Lisias

Not to mention that they are building a whole new company from the ground - the poor stand-up guy that made that silly mistake must have a backlog with hundreds of tasks, and was almost surely sleep deprived. Been there, done that. Last time I made a major borkage, about 40 truck drivers spent the whole morning (from 6AM to 12) waiting for legal documentation so they could hit the road and, so, all of them burnt the midnight oil (literally in this case) because of that. I'm probably still in one piece because I work remotely, otherwise I would had to be escorted out of the facilities by a riot squad!

So it's a bug on the documentation. I fixed it first, as it is the canonical source of information. Now I'm fixing everything else I ever wrote about. Worst. I did it, but failed to detect the problem due being biased on trusting too much the documentation and the community's willingness on maintaining it... Well, these are fixed by now too.

Why you just don't read what people sends you to read? You force people to repeat themselves again and again for no reason. Heck... You can just watch the MM patching log, by God's sake. Take these synthetic patches on a completely clean GameData (but latest ModuleManager): Put each patch on the file I mention between []: [GameData/ModA/config.cfg] PART { name = ModA-Part title = This is the title of ModA. } [GameData/ModB/config.cfg] @PART[this-does-not-exists] { title = Just to force the ModB tag on th MM taglist } [GameData/ModC/config.cfg] @PART[ModA-Part]:FOR[ModA]:NEEDS[ModA,ModB,ModC] // Using ModC in :NEEDS is pleonasm, as we are ModC and we are installed! { @title ^= :$: And ModC was here!: } Run KSP, and check the ConfigCache! This is a piece of the ConfigCache with the ModB present: UrlConfig { parentUrl = ModA/config.cfg PART { name = ModA-Part title = This is the title of ModA. And ModC was here! } } And this is the MM Log: And now follows after removing ModB: UrlConfig { parentUrl = ModA/config.cfg PART { name = ModA-Part title = This is the title of ModA. } } And this is the MM Log: And I want to pinpoint these lines: [LOG 15:05:12.688] Extracting patches [LOG 15:05:12.706] Deleting root node in file ModC/config node: @PART[ModA-Part]:FOR[ModA]:NEEDS[ModA,ModB,ModC] as it can 't satisfy its NEEDS [LOG 15:05:12.852] Applying patches Being logged before anything else. The :NEEDS behaviour can be easily verified by merely checking your ModuleManager.log. The documentation matches the code (had you read the code?), the tests above matches both. End of history. If you found a different behaviour on a long time documented feature that have even concrete examples that is proven to work as documented (and, again, there's the Source Code!!), 99% if the time you made a mistake yourself, and that 1% that remains is surely a borderline situation that you found and must be fixed, instead of falsely advertised as the new norm! Again, if you can confirm this misbehaviour in your tests, you found a bug and we should be investigating it and fixing it instead you telling people that a borderline bug is the new norm!! ========= POST EDIT =========== And, in fact, you found a misbehaviour on MM. I tried your weirdpatch thingy, and found: Mod DLLs found: Name Assembly Version Assembly File Version KSPAssembly Version SHA256 Assembly-CSharp 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 1.12 8a20892953fc14c02f352b393eb6712c66 ModuleManager 4.2.3.0 4.2.3.0 2.5 95847827ab293b9e82a19b7efb97ffea3e KSPSteamCtrlr 0.0.1.35 0.0.1.35 1675fa4fcb61d014eb1babe7eed703e7f7 Non-DLL mods added (:FOR[xxx]): ThisModDoesntExist Mods by directory (sub directories of GameData): Squad SquadExpansion weirdpatch Mods added by assemblies: [LOG 15:28:33.728] Loading Physics.cfg [LOG 15:28:33.733] Extracting patches [LOG 15:28:33.898] Deleting root node in file weirdpatch/weirdpatch node: @KOPERNICUS:FOR[ThisModDoesntExist]:NEEDS[AnotherModThatDoesntExist] as it ca [LOG 15:28:33.899] Applying patches [LOG 15:28:33.901] :INSERT (initial) pass [LOG 15:28:33.988] :FIRST pass [LOG 15:28:33.988] :LEGACY (default) pass [LOG 15:28:33.992] Applying delete weirdpatch/weirdpatch/!PART[mk1pod_v2]:NEEDS[ThisModDoesntExist] to Squad/Parts/Command/mk1pod_v2/mk1Pod_v2.cfg/PART WE FOUND A BUG, this is not how MM is supposed to work accordingly the documentation. ================= POST POST EDIT ============== The ModList is being extracted before the NEEDS removal, unsurprisingly on the ModListGenerator: https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/blob/c4561925f983e7ae81d9dfd4d11356a35cb6b9b6/ModuleManager/ModListGenerator.cs#L95 That's just so great. I have 3 years of posts to revise now. =============== POST POST POST EDIT ============ Given the ages in which :FOR behaves this way, it's obvious that it should be considered a feature by now and, so, the bug is on documentation. Fixed. https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/wiki/Patch-Ordering/_compare/b97501810baf9625d33f66515fd85b4a00f17564 And the fix fixed: https://github.com/sarbian/ModuleManager/wiki/Patch-Ordering/_compare/04c496d7a2cd11a88df7ef9e39d6384c0e9a578d Now I literally have years of posts to review and update (done!), as well some repositories of mine(WiP). My job now is trying to prevent people from falling in the same booby trap I felt.

I had the opportunity to work under two different managers under the same project, one good in management but clueless on the business, and other a seasoned professional on the field but AFAIK without much experience in management. Both made mistakes with me. One didn't trusted me, relied on counseling from 3rd parties that probably would like to get rid of me so they could score another head for their Consulting (I was a Contractor from a rival Consulting). He almost killed the project and was probably the reason the project was in that sad situation. Important to say that he was praised on a previous job where he undertood very well the business. The other, knowing very well the business, realized that I was insane but not stupid, and agreed that being insane was the less crazy thing we could do at that point. He trusted me so much that cut me loose a bit too much, and I made a silly, stupid but almost fatal mistake that costed the whole team 1 week to diagnose and 15 seconds for me to fix I could had killed the project if we had a non pure technical approach were hiding mistakes would be the norm. He learnt to trust me just a tad little less after that, asking me if I was sure when some implementations appeared to be too good to be true, preventing at least one more major screw up of mine! TL;DR: Good managers are useless if they can't trust their team. The dude MUST know the business very well to dodge bullets, or he must blindly trust someone to do that for him. On every death march I knew about, someone broke the chain of trust by a reason or another - not necessary by ill intentions, sometimes we just screw up. But we still have deadlines to meet, and money burns into ashes every single time we lose one. On the bottom line, both of them ended up with me in a death march - but only one of them marched there with me. And this makes all the difference in the World. It's the reason I pesky suggest people to count their blessing all the time. We are already cursed, it's a done deal. But we still have some blesses to count!

Yes, it does. :NEEDS remove the patch before :FOR kicks in. This behaviour is documented and confirmed: Additionally, the very MM documentation says explicitly: And, of course, there's also the source code. Please let me know if you need assistance on reading it! ---- POST EDIT ---- And, finally, my thick skull finally got rid of some idealized misconceptions about MM and its Community, allowing me to see I had made a mistake. :FOR always create a "modname" on the MM's taglist, and :NEEDS only prevents the Patching Phase between :BEFORE and :AFTER . The full story will be found here.

Read the post again, you didn't understood the problem neither the solution. The user wasn't patching from Kopernicus, they were patching from other patches that aimed to support DwarfPlanetsPlus. The solution the user ended up coming from was to make these patches to run exactly at the same Pass as DwarfPlanetsPlus, and so the :FOR[DwarfPlanetsPlus]. But since :FOR also creates a tag into Module Manager with that symbol, it would fool everybody (including MM) to believe DwarfPlanetsPlus would still be installed if the user decides to remove DwarfPlanetsPlus from the installment, and so things would get screwed. Using :NEEDS[DwarfPlanetsPlus] prevents the mess, as the whole patch would be removed when DwarfPlanetsPlus is not installed, preventing the :FOR from kicking in. Hint: Emphasis are mine. ---- POST EDIT ---- And, finally, my thick skull finally got rid of some idealized misconceptions about MM and its Community, allowing me to see I had made a mistake. :FOR always create a "modname" on the MM's taglist, and :NEEDS only prevents the Patching Phase between :BEFORE and :AFTER . The full story will be found here.

Good thing you are not a project manager so. Crunch time is when you desperately tries to do on the remaining time you still get everything you should had done, but didn't, with the time you had before. Every single project in which I was hired in the final stages ended up in "death marches" (you see, no one hires a Senior when everything is going well...) had a past of pretty long delivery times that were mismanaged. Absolutely no exceptions. Give too much time to people that don't know how to manage it, and you will take too much time to realize when they messed up - and then the choice will be a crunch time in the hope to salvage the project, or just ditch it and fire everybody. The very video you provided says exactly the opposite. I'm afraid we are talking about different companies now. In both Yahoo and Marsh, they hired CEOs to manage the business, they didn't put their own. Now, if we were talking about Liquidators - yeah, you would be right. And P.D. as it appears could had contemplated liquidation. It's not a unfair consideration, to tell you the true. But you are forgetting something very, very important: these soul-sucking demons don't walk in the streets hunting for souls. The souls must go to them and ask to be... hummm... haunted. You need to utterly fail before being sold to these guys. And, usually, the company would be liquidated without them. It sucks being controlled by them? Probably. But being dead sucks more, so...

There's nothing obvisouly wrong in your KSP neither Player log, other than the fact that they just stop out of the blue. KSP.log [LOG 16:32:47.263] [HighLogic]: =========================== Scene Change : From LOADING to MAINMENU ===================== [LOG 16:32:47.677] [AddonLoader]: Instantiating addon 'ContractDefs' from assembly 'KSP' [LOG 16:32:47.702] [UIMasterController]: ShowUI [LOG 16:32:47.867] [GameParameters]: Loaded custom parameter class CommNetParams. [LOG 16:32:47.868] [GameParameters]: Loaded custom parameter class MissionParamsGeneral. [LOG 16:32:47.868] [GameParameters]: Loaded custom parameter class MissionParamsFacilities. [LOG 16:32:47.868] [GameParameters]: Loaded custom parameter class MissionParamsExtras. [LOG 16:32:47.868] [GameParameters]: Loaded custom parameter class AdvancedParams. Player.log [UiApp] Awake: (Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 35) [ApplicationLauncher] OnSceneLoadedGUIReady: scene MAINMENU ShouldBeVisible() True ShouldBeOnTop() True iIsPositionedAtTop True (Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 35) [UIApp] Adding to Application Launcher (Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 35) [ApplicationLauncher] SetHidden: (Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 35) [MessageSystem] OnAppInitialized (Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 35) [MessageSystem] Reposition 0.0742343 12972 (Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Runtime/Export/Debug/Debug.bindings.h Line: 35) No crash dump in Player.log, no nothing. If you got the game from Steam, do a Install Verification to guarantee your game files are intact (SSD users are terribly prone to have files corrupted out of the blue). I would also remove all mods after the verification and try to run the game without them first. The less different things you have installed on KSP, less suspects we have when something borks. The memtes86 idea from Anth is also a very good one. It's pretty rare to have an HW issue, but it happens. And a corrupted memory will also corrupt files if the screwed memory is used as buffer while copying files - had a computer with a bad L1 cache in the times the L1 were external (P5 and 486 era), guess how I discovered it? When most of my files got corrupted while copying from the old hardisk to the new one I had installed...

Oukey... Who let Jebediah alone in the server's room again? Serious now: IMHO, just a tinny little bit of communication would had made wonders for this situation. The DNS Entry pinpointing to a parking page where a image with a grinding Jebediah with a keyboard in hands and some scared IT technicians behind and the printing "We are reworking the servers, we will be back Soon™" would not had prevented some of the backslash, but would had prevented the chilling effect that any outage now creates - and as bonus, we would get some good laughs on the less annoyed users. Not that these guys would not had their hands already full - they are building up a new company from the ground, almost surely the one in charge for this migration have an awfully big backlog to cope with, and this Forum is only one of that entries. Pretty sure something got trough the cracks and when it blew up, they had to scramble. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is optional. Carlos Drummond de Andrade. And count our blessings in the mean time.

Assuming, of course, that the real objective would not be licensing the game engine to a future KSP project... You see... Second places sometimes ends up winning the Championship (see Formula 1).

There're way more options available now, some of them even more seasoned and field proven then RW is now. No to mention the risks: RW has an estimated (gross) revenue of 8.1M USD/year. They are smaller than TikTok Games, just for starters. This is no way reflects on their competence, but surely reflects in their muscle flexing - Jagex, that it's already fully owned by Haveli, has about 171.4 M / year revenue. For scales, Private Division had about 24.2M USD / year. At this scale, is more probable that RW would be hired as a subcontractor for whoever takes the full contract. And, now, you made a light-bulb sparks in my mind: RW's KSA may be not exactly the goal, but a tool to achieve a goal - they grabbed all the KSP seasoned developers they could, and are developing their own game engine... This may score some points on a probable competition for a contract in the future. Developing a full fledged new game engine is a hell of an upfront investment, so it would be somewhat daring to develop it only for a single game that aims to heir users from a (allegedly) dying scene. They manage to pull this one, they will have a nice bargain coin on their hands, and this would make that upfront investment sensibly more profitable than just another Kittens into Space game.

Hi, this is not exactly a question, but I didn't thought of a better place to do it. In the page https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/guidelines/ , both the Privacy Policy and the Terms Of Use are still linking to TTWO. Please send a heads up to the new owners, as this may be - from this point - a liability. Cheers.

Since this problem is still biting some people (Forum is reestablished, but some services still aren't): The Support site is working. Anyone in need to download KSP or the DLCs could reach them here: https://support.privatedivision.com/hc/en-us/articles/360037744353--Kerbal-Space-Program-Can-no-longer-access-my-KSP-1-and-KSP-2-download-links Source.

The original thread was locked before I could save the post, so I'm reposting that material here! Oh, that one.... I had forgot that "Derp" was related to the 2013 one, sorry... I was talking about the vBulletin to IPS change that happened in 2015: and also Some data were missed/scrambled on the migration, and since there were way more people around here in 2015 than in 2013, this one got way more attention and fuzz. What you were talking about, now I know better, is this one: and since the migration I mentioned above screwed the links on this thread, follows the correct link to the Notice mentioned on some posts (as it were scrambled by the migration): And since are here, I just found this one too : Apparently, Forum borkages are kinda of a tradition around here... =========================================================== Now, trying to answer your original question (properly this time): What happened last month is more related to this one than anything else: both are related to exhausting quotas (besides with slightly different outcomes). This recent one happened because Forum, after building the response for the requested Resource Name (see this post), received a "nope, you can't" from the network while trying to send it back. There was no overloading on the processing, only the aswering being sent to the Krakens because the outbound quota was exhausted. In 2013, Forum was being effectively attacked, probably trying to exploit some of the many, many vulnerabilities that were common on Web Applications on that time (boy, I really don't have good memories from PHP-Nuke). Since the database got screwed, I'm betting that some SQL Injection was exploited, allowing the attacker to destroy the data on the MySQL Database, and probably this was the reason they had to rollback to the last backup. The DoS attack was probably issued in parallel, to make very difficult for the admins to reach the Forum and detect and block the attack. But Software on that era was, really, way more brittle than nowadays so it's also possible that the DoS attack was simply a massive adding of new trash posts until the database outgrew the filesystem size and by them the database itself would start to ruin its own data itself. This also was a pretty common problem on MySQL databases (mostly because it was more used, and usually by less seasoned professionals - almost every database will be in deep trouble if it exhaust its filesystem, but the really good ones will just halt processing and start to cry for help). In a way or another, Forum did not got in danger this time. Not only Software nowadays is more resilient, as the most common attacks are already known and mitigated before reaching the vulnerable lower layers, but in essence what exhausted wasn't the server itself, it was the bandwidth (more or less like 2011).

It was way before my time! If I understood correctly what I had read, there happened a software update that day. Instead of changing networks or servers, they changed the program that makes Forum "be" the Forum. It's yet another hop on that long chain of events above - when the HTTPd receives the https message, it must decide what to do with that thing, and someone told it "hey, ask this program here what to do", being "this program" the Invision Forum (Invision is the company that created, maintain and sell the software used by this Forum). How the Invision Forum software operates is beyound me, but since I worked on similar products in the past, I infer that while migrating data from the old software to the new version of it (while "migrating" is a type of copy, but changing bits because the target like some things in a different format), something got wrong and data wasn't migrated, was corrupted in the process (becoming unusable) or was plain lost. But... it was before my time, there're other reasons that could explain what happened, I'm only explaining to you what I think it was more likely to had happened (assuming I had all the facts correctly)!

Well... When your browsers calls a site, it uses a thingy called URL. In our specific case, this one: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/226141-so-we-had-some-kind-of-technical-problem/page/10/#comment-4438600 "https" is the name of a protocol. It's a collection of rules and guidelines to allow two systems to understand each other, in this case your browsers and a HTTPd server hosted somewhere in the World. "forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com" is a server name. It must be something that should unequivocally identify a machine in the Whole Wide West, I mean, Web. Anything after (and including) the first dash ("/") is called a Resource Name, and it's a message your browsers send to the HTTPd server asking for this exactly page we are seeing now (the "#comment-443860" thingy is called "Anchor" and serves to identify a point in the document, in that example, my last post). Problem: the Internet doesn't know squat about http or https, it only understands a thingy called TCP (and other called UDP), and TCP doesn't know squat about server names, it only understands IP address (right now, 44.240.13.95 for Forum). So someone need to translate forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com into 44.240.13.95. The dude that does that is called DNS Resolver. So your browsers ask the DNS Resolver "Dude, who is forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com?", and the resolver answer back "44.240.13.95". And so the TCP layer can reach Forum, sending to the server an https message asking for this page. Problem: if people enough decides to send messages to the server at the same time, it will drown in excessive load and will misbehave. We had witnessed exactly that in the recent past, with that pesky and persistent "http 5xxx" errors. To prevent this problem, the DNS Resolver doesn't give you the IP address of the server, but the IP address of a thingy called CDN (Content Delivery Network) or, as it being done right now, a thing called Load Balancer. The first is a dude that tries to keep a copy of everything on servers scattered around the World, and then decides what would be the one nearest you so you would be served quickly. When the CDN doesn't have a copy of the resource you are asking, then it (and only it) will reach Forum asking for that Resource, and then keep a copy for itself for the case anyone else asks for it too. These copies have an "expiring date", so old copies are refreshed regularly to avoid serving you deprecated content. A CDN can give you some additional services. as blocking bad guys from trying to screw you. Or at least most of them. Right now, I think that Forum is being served by a Load Balancer. A Load Balancer is a completely different beast. A LB keeps a pool (or list) of many servers, and when you reach the LB asking for something, it elects a server from that pool to serve the content you are asking for. If they have 10 servers, then all the load the LB is getting from many users are shared between all of them. This arrangement is better to serve content that changes all the time, defeating the purpose of a cache at first place. The first time Forum had borked, there was two DNS entries for Forum: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com resolving to forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com.cdn.cloudflare.com forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com.cdn.cloudflare.com resolving to an IP address on the Cloudflare network We do these tricks when we want someone else to resolve the final IP address, and only want to keep control of the main server name. Then someone deleted the "forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com.cdn.cloudflare.com" entry, and so "forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com" started to resolve to something that didn't existed anymore, and your browsers could not reach the CDN servers anymore! That's the reason for the first borkage. Restoring the second DNS entry fixed the problem for us for a while. The second borkage happened when they reconfigured "forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com " to resolve into the new ELB (Elastic Load Balancer - it's how AWS call their LB) server, but for a reason still unknown they did not created the DNS Entry resolving the ELB name into AWS's IPs. And we ended in the same situation as before, but with Forum pinpointing a different CNAME this time (CNAME is how we call the "other name"). Today they finally created that missing DNS Entry, is all is working again. I just didn't wanted people to get scared (again), as it happened last time. Even me, on a first moment, was almost throwing the towel by some time. But then I reconsidered, because this is not how "they" usually handle things (see my post about YahooGroups above), and started to dig (pun really intended ) on the matter.

Change of ownership, change of center of cost, change of accounts. Or perhaps... There's a chance that they just ditched CloudFlare in favor of Elastic Load Balance, and that Forum was always hosted on AWS - that M.O. we had in the past, where we could double post on a http 5xx event, suggests that they had a outbound quota but not an inbound quota, and this is exactly how AWS operates. Granted, not only them, but still...

I'm probably the only one able to post on Forum right now... This is what happening: A few hours ago, I could reach Forum on my Mobile network. Now I can't on my cable-tv network All of this strongly suggests it's again a DNS problem. So, let's dig into the problem: <borked dig removed, I had just did a monstrous typo on this one! Jesus Christ...> Below is the last "dig" from the last time forum was working: It ends up that I know the Cloudflare IPs serving Forum. So I edited my /etc/hosts file : ## # Host Database # # localhost is used to configure the loopback interface # when the system is booting. Do not change this entry. ## 127.0.0.1<----->localhost 255.255.255.255>broadcasthost ::1 localhost 172.64.145.232><------>forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com And here I am!!! Not being satisfied, I did another dig on a different network: > dig forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com. ; <<>> DiG 9.16.12 <<>> forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com. ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 52563 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com. 300 IN CNAME sp-forum-elb-2033387385.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. 8 IN SOA ns-332.awsdns-41.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 60 ;; Query time: 9 msec ;; SERVER: 10.0.0.2#53(10.0.0.2) ;; WHEN: Thu Jan 23 00:10:45 UTC 2025 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 197 And voilà... The new owners are moving Forum to AWS. In a few hours the new DNS entry will propagate and fix everything. --- POST EDIT --- Now forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com is being resolved on my cable-tv network too: > dig forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com ; <<>> DiG 9.20.3 <<>> forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 15297 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 512 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com. IN A ;; ANSWER SECTION: forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com. 3600 IN CNAME sp-forum-elb-2033387385.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. 60 IN SOA ns-332.awsdns-41.com. awsdns-hostmaster.amazon.com. 1 7200 900 1209600 60 ;; Query time: 124 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.200.1#53(192.168.200.1) (UDP) ;; WHEN: Wed Jan 22 23:39:33 -03 2025 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 197 But sp-forum-elb-2033387385.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com still doesn't - not on my home network, neither on my remote one, so this is the reason Forum is out of reach to the World. > dig sp-forum-elb-2033387385.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com ; <<>> DiG 9.20.3 <<>> sp-forum-elb-2033387385.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 52641 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1280 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;sp-forum-elb-2033387385.us-west-2.elb.amazonaws.com. IN A ;; Query time: 0 msec ;; SERVER: 192.168.200.1#53(192.168.200.1) (UDP) ;; WHEN: Wed Jan 22 23:39:55 -03 2025 ;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 80 Oukey, lets wait a couple hours days more.

I was going to make a joke, but then I considered that people are still recovering from a near funeral event, and decided to laugh alone... But... You have a point. I was decommissioning my Forum related services when I noticed it was back (nice thing to have such tools, I have the exact moment Forum was gone, and the exact moment it was back!), but kept them down since them. Handovers are problematic, and since we have concrete evidence that they are working to keep Forum alive, there's nothing to be lost if I stop the services until tomorrow to prevent being a hinder if anything else would be in need of tackle down. With the new infra, I will need to carefully benchmark the services again to reach an acceptable equilibrium between the need to archive the pages quickly enough and not causing trouble (what would defeat the scraping anyway). If I get out of reach around here for sometime, it's because I realized the point in which Cloudflare would kick my balls - be patient, I will be back once the ban is lifted! Your reasoning is sound, but your axioms are insufficient to uphold it. I want to tell you a(nother) history: YahooGroups. It's an interesting history because, you see, the same Company involved on that mess is (indirectly) involved on this mess. What happened - Yahoo was failing, it was a matter of time until they would throw the towel, and managed to get a deal with Apollo Inc. The new management sanitize the Company, rationally closing up any and whatever product or service that wasn't paying their costs and screw the non financial consequences. One of the deficitary services was YahooGroups. And they announced they would be closing it at end of the month (or something like that), whoever wanted their data should worry and extract it with a tool they provided. The tool wasn't perfect, and the load of everybody and the kitchen's sink dumping their data made the target date unfeasible. Tremendous outcry, they extended the deadline to the end of the year IIRC. And then they pulled the server's plug, and that's it. I will not discus the huge loss the Internet had due this, it's out of the scope of this post - but it's necessary and sufficient to say that they did it to save some bucks, and they don't regret it. And what does this YahooGroups thingy have to do with the subject at hand? Modus Operandi. They didn't invested resources on YahooGroups at that time, other then the data dump tool. Things were breaking and not fixed, they just left the servers in God's hands, may the Lord provide and protect us. And then they pulled the plug, but the homepages of the dead services were redirected to Mortuarium placeholders. And this is how they shutdown unwanted services. What we had here on Forum, on the other hand, under no circumstances are something a Company like them would be doing is they didn't had some kind of plan (even than as unpleasant one) for it. See: They renewed Invision's license, even knowing that letting the license expire would just incur on lack of support and updates; Forum got down in September. It took 2 weeks, but they got it back; Forum was getting a lot of http 5xx errors since before, and some time after the (first) outage. They took 2 months**, but they fixed it; They screwed up the P.D. login and customer's downloads. They took 2 days**, but they fixed it. You see... On every event above, money and resources were used - this would not be happened if they were intending to ditch Forum. These guys live and breath for one thing: money. And they don't throw money on things they are going to trash. In a way or another, until someone else on Reddit called me up for a mistake on how Cloudflare works, I was 100% convict - due the reasons above - that this was something involuntary, and that Forum would be back eventually. As we can see, I was right. I'm not trying to sugar the pill - sooner or later they will do something to maximize their gains that will liquid us off. But this day is not today. Notes ** Rhetorical - I thought it would be nice to use "2" to match the other problems

It's not my intention to force anyone hand on the matter, being the reason I didn't considered serving the archive online until this moment. Forum is alive, and that's what matters - and the day I realize that all I managed to accomplish with my backup is wasting time and money, believe me, it will be a very, very happy day in my life. Very few things in life would bring me more joy than realizing I did all if that for nothing!! But if we manage to reach a consensus that it's possible to preemptively publish this material without risking any undesirable consequences on the long run both for Forum and "my" Archives, I will do whatever I can to assist, including with hosting services (as long I would not be the only one - no single point of failures, please).

Neither do I saying they would be morally wrong neither, depending on how they do things. Not every modder is their friend. They need to sort out the ones that are their friends, and the ones that aren't - otherwise sooner or later they will have their hand forced on treating all of us as unfriendly. High Level Business is a war, no matter what they tell you on the evaluation meetings. If things start to go to hell, they will cut some throats, or their ones will be the ones being severed.

So it was that? I though forum would be dead, because I detected that the DNS entry for forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com.cdn.cloudflare.com was deleted and someone on reddit told me that this happens when the account is terminated. I will not lie to you - I was terribly saddened by this hypothesis, and I'm very, very, very glad it was not the case. (had a hell of a night, because Forum going down coincided with some other suspicious events on my Day Job©, and I spent the night monitoring probable... "interesting 3rd party actions". )

Are you absolutely sure they are the ones burning bridges now? TTWO is not around anymore. Who is in violation of the EULA and licenses? Haveli? The Annapurna gang? It's not about the modders in question. It's about the doors being opened. Every single major legal tragedy started with someone breaking long standing rules for a bigger good - just to realize some time later why that rules existed at first place. There's not a single case of success I'm aware - every single time this happened in the last 30 years, it ended in tears. The only success cases I know were due the IP owner opening the source - this leveraged the field and prevented chaos from getting out of control (chaos is unavoidable, but it can be contained). --- POST EDIT --- Talking about a case of success, did you know there's a remake of Total Chaos? Cool!!!

Yep. Sadly he didn't came this time, but perhaps in the future? Are you around, @Chemp? It's some time I don't see you!

Hate to be the one telling you the news, but... KSP¹ already has something so or even nastier as micro-transactions. Paid closed source mods. The difference is that the money is not going to the IP owners. Now, bear with me: what would you do if you see a lot of people making money on a property from yours that you just bought and are still scratching your head for ways to get some return from it? While you get your cheeks bashed because this property is dirty and messy? Be honest. Now ask yourself: why the current KSP owners would do less than you? What's coming is not pretty. We're gonna carry that weight.