So, we had another kind of technical problem. Whole different one this time, to keep things exciting!

[ColdJ]

20 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Ultimetaley, this insanity must stop at some point.

It is funny, it is almost as if I posited that this might be happening last year and some others (not you) told me I didn't understand how AI scraping works.

Of course those others will have conveniently forgotten they said anything by now.

[Lisias]

10 hours ago, ColdJ said:

It is funny, it is almost as if I posited that this might be happening last year and some others (not you) told me I didn't understand how AI scraping works.

Of course those others will have conveniently forgotten they said anything by now.

Worst. Last time I had notice of them, they were still sustaining, unchecked, what they said here on Forum - only in a different place, where they can fully control the timeline and harass or ban anyone that would contradict them.

In the end, they are the ones that don't understand how Forum (and similar services) really work - but they will double down on their narrative until the end, because they have nothing to lose by keep lying.

Spoiler

And we are relying on them to keep our Scene working - a horrifying thought, if you ask me.

 

As a matter of fact, most of this Forum's problems in the past can be reduced to people not willing to cope with Reality.

[ColdJ]

502's are turning up more regularly again.

[Deddly]

Interesting. I haven't had any myself.

[ColdJ]

29 minutes ago, Deddly said:

Interesting. I haven't had any myself.

They are rather random. Usually going back to the previous page will get you out.

[adsii1970]

2 hours ago, ColdJ said:

502's are turning up more regularly again.

This is expected as the new company that owns the forum is preparing to migrate the website and is archiving everything. Don't worry. It will be more stable after the migration is finished. 

[ColdJ]

9 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

This is expected as the new company that owns the forum is preparing to migrate the website and is archiving everything. Don't worry. It will be more stable after the migration is finished. 

Interesting. Any Idea where we are going?

[softweir]

14 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Interesting. Any Idea where we are going?

According to the stickied: 

 - it is no more than an upgrade. Nothing to the contrary has been posted that I am aware of. I reserve the right to be ignorant.

[adsii1970]

22 hours ago, ColdJ said:

Interesting. Any Idea where we are going?

Yep, we were told that the forum will no longer be self hosted. This is going to be a good thing because it means more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere. 
But that’s all we can say for now. 

[umbra humanus]

2 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Yep, we were told that the forum will no longer be self hosted. This is going to be a good thing because it means more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere. 
But that’s all we can say for now. 

Good. I think. You can never be too careful in these times of instability, within KSP.

Edited Monday at 01:09 AM by umbra humanus

[HebaruSan]

2 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Yep, we were told that the forum will no longer be self hosted. This is going to be a good thing because it means more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere. 

Thank you for telling us things.

[Lisias]

9 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

This is going to be a good thing because it means more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere. 

If the data I got from the last borkage worths something, it's a hell of a closet inside an AWS datacenter!

Edited Monday at 08:07 AM by Lisias
Of cuorse, tyops!

[softweir]

21 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

 <snip> more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere </snip>

I'm going to use that very singular double-positive that equates to a negative (ahem!): "Yeah, Yeah"!

I have been a member of several forums which were third-party hosted, and which died because the hosts went for profit over service. The potential evils are: metered bandwidth so forums go offline any time they get too much traffic, no maintenance so forums break and don't get mended for days, irregular backups so when forums break they revert to an earlier, even more broken state, and inadequate server capacity so even when everything else works, the forums are unresponsive.

If what you have been told is true then (pending info on who the third-party host is) I quake in my boots.

Edited Monday at 08:07 PM by softweir
ARGH! TYPO! Illiteracy not correctible.

[Lisias]

On 4/7/2025 at 1:08 PM, softweir said:

I have been a member of several forums which were third-party hosted, and which died because the hosts went for profit over service. The po5tential evils are: metered bandwidth so forums go offline any time they get too much traffic, no maintenance so forums break and don't get mended for days, irregular backups so when forums break they revert to an earlier, even more broken state, and inadequate server capacity so even when everything else works, the forums are unresponsive.

I second that.

Spoiler

On DayJob© part of our services are 3rd party hosted, and part is in house.

I will not lie, now and then I make a mistake and the in house service borks in QAS (and only QAS, because nothing goes to PRD without a month on public QAS first - unless under very exigent circumstances). It's not exactly something to be proud of, but sometimes small changes on some hidden permission on the new OS version just screws us up in ways you though it would be impossible. But it wasn't...

However... The in house service exists because the partner responsible for that 3rd party hosted service decided to go trough a venue that it's incompatible with our current infra but at the same time had some badly hindering limitations on their infra so we had to pull from our hats a middleware that would cope with such limitations ourselves - and that middleware is exactly the service that eventually borks when something in our infra changes (or I do a mistake), as a server migration we did recently.

Had we choose to go trough a venue in which such services would be hosted in house too, we would had saved ourselves from the need of a extra middleware, as we would be able to fix the damned problem ourselves (we coded the middleware, didn't we?).

Sometimes, an old server stuffed on a closet is exactly the best option for your needs. Believe me, been there, done that.

In the end, it boils down to Pain Management. Where you are willing to take the pain and for how long. Doing things in house usually is a frequent source of small and quick pains, while relying on 3rd parties where you are merely just one small part of the their incoming will most of the time give you very rare but really huge [and long standing] pains, one of them will eventually kill you.

Spoiler

AWS just screwed one of our VMs out of the blue recently. The VM was working last time I had used 4 weeks ago (it's a last resource emergency VM). Last week it wasn't anymore. If this would had happened after I had did an update, I would not be worried. What really worries me is something changing on AWS infra that turns a usable VM into a virtual brick out of the blue.

And there's nothing I can do but rebuild the VM and pray to it not happening again, or ditch AWS and use something else - if I could find something else, because everything else we had tried (from Google Cloud to Azure) was incredibly expensive, just don't fit our needs, or both.

--- POST EDIT ---

Spoiler

Annnd... The affected VM just come back to life out of the blue.

I didn't remembered exactly the error message I found on the AWS Screenshot (I don't know if I forgot to save it, or if I deleted it by accident on freeing diskspace frenzy), and the <insert your favorite non-Forum compliant expletive here> just worked as nothing would had happened.

(sigh)

So I just cloned the machine into a "guineapig" one to be used on potentially destructive tests, "fixed" all the other VMs with the configuration that probably would had fixed the problem if it was still there, and hold in God's Hand and gone solve something else while exercising again my long gone religiosity and awe in His Sacred Mysteries - as, frankly, this is a Faith issue by now, not technical anymore. I hope AWS have Him in their payroll, because I don't).

 

Edited 20 hours ago by Lisias
POST EDIT: Holding God's Hand.

[umbra humanus]

23 hours ago, adsii1970 said:

Yep, we were told that the forum will no longer be self hosted. This is going to be a good thing because it means more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere. 
But that’s all we can say for now. 

When will you be able to say more?

[Deddly]

7 hours ago, umbra humanus said:

When will you be able to say more?

It's not that we know lots of things you don't, it's just that there's not much to say.

The plan is for the forum to be hosted by Invision themselves. I think that's usually considered an upgrade.

[AlamoVampire]

On 4/6/2025 at 5:56 PM, adsii1970 said:

Yep, we were told that the forum will no longer be self hosted. This is going to be a good thing because it means more stability than an old server stuffed in a closet somewhere. 
But that’s all we can say for now. 

Does this particular change have any effect on us rank and file users in terms of our personal log in credentials or aside from the down time will we see no other change? Im assuming web url will remain the same as well?

011704082025

[adsii1970]

4 hours ago, AlamoVampire said:

Does this particular change have any effect on us rank and file users in terms of our personal log in credentials or aside from the down time will we see no other change? Im assuming web url will remain the same as well?

No. We have been assured of this. Except for the inconvenience of the forum being down and some stuff on our end, there are no major surprises expected. 

4 hours ago, Deddly said:

The plan is for the forum to be hosted by Invision themselves. I think that's usually considered an upgrade.

Um, yeah. This is the plan rather than self-hosting as the forum currently is (and has been since 2012). 

[ColdJ]

@Anth

So, now standard Dark Theme is busted, Light theme is missing information, Red themes make me sad.

Was someone just playing around with settings? Did they by chance save the settings beforehand so they can revert?

[Anth]

8 minutes ago, ColdJ said:

@Anth

So, now standard Dark Theme is busted, Light theme is missing information, Red themes make me sad.

Was someone just playing around with settings? Did they by chance save the settings beforehand so they can revert?

Yeah, something weird happened. The problem is being worked on.

[Deddly]

We can probably expect other strange symptoms to occur as the migration proceeds. 

 

Just look at those large, friendly red letters.