New vault tech issues

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

Im getting error 500 often these days, also the site is incredibly slow for me (im from middle-Europe).

 

Also, when I tried to write a new forum post there it didnt get saved. After I pressed the save button I get a new form to write a comment without any text and no new post appeared at the topic.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_leo_x]

               

I find it pretty slow too and sometimes not too good... but aside from learning Drupal and giving Rolo a helping hand or donating what is there to be done?  I'm not sure if the site could be 'open sourced', but if so I know some people that want to learn/work on Drupal.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               

<counting the damn few...>

 

The core of the problem is really quite simple (if no less difficult to correct); I'm broke and the site is cheap. 

Basically, I am hosting a quite complex, MySQL-intensive site on the cheapest shared hosting I could find. I believe there are (a possibly flexible number) 4 other sites on the particular machine I am hosted on. When the combined traffic gets high, the database queries time out (those are the 500 internal server errors).

 

There are two relatively easy fixes to this problem. Move to a better server with the same company or find a dedicated server elsewhere.

 

In the past 18 months the Vault has received $150 in donations, leaving another $50 for me to make up out of pocket. I can do that, but I cannot do the $600 a year (approx) that a VPS would cost. Nor have I had any sterling gentlemen offer to host the Vault on their spare, idle t1 line :-P

 

Re opensourcing drupal: Leo, that is what drupal is all about! :-) I gladly accept help where and when I find it, and am quite willing to tutor newbies who want to learn what I know, whether it is drupal or 3DS Max or Nwscript :-P

 

<...chickens that hatched>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

Yea, I suspected it. Unfortunately I cannot help in this regard in any way.

 

So the question is whether this community has a resources to maintain a site like vault on our own. The ultimate goal was to move everything there, but now we got only 1/10000 of content there and its already too much. If we dont have these resources, it would be better to abadon this idea than losing all the content in a future. There is still one other choice and thats nexus - ultimately the only reason why Im not using nexus for my work is that many peoples from this community doesnt support it and because a new vault was created. However we should reconsider nexus again - or is there a way how to keep old vault (better choice as no need to transfer anything)? I get the impression its going to be down in near future. Maybe if the donations we are giving to the new site would be sent to the old vault owners it would helped.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <cleaning the wax out of his ears...>


Now, Shad, I just gotta clarify a couple things...

1/10000 of the 40,000 projects on the old vault would be... *carefully counts out fingers and holds up four* four. I think there are about 400 on the new Vault, or about 1%.

Re abandoning what we have so we don't lose it?! You lost me there. Completely.

While I have nothing against the Nexus in general (quite impressed with their Skyrim support), their NwN support is almost laughable. Not that the Vault is that much better, at the moment.


And perhaps you can explain better how taking away what few (greatly appreciated!) Donations I get will *help*!


Though, its a rather moot point, as I will support the Vault regardless until someone steps up and does it better. Same as the content I make, I do it for me and love of the game. Anyone who wants may take it or leave it.


<...and reading it again>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

<cleaning the wax out of his ears...>


Now, Shad, I just gotta clarify a couple things...

1/10000 of the 40,000 projects on the old vault would be... *carefully counts out fingers and holds up four* four. I think there are about 400 on the new Vault, or about 1%.

Was only guess, I dont have an exact numbers as they are afaik not generally available. Still its not just about the number of project, also a number of comments, users and files. What we have now on new vault is definitely way less than 1%.

 

 

Re abandoning what we have so we don't lose it?! You lost me there. Completely.

I suggest that if the solution we tried to prepare is above our limits that we should abadon it. Better now than after four years of working on that site. How much time you, TAD and users put into running this site already? How much money? This is also probably reason why users dont move their projects from old vault into new one. As of now, the old vault seems like a more stable platform to be honest. By moving projects from old vault into new one, people risks that the time and effort they'll put into this will be lost again.

 

And perhaps you can explain better how taking away what few (greatly appreciated!) Donations I get will *help*!

Same argument as above. Whats the point of donating to something we have no real expectations to get running the way we need. Lost money imo.

 

Of course, this is based on a suspection that we don't have the needed resources to keep new vault running in the way we need - forums, users, project, terabites of datas, good connection. Maybe I am wrong and there are peoples in this community who can fund all of this ad infinitum. Please prove me wrong.

 

Ad. nexus: Agree the support for NWN is bad. However maybe the owners can help us if we tell them what do we need? Did anyone tried that already?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ruadhri10]

               

Hey Rollo, just got a "The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number." error when I went to donate to the Vault with Paypal.

 

There's nothing wrong with my card, and I used it a few minutes ago on another site. Annoying. You can accept non-US paypal donations, right?

 

Do you have a Bitcoin address for donations?

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ruadhri10]

               

Also, if bandwidth is an issue, could we use Bittorrent to do the heavy lifting for frequently-requested files? I'm sure a lot of people have torrent clients already, and have copies of the popular stuff on disk.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Proleric]

               Are there 10 people here who will commit to contributing $60 towards the $600 annually?

I certainly would.

I hear that would address the response time and 500 error issues.

Perhaps someone with Drupal skills can help Rolo to make the editor more reliable?

With an eye on Bioware's draconian site rules, I don't feel free to comment honestly on the Nexus suggestion here, so I've posted elsewhere.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zarathustra217]

               

Yeah, torrents would definitely be a help. Could also use google for site search.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Malagant]

               

I would suggest that the more accurate reason why people aren't migrating their files from the old vault to the new one is because they are no longer part of the community. They have moved on, hence the initial run of volunteers mining old projects and migrating them instead.

 

I don't know if bittorrent would be a viable solution; it has this pesky necessity of someone having the data readily available at any one time and an even more pesky likelihood to eventually die out with decreasing demand for content. Demand for NWN content really doesn't have the demand necessary to start off with.

 

I'm not sure an abandon all hope ye who enter here outlook is productive but, as another old saying goes, nothing comes for free. I would think having a central option and discussions toward a more stable solution is paramount, and I would also think that a little vault access issue is probably a lot better than having to hunt down a myriad of dropbox or other "cloud" services- some of which are even less permanent unless every person were to invest in premium accounts and are already on shaky ground when you consider certain similar services subjected to government take downs, causing people to loose access to all their files, the irony being some government employees having lost theirs as well.

 

If one were to champion a move to drop it and kill all investment and support, the question remains: what then?

 

IGN is questionable at best and on borrowed time at worst. Nexus doesn't seem to be a viable or popular option. Gamefront is horrendous and Filefront isn't far behind IGN and extremely buggy the past year. So what then? Hit each other up by PM when we need a file?

 

Rolo took something on himself as an attempted solution to a dilemma and, were I in a more comfortable financial place, I'd be glad to contribute. As it is, I'm not, but I'm not resorting to "give up, dude" either.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Shadooow]

               

If one were to champion a move to drop it and kill all investment and support, the question remains: what then?

As it is, I'm not, but I'm not resorting to "give up, dude" either.

Im not doing that, I am happily user of new vault and I support it by posting new stuff there and writing suggestions/opinions on forum. But the tech issues it has now made new vault unusable, the site is not working well for most part, every second request ends up with error 500, its impossible to upload something there because it might fail when saving as happened to me. Was only sending a reply to the forum for the ten times till it get sucesfully posted.

 

The VSP will be needed. So the real question is if this community is able to get 600$ together each year. If not, I fear this is lost cause and the efforts we've put int one vault are lost.

 

 

what then?

I actually have an idea. We dont really need to move the stuff from old vault. We can use the Omnibus solution. Archiving all the projects into downloadable program. Only files have to be somewhere and the links must be changed to the new location. Still just hosting the files is cheaper than hosting a live site with all the datas.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Rolo Kipp]

               <listening...>


I'm liking this convo more as it develops.

Shad, since I first knew you (and you wore that troll avatar like an ugly green chip on your shoulder) your post sometimes sound like that guy in the bar that just wants to fight. I know better than that and thank you for explaining.


You have some valid points but I'm afraid, or saddened, that it really doesn't make much difference.


The primary cost is the file storage. Look around and you'll find, as we did, that file servers run about $1 per gigabyte. The RoloVault, my backup of the old Vault through July 2013 (when they blocked our scraper) holds about 450gb. That does not count the new project on the new Vault, which is actually pretty lively.


Pain of dungeon eternal and I were, at one point, talking with Robin Scott at the Nexus and he was not *against* the idea, but like most people took a wait and see attitude.


Honestly, the premium solution would be to finish what Pain started in developing the pseudo-torrent vault file system. It is based in php and both fast and robust. It allows distributed, but centralized file service and we already have offers of file repositories around the world.


The current file system was never meant to be more than temporary, but the VFS is, in my opinion, a work of genius, and will take a saavy php guy to pick up the reins and complete. Its mostly finished and working, but the drupal interface needs to be finished and I think the optimal file server logic was still missing.


The fly in that ointment is Pain is not here to finish it. I will personally dig into it and work on it... As soon as I get something solid with my toolset replacement. I.e. not soon.


Anyway, thats my counter-opinion.


My eyes hurt from squinting at this tiny screen. I'll post more later.

Sometimes I miss that little troll :-)


<...harder>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zarathustra217]

               

How much of the cost is storage? Maybe it would be better to purchase storage in a cloud service (e.g. Google Drive) - can get 1 TB for 9.99$/month.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_werelynx]

               

Can we reconsider ads? They could be implemented in the way that there is a button "Turn ON the ads" and those of us that would like to could finance the site by turning the ads on?