in commercial forum software that aren't available in phpBB, or any of the others.

64GB of RAM in a server is overkill, nearly universally. The hardware that is running WP now is more than sufficient to handle the load, given the right software features.

Want to get together and do a whole CMS?

Ben

Oh, he's actually willing to pay for commercial forum software? I thought he was having some kind of financial crisis for the past few years and that's why the site hasn't been updated, and he was blaming it on aspies' resistance to external changes, and those server specs were considered high.

In that case, nevermind!

I'd like to, but there are a number of projects I could do at the end of the year when I have free time, and I'm going to have to evaluate which to do based on financial considerations. A CMS might not be a bad one, but I could easily see dozens of man years going into a full fledged one. I would probably need an entire team of mostly experienced senior people.

There are a whole bunch of things I'd like to see in one though. I would think the entire backend DB would be only on the order of several GB, even for a site like WP, so the entire thing could be cached in hard drive, and subsequently RAM, on the web server(s), eliminating roundtrips except for deltas. The DB could even push deltas to the web servers.

Without the overhead of Apache, PHP, etc, nothing involved in serving an HTTP request that doesn't occur in native code accessing system memory, the thing could be, well, real fast.

It sounds like everyone here has great ideas on how to fix this site. With such a serious discussion about this I'm surprised Alex has not posted anything in this thread. It leaves the impression, rightly or wrongly (I honestly don't know which) that he doesn't care or perhaps doesn't have the time to deal with the WP forum.

I agree and I have been openly critical about it. I'd like to see him respond.