Good news. The forum software license has been renewed for 6 months.

[voltmanderer]

Due to the outage, I started precautiously making a mirror backup of the wiki, just in case it goes offline suddenly. Any idea of the actual size of the forum? I expect that in a few years time, this may not exist any more, but the history contained within, as well as all the tutorials, art, stories, etc is just too important to allow to sunset. With only a 6 month license renewal, perhaps it's time to release archival images of the whole forum from a single snapshot date, and allow those to be downloaded by interested parties or released into the wilds on Bittorrent.

[theJesuit]

8 hours ago, voltmanderer said:

Due to the outage, I started precautiously making a mirror backup of the wiki, just in case it goes offline suddenly. Any idea of the actual size of the forum? I expect that in a few years time, this may not exist any more, but the history contained within, as well as all the tutorials, art, stories, etc is just too important to allow to sunset. With only a 6 month license renewal, perhaps it's time to release archival images of the whole forum from a single snapshot date, and allow those to be downloaded by interested parties or released into the wilds on Bittorrent.

I hadn't considered the wiki!

[Neeeosis]

But if the forum closes, where and how can we download all the mods? Maybe on github, but there are a lot of explanations, faq and tips on the forum page of some mods

Look at the MKS (modular kolonisation system) page...

Btw i would be ok to donate some money in order to maintain this forum.

[Superfluous J]

3 hours ago, Neeeosis said:

But if the forum closes, where and how can we download all the mods?

Spacedock.

And if that closes, well then we're in trouble.

[AVaughan]

Ckan has most of the mods indexed.  (And it knows download locations as well).  No reason to think that is going away anytime soon.

 

[Scarecrow71]

@Vanamonde

So what happens in March when the license runs out?

[RandomKid]

On 12/26/2024 at 6:19 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

@Vanamonde

So what happens in March when the license runs out?

Who knows.

[Gargamel]

On 12/26/2024 at 4:19 PM, Scarecrow71 said:

@Vanamonde

So what happens in March when the license runs out?

Considering we've given all the info we have, you know as much as we do. 

[Terran R]

23 hours ago, RandomKid said:

Quem sabe.

only time will tell

[AlamoVampire]

from what ive heard from a source that i trust implicitly, is that its been renewed for a year, and this information was relayed to me back in november. i will not say who told me, but suffice to say, that again, i trust them and their reputation is stellar. if they wish to speak up they may or if they tell me i can reveal who they are i will, but until im green lit to say who, i cant. 

231512312024

[Scarecrow71]

9 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

from what ive heard from a source that i trust implicitly, is that its been renewed for a year, and this information was relayed to me back in november. i will not say who told me, but suffice to say, that again, i trust them and their reputation is stellar. if they wish to speak up they may or if they tell me i can reveal who they are i will, but until im green lit to say who, i cant. 

231512312024

I have a hard time believing this.  "I know something, but I can't tell anyone unless I'm told I can, even though I'm sure they wouldn't mind but haven't told me I can yet."  Why even bother telling us that you know something if you can't tell us who told you?  It falls under the same category as the forum user who, last year, claimed they were in talks with Take Two to purchase the IP.  Which, as we all know, turned out to be bunk.

It's bad enough that we don't know who bought the studio (which, to me, is just more of the same "We know something but can't tell you" garbage).  Unless you can give us actual details, please don't come out here and tell us you have it on good anonymous authority.  I'll trust the actual post from the mods that validated it was only 6 months.

[Lisias]

On 1/1/2025 at 2:14 AM, AlamoVampire said:

from what ive heard from a source that i trust implicitly, is that its been renewed for a year, and this information was relayed to me back in november. i will not say who told me, but suffice to say, that again, i trust them and their reputation is stellar. if they wish to speak up they may or if they tell me i can reveal who they are i will, but until im green lit to say who, i cant. 

231512312024

Given that que Forum QoS is finally getting better (not perfect, but way better) at the same time the concurrent users rise in quantity, I believe que there're people working on it and, so, there's a good chance we survive this ordeal after all.

Edited January 2 by Lisias
Kraken damned auto-correctors!

[PDCWolf]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

 at the same time the concurrent users rise in quantity

Source needed, and I'd also need a good proof it's not self-fulfilling from the forum having better uptime and thus allowing the 1000+ lurkers (mostly crawler bots) to be online for longer.

[softweir]

57 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Source needed, and I'd also need a good proof it's not self-fulfilling from the forum having better uptime and thus allowing the 1000+ lurkers (mostly crawler bots) to be online for longer.

I believe @Lisias's point was "the forum is remaining stable despite an apparent increase in users and/or bots". That the stability increase will have inevitably lead to an increase in apparent users doesn't invalidate the point that there is an improvement in stability.

[Lisias]

5 hours ago, PDCWolf said:

Source needed, and I'd also need a good proof it's not self-fulfilling from the forum having better uptime and thus allowing the 1000+ lurkers (mostly crawler bots) to be online for longer.

And I never said "humans", only "users" as stated in main Forum page:

Quote

• Who's Online   35 Members, 2 Anonymous, 1,157 Guests (See full list)

  <yada yada yada>

We had about 2.800 Guests near Christmas, by the way. This means that the improvement may had happened even earlier, but it would had been eroded by the increased volume of accesses.

From the technical point of view, doesn't matter if a "Guest" is a bot or a human - the request was served without errors, and this is what is being measured here.

Count your blessings.

 

4 hours ago, softweir said:

I believe @Lisias's point was "the forum is remaining stable despite an apparent increase in users and/or bots". That the stability increase will have inevitably lead to an increase in apparent users doesn't invalidate the point that there is an improvement in stability.

Exactly. I'm not evaluating Forums's SEO or Makerting value, or whatever, I'm measuring Forum's health - with concrete data.

Spoiler

https://speakerdeck.com/mariofusco/measure-dont-guess-benchmarking-stories-from-the-trenches

 

[PDCWolf]

21 hours ago, softweir said:

I believe @Lisias's point was "the forum is remaining stable despite an apparent increase in users and/or bots". That the stability increase will have inevitably lead to an increase in apparent users doesn't invalidate the point that there is an improvement in stability.

I'm not contradicting Lisias or saying the forum hasn't gotten better. I'm interpreting the data exactly the opposite way: The forum has gotten better, allowing bots to crawl it for longer/more aggressively.

16 hours ago, Lisias said:

And I never said "humans", only "users" as stated in main Forum page:

We had about 2.800 Guests near Christmas, by the way. This means that the improvement may had happened even earlier, but it would had been eroded by the increased volume of accesses.

From the technical point of view, doesn't matter if a "Guest" is a bot or a human - the request was served without errors, and this is what is being measured here.

Count your blessings.

 

Exactly. I'm not evaluating Forums's SEO or Makerting value, or whatever, I'm measuring Forum's health - with concrete data.

  Reveal hidden contents

https://speakerdeck.com/mariofusco/measure-dont-guess-benchmarking-stories-from-the-trenches

 

As far as my knowledge of English goes, the definition of "user" explicitly includes the word "person". Again, this isn't attacking your point or saying it's not true, what I did do is interpret the data the opposite way, with the forum being more accesible allowing for more bots to crawl it, where a % of those bots would've been 504'd out of being listed as guests before.

[Lisias]

2 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

I'm not contradicting Lisias or saying the forum hasn't gotten better. I'm interpreting the data exactly the opposite way: The forum has gotten better, allowing bots to crawl it for longer/more aggressively.

Makes no sense. If the bots are managing to crawl for longer/more aggressively, this is a CF problem, not Forum.

CF is the tool that should had been preventing it. And they have some measures active, I can guarantee you - done that, been bitten on the process.

 

4 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

As far as my knowledge of English goes, the definition of "user" explicitly includes the word "person".

Sorry, but this is not a consensus at all.

Quote

A user is a person or entity that engages with a product, service, or system in some way, such as by using it, interacting with it, or consuming it.

https://chisellabs.com/glossary/what-is-user/

Of course, now we can battle about the meaning of "entity", and this will go on indefinitely.

What, frankly, would be a huge waste of time and efforts because none of that will change the numbers I have.

[PDCWolf]

Just now, Lisias said:

Makes no sense. If the bots are managing to crawl for longer/more aggressively, this is a CF problem, not Forum.

Wouldn't it fit if there's -more- bots? Say... the forum is erroring out for 50% of "users", so from inside you'd see there's 1000 guests... Suddenly the forum works better and now 100% of "users" can flood in, you get 2000 "users" on the guest counter now.

The bots were always there, just unable to access because of the issues.

Otherwise why else would there be such a huge spike of users? I doubt christmas KSP1/2 sales would end up spiking the amount of guests.

[Lisias]

38 minutes ago, PDCWolf said:

Wouldn't it fit if there's -more- bots? Say... the forum is erroring out for 50% of "users", so from inside you'd see there's 1000 guests... Suddenly the forum works better and now 100% of "users" can flood in, you get 2000 "users" on the guest counter now.

The bots were always there, just unable to access because of the issues.

Otherwise why else would there be such a huge spike of users? I doubt christmas KSP1/2 sales would end up spiking the amount of guests.

And exactly what's your point? Requests returning http 200 should only matter if the requester is not a human? Or vice versa? Your arguing makes absolutely no sense.

Forum was borking even with less the 600 online Users/Guests/Bots/whatever. And now it's not with 1200 1600, so it's definitely an improvement.

This conversation has no purpose. #HAL9000feelings.

Edited Friday at 07:28 PM by Lisias
We have about 1600 whatever right now.

[PDCWolf]

2 minutes ago, Lisias said:

And exactly what's your point? Requests returning http 200 should only matter if the requester is not a human? Or vice versa? Your arguing makes absolutely no sense.

Forum was borking even with less the 600 online Users/Guests/Bots/whatever. And now it's not with 1200 1600, so it's definitely an improvement.

This conversation has no purpose. #HAL9000feelings.

I'm not discussing the improvement, I do feel the improvement as well on my region, not discussing that at all, specially since your data obviously shows an improvement. What I'm interested in discussing is the egg and chicken dilemma of the online guest spike versus the improvement on the forum's/cf error rate.

[Scarecrow71]

4 hours ago, Lisias said:

Sorry, but this is not a consensus at all.

Actually, it is.  1st definition of the word includes the word "person".

define user - Search