Know Your Xixax: Donation begging and site news

Started by Xixax, December 02, 2006, 08:52:14 PM

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ono

Quote from: wilberfan on December 20, 2017, 04:37:16 PM
I just noticed that according to the stats, there are over 1,700 members of this forum.   I seem to recall that there are only 50+ that contribute on a regular basis (am I remembering that correctly)?   Thats, like, a 3% participation rate.

Is that typical for an online forum??
I wouldn't know, but there are a lot of guests and lurkers in any forum.  The nature of the medium lends itself to that.

Kal

Quote from: wilberfan on December 20, 2017, 04:37:16 PM
I just noticed that according to the stats, there are over 1,700 members of this forum.   I seem to recall that there are only 50+ that contribute on a regular basis (am I remembering that correctly)?   Thats, like, a 3% participation rate.

Is that typical for an online forum??

1700 active or 1700 total registered? what is the number of monthly active users or visitors? We've been around for ~15 years, so not surprising that so many people are inactive. And now that I think of it, it's pretty incredible I can't think of many other sites I continue to visit regularly in so many years.

3% is a very low percentage, to answer your question, but depends on how you are measuring this percentage.

Jeremy Blackman

We had some server stability issues today resulting in 503 errors. I just reset all the PHP processes that were running on the server, which is apparently a common fix. If that doesn't work, I'll open a ticket.

Please let me know if you see any such connection issues!

Jeremy Blackman

Connection issues have continued and will continue in the short term.

I'm going to move us to a new hosting provider.

We are apparently on one of Godaddy's "legacy" servers, which does not have the latest version of PHP. That is probably causing errors in our PHP scripts, resulting in extra connections, server overload, and downtime. They're offering to migrate us to one of their newer actually functional servers, but for an unreasonable cost.

If anyone has suggestions for good hosts, let me know here. But I'm going to see which servers work best with our forum software.

I would like to sign up for a new host and do a test run of migrating the site before I actually pull the plug on Godaddy.

If the site unexpectedly goes down for a while, assume that I'm working on it. If our current server becomes especially uncooperative, there is a possibility that we could be down for days at a time. But rest assured it would be temporary.

Robyn

thumbs up for doing a good job and keeping this site running in general!

Jeremy Blackman

My current working theory is that the shoutbox clear has fixed the problem. We'll see.

So PLEASE keep an eye out and report any errors you see... especially looking for "503 Service Unavailable" or "cannot connect to database."

Jeremy Blackman

Got several 503 errors this morning.

Disabled the shoutbox to see if that's the culprit. (Can freely toggle it on/off.)

We will definitely be getting a new host and updated forum software sometime in January.

Robyn


Jeremy Blackman

Still getting the error pretty regularly.

Messing with some things. Site may look weird for a bit.

Jeremy Blackman

Seems stable for now. Something I did might have worked.

If stability continues, I might try re-enabling the shoutbox.

Already signed up for the new host and will be experimenting soon.

Jeremy Blackman

In the mean time, why not use the Random Chat Thread as a substitute for the shoutbox?

Robyn

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on December 29, 2018, 11:58:10 AM
Seems stable for now. Something I did might have worked.

If stability continues, I might try re-enabling the shoutbox.

Already signed up for the new host and will be experimenting soon.

you might? otherwise you won't re-enable it before you get a new host?

Jeremy Blackman

If it turns out the shoutbox is bugging out and crippling the server, yeah, we'll have to leave it disabled until a server switch.

Jeremy Blackman

Errors continue. So essentially I've been unable to find a temporary solution. We may just need to deal with instability for now. Always copy your posts before you post them!

Enabled the shoutbox because #YOLO.

I've already started messing with our new host. But the process will take a while. Maybe a week, I would guess. It involves experimenting with forum software and corresponding with tech support, over a long holiday weekend no less.

Side note: Interesting that the server was stable for most of the day, but now as we approach peak time it's getting terrible. Godaddy may be more to blame than I realized.

Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on December 29, 2018, 07:10:10 PMSide note: Interesting that the server was stable for most of the day, but now as we approach peak time it's getting terrible. Godaddy may be more to blame than I realized.

And now after peak time, the server is stable again. #confirmationbias