Salmoneus

Hey MilliganTim, welcome!!

Darn it, I forgot to add Egghe's IP to the server ban list! I mean... Welcome back Egghe!!

This work is now complete! The main website and forum are both running on a shiny, brand-new server! Things appear to be working just fine, but let me know if you notice anything amiss. It's a bit of a bittersweet moment though -- after a decade of serving our community, the old server will be decommissioned once I'm sure the new setup is working properly. Hopefully it will be turned into new servers or shiny new iPhones or something! Cheers!

Hopefully it's not the smell of burnt electronics! You're welcome! I haven't forgotten this place! ?

Hey there everyone! Believe it or not, the site and forum have been living on the same sever for more than a decade! In computer years, that's like 100 million and 3 years, give or take a year or 2 million. Basically, the forum is being served by a Stegosaurus, or something like that. It also turns out that a comet is about to destroy the very part of the datacenter housing our server, so there's that tiny detail too. Anyways, the server is really, really old, and it's living in a really old building that's about to be demolished pretty soon. Seriously, this is all true, I promise! So, I've spent a lot of time building a new server environment elsewhere which should be easier to maintain and upgrade, and it should cost a lot less to run! It also seems to run a bit faster/smoother, and we'll have the benefit of running on all the latest and greatest server software! I'm planning on running the final part of the migration on Wednesday, 9/26, which is basically the part where the forum database is moved over to the new server. My plan is to take the board offline on Wednesday night, copy over the database, run the final maintenance steps, and then update the DNS to point to the new server. For you, this update should be completely painless, except for the fact that the forum will be offline for awhile (oh noes?). I'll update this topic when the work is complete! If you have questions, or just want to post pictures of your favorite dinosaurs to celebrate the life (and impending shutdown) of the old server, please do so in this topic! Cheers, Sal

I'm not aware of any outages or downtime. Were you unable to connect to the site at all? Were you getting an error message? Thanks!

Heh! Rather than accidentally banning him, we'll do it on purpose. We can totally do that, especially for a troublemaker as heinous as Egghe!

I'm currently working on migrating the site and forum to a more modern setup, and I may end up leaving out some of these security layers altogether. It's becoming difficult to manage, and as you've experienced, it's causing issues for regular users too. So this problem may completely go away very soon!

Can you try now? Also, stop trying to BREAK things, Egghe!!

I guess the news bot just really wants us all to know about Double Dragon Chests... whatever those are.

If you want I could ban your IP altogether!

I didn't do it... Possibly fixed it. Are you guys still having trouble posting?

It's really hard to quantify, but IIRC traffic didn't really increase, even when we were were at the height of posting on social media. We do have quite a few followers on Twitter and Facebook, and maybe we could bring some folks back if we started posting interesting stuff through those channels? The problem is that the CMS that we use wasn't meant to be used as a wiki, which sounds similar to what you guys are suggesting. I'm sure that it is possible to do without changing to a new system, but it would be a large undertaking. My concern and number 1 priority is to make it safe to update content without opening our site up to vulnerabilities like cross site scripting, malicious links and SPAM. I'll reply to a few of your points... Like I mentioned above, this gets tricky, because our CMS isn't really designed to be a wiki with front-end editing capabilities. It can certainly be done, but it would need to be done in such a way that it's not going to open a security hole in our site. Right now we can give specific permissions to specific users to edit content which isn't a problem, but to do it on a mass scale would be more complicated. I would definitely like to see a refresh on the site design to bring us back to the look that we had years ago. I'm fond of the current design, but the old "retro" design was our signature. It was simple and clean, and despite its basic look, people loved it. Indeed, there are tons of things we can do. The unfortunate thing is that back when we redesigned the site, I did put a lot of effort in to make the site SEO friendly. But it backfired, for whatever reason and our ranking tanked immediately after the design went live. Attempts were made to bring us back, from building quality backlinks, to optimizing markup, posting new and updated content frequently, improving the load time of the site. And really, the old site was an SEO nightmare, but it fared really well. But nothing I did really made any impact whatsoever. But there are other things we could try. We need a mobile design for the site. Page speed can be optimized with newer tech. SSL can be put in place. Maybe these things can help some. Definitely! I think these are both cool ideas. Video guides and other content are something we discussed years ago but it never took off. I'd love to see something like this on our site.

*With sad eyes* You shouldn't fight in here. This is a magical place. Yes, we need a new skin or two. Folks should look at this topic and help us choose! Otherwise I'm going to upload random skins based on my cat's reactions (and while she's a classy cat, she has no innate sense of web design so it will most likely end badly).