THIS IS THE NEW POST-MIGRATION FORUM!

[Clay]

@RichVR

Agreed. Set it up and I will gladly donate.

In a sense, it’s already there… as Patreon. No, that’s not a specific call to action, but it ends up in the same place. Anyhow, Tom will have to be involved with the conversation.

[RichVR]

Fair enough. I could up my Patreon. But if something is created for a more immediate purchase I’d be behind that as well.

[lordkosc]

@AWS260

I assumed that the slower performance was the result of moving to a Qualcomm processor.

[malkav11]

I think a system designed around a recurring cash flow is a poor fit for helping with a one off expense. Hosting costs are ongoing, of course, so I am sure it wouldn’t hurt to also see Patreon donations go up, but I don’t think that’s the way to fund a server purchase.

[stusser]

I made some changes and performance feels a lot better now, just have to see if it stays that way.

We’ll probably have to upgrade to the next highest tier anyway because we don’t have enough space to hold backups right now. Discourse is lovely feature-rich software but it is an incredible pig!

[Scuzz]

I just noticed I was being asked to log in again, and then I wasn’t. I assume you are still playing with things.

I haven’t noticed things being slow, well, maybe a touch. But I am not in that big a hurry for anything.

[stusser]

What before I made the change? Really? Posts were taking like 20+ seconds to post, and often timing out with 503 errors.

[sillhouette]

Yeah the whole forum was redirecting me to the cloudflare image for a while, but it’s back now.

[stusser]

That was when I rebuilt it, was down for 8m52s.

[Gendal]

[dsmart]

@Clay

I don’t think it requires any digging. The simple fact is that it’s expensive to run the forum. That was covered before, now it isn’t, so let’s figure out, as a community, how to best cover it so that this change does not end up being disruptive to the site we all love. It’s pretty simple in the end: if everybody using Patreon chipped in an extra dollar or two each month, that would cover it.

Whatever you do, don’t switch to cloud services because server bandwidth spikes will burn whoever has their credit card on the account. Stick with hosting a dedicated server instead.

[stusser]

Yeah, we aren’t going to AWS or GCloud, but we aren’t using a dedicated server either. I like the flexibility of a well-hosted not over-provisioned VM.

[tomchick]

Oops, I’m just now reading this thread. Clay and stusser have done an amaze-balls* job of making the transition smooth and getting us back up to speed without having to change to dedicated hardware or a new hosting service, and it only took minimal downtime.

In terms of the additional expense, it looks like it was covered upthread, but here’s what I posted in the other thread:

@tomchick

This is not an expensive site to run, but I can’t deny that the added expense is not trivial to me. I’ve had a couple of very generous offers to foot the bill for hosting, but it’s from people who are already incredibly generous to me and the site. So before I even consider accepting that sort of support, I would like to put out another call:

If this site of of value to you, please consider just throwing a single dollar into the Patreon campaign at Tom Chick | creating a place where reviews matter | Patreon.

I pay for everything out of pocket, we don’t have ads, and we won’t for as long as I have a say in the matter. Any level of support is much appreciated. Since the transition was announced, there have been two new supporters, and some of you have raised your level of support, even though you’re already going above and beyond. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. What started as a really demoralizing week turned around pretty quickly and it’s thanks to you guys.

As for the legitimate question of what would happen if I kick the bucket or run off to Tibet to become a sherpa or get a job doing PR for Ubisoft, I’d like to think nothing would happen! You guys are a community. You would be no less of a community without me. You don’t need me. Someone would step in and take care of the ins and outs of running the place, but I think there’s enough of a sense of this place’s identity and tone and mode of interaction that I’m basically just the guy collecting the donations that keep the lights on.

-Tom

* I have never used that term in my life. This situation finally merited it.

[Teiman]

The link
patron.com/tomchick
seems wrong.

the correct ones is this

Tom Chick is creating a place where reviews matter | Patreon

[tomchick]

You know you’re doing a lousy job of proofreading when Teiman has to correct your grammatical errors. :)

-Tom

[Teiman]

[WhollySchmidt]

I love these two posts.

[habibi]

So, I am just catching up on GOT Season 7 discussion and I notice many “photos” are broken…

Game of Thrones (HBO)

Reddit had the best summary of the Dragonstone strangeness, click through for the slideshow. [image]

(go up a few post from this threads and you will note some photos gone)…

CDN error or … ?

[Clay]

The posts haven’t been rebaked yet. It’s going to take months to get through all of them… when you find a topic you haven’t read that needs rebaking, let me know and I can escalate it to be rebaked sooner. I’ll try to get to this one in the AM.

FYI, rebaking starts with the most recent posts and moves backwards, so you’re most likely to find issues with older posts.