ElfQuest Fan Art

Everybody knows ZFS is where it's at

Hi Faerydae -- I hope you're feeling better

What is currently happening is that Warg and Mirr are basically going to do what you suggest on Warg's server. There's a team of members who have volunteered to act as mods on the new incarnation of the site, and the transition is being hashed out in a private section of this forum.

Alea iacta est.

Fortunately it looks like someone is taking over running this site -- including a complete replica of the site's contents. There'll also be more people actively involved in running the site, so things could spice up a bit too

Also, Foxeye and I will still hold on to a copy of this site's database, so we can help if someone really needed to get in touch with someone. With Google's help, Foxeye and I are pretty easy to find on the Internet.

Now, on the topic of site longevity, there is always the option of going to a Deviantart or Yahoo! group.

That means that if someone does take on the mantle of running this site, and a year later decides that it's too much work, this group can just as easily migrate to a dA or Y! group at that point. When we're talking about someone taking over the site, we're not talking about everyone having to start over: we're talking about doing a proper site-migration, with database, user accounts, posts, galleries, and even the site URL intact. There'd be no wasted effort from the part of members.

Migrating to a dA or Y! group on the other hand would require everyone to start fresh.

If there would not be migration of this site's content, there'd be little benefit to running a separate site over using a dA or Y! group.

With that out of the way, on the topic Warg+Mirr (or someone else) taking over running the site, let this be clear: this would be your show and neither Foxeye nor myself would (or indeed could) impose any choices upon you. Fundamentally we would just provide you with a database dump and a bunch of gallery files, and you're left to do with them as you please. We will, of course, reserve the right to choose to whom we provide these sensitive items

That said, given the concerns voiced in this thread, I would recommend that the new hosts of the site distribute the site management load by enlisting the help of the community. This is actually something that has always been a part of our roadmap for phase-2 implementation strategy of this latest incarnation of EQFA (in addition to the feature roadmap): when Foxeye and I started this site the larger Elfquest community was too amorphous to draw upon, so we were left to our own devices to design and implement all aspects of this site. Now EQFA has a community to draw upon, and it might be beneficial to bring the community in on running and improving the site in limited fashion. Enlisting the help of moderators could be one way, but another way could be setting up contests for letting our CSS+XHTML savvy members design a new theme for the site.

The decision on whether to use moderators is not clear-cut by any means, and there are pros and cons to both approaches, but in the long term I feel it can help lessen the load for the sysadmin and the super moderator, which in turn lends itself to letting the site run itself in case the sysadmin workload grows beyond expected.

Now, Warg, I do not know what particular method you'd choose to re-implement this site, but from my perspective there are three choices:

1) Re-implement the current software stack (SMF and Aeva)
   -> Simply put the gallery files in the proper directory, import the database, change a few fields, and away you go.
   -> Probably the simplest and fastest way to get the site up and running in a new home
2) Write a database conversion script for a software stack of your choice
   -> Slightly more effort, but fairly easily doable
   -> You're on your own with this one
3) Write a custom site from ground up using the existing database and gallery files as base
   -> Most time-consuming option of the bunch
   -> I'd personally recommend against this as a phase-1 transition strategy

Under all three options you're left to design and implement your own theme. I'd also highly recommend that you devise your own registration agreement and site rules, albeit you are also welcome to use our current set of rules if you so choose; it would be good to have the new rules in place before the migration so that when the members reset their passwords on the new site they'll have to accept the new site rules.

Back to the community bit, I can see the community being able to help you with...

• (A team of moderators can help with) site moderation
• (The moderators can help) crafting a new user agreement and site rules
• (The community at large can help) creating a new theme

In addition to above, we can share with you what our original roadmap for features and implementation was for this incarnation of EQFA: you will undoubtedly come up with your own roadmap, but you might be amused by seeing what direction we were planning on taking this place

From the slightly more practical side, my current thinking is that we're going to blank all the passwords and private messages from the database we'll hand over to Warg & Co., and we're also going to remove most of the custom columns except for the column that indicates whether the user is ok with seeing mature images.

I do not know if the new owner-operators of the site have any inclination to re-implement the maturity filter feature, but that column will do no harm under basic SMF+Aeva installation and will provide the option of implementing the maturity filter feature down the line.

Any objections or amendments to this?

The server demands are pretty low: the 95 percentile traffic for the past 12 months is about 250kb/second, with occasional peaks to around 1.2Mb/second over 15-minute period.

We've seen spikes to around 80 legitimate requests/second, albeit that level of traffic happens very very seldom: the normal traffic is very low. The database has seen maximum of a little over 1k database requests/second, but that, again, happens very seldom.

All in all, this is a low-demand site. A dinky embedded appliance with an SSD could run it

To follow-up on Foxeye's post about fake user signups, we have an automated system in place that checks new signups against botscout.com and stopforumspam.com databases, but we are also targeted by lots of spammers who do not use those login credentials on any other site -- and therefore there's a constant flood of malicious signups regardless of the automated checking

P.S. I can also help with the technical details if someone wants to take over the site. We have a fairly simple MySQL5 (admittedly with stored procs, but the need for those would go away if we drop a few columns from the database) and PHP5/FastCGI setup. Directory permissions are fairly locked-down on granular level, so you may need to be familiar linux filesystem permissions.

P.P.S. We are also occasionally targeted by DoS attempts -- albeit not very sophisticated ones, and not frequently. Being knowledgeable in writing automated firewall response rules would be helpful for would-be admins

Copy the link in Kitt's post, and then when you click on the link and get the hotlink-prevented message, just paste the link again to your browser's address bar and hit enter. Should come up fine.

Worked for me. Mayb Internet weather?

The game just got bigger.

Except for the last part.