Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Too bad we are incapacitated of any coders that have enough spare time for the job.
This post is obviously a quite a big hint that we need more coders.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
I think the entire intro text at the top of the front page is a bit silly and poorly written. The blatant attempt to trick someone into clicking on a casino link (which, by the way, exist to make you broke with nothing in return) is just awful and I had no idea we were doing this until now.
I can totally get why this site would be expensive to run, though. We do get a fair bit of visitors. But I'm curious as to 1) what exactly it costs, and 2) what we're getting in return for that price (specifications of the server).
That would at least ease my mind in knowing that this thing is necessary.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Considering it's an entire database rewrite, we could use a fair few amount of trustworthy people aboard.
Grunt, Nach, and adelikat know more about the situation than me, however.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
I've already greatly optimized what we started with from Bisqwit so it runs on a much lighter setup. However, the setup still requires a good GB of RAM to run well (1.5 even better). Most VPSs with that capacity cost several dozens of dollars a month.
Despite lightening the load of many parts of the site, we're also getting heavier over time as we get more users visiting and we add on new features which require server resources. I'm looking to add on even more compelling features in the future which will increase load more.
You guys should be happy that we have a stable source of income which covers a large portion of our server fees each month. Otherwise we'd be asking for donations on a regular basis.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Done right it would be mostly static (the main pages) + the forum, which any shared hosting provider can handle competently enough.
I have to comment on that. How exactly would static pages be "doing it right"?
The site consisting of static pages would be a nightmare to administer. If you haven't noticed, all pages in the site are editable by editors: Anybody anywhere in the world who has been given editor rights can just go and easily add or modify text and other contents to any page, using their favorite web browser. This allows people to easily eg. write articles, create lists, enhance or fix existing information, etc. Moreover, it allows people to rate movies. And more still, much of the contents of the site are very dynamically generated from a database, including movie lists (with all their details), submissions, statistics lists, and so on.
Exactly how would the site contents be achievable with static pages? Every single html file would have to be edited by hand, and its contents would be fixed (because that is, after all, the very definition of "static page"). All the data of, for example, a given movie would have to be entered by hand. If you wanted the data of the same movie in more than one page, you would have to manually add to each such page. You couldn't create movie lists or statistics dynamically on-the-fly. Submissions would have to be handled by hand, and their publication status updated manually by modifying the relevant html files directly.
It would also be a versioning nightmare. If two admins modify the same html file at the same time and both then upload it to the server, the first admin's changes will be lost. And this assuming that any sane person would even want to administer such a nightmare of static html files. The site would die very quickly because nobody in their right mind would have motivation enough to do this.
The reason why we have so much up-to-date content is because the website is highly dynamic, generates content based on a database and is editable by anybody directly using their browser.
So once again, exactly how would static pages be "done right"?
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warp wrote:
So once again, exactly how would static pages be "done right"?
Probably exactly how we're already doing it.
Non logged in users and web bots are being served static content 99% of the time for the site itself.
I advise studying Wiki: CacheControl.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
Joined: 11/22/2004
Posts: 1468
Location: Rotterdam, The Netherlands
Nach wrote:
I've already greatly optimized what we started with from Bisqwit so it runs on a much lighter setup. However, the setup still requires a good GB of RAM to run well (1.5 even better). Most VPSs with that capacity cost several dozens of dollars a month.
Okay, that makes sense. My server has similar capabilities (2 GB RAM) and costs me about €476 per year (including taxes).
If you're in need of another programmer (PHP, MySQL), I've been working as a freelancer for years so I might be able to help you out.
So once again, exactly how would static pages be "done right"?
Probably exactly how we're already doing it.
Non logged in users and web bots are being served static content 99% of the time for the site itself.
I advise studying Wiki: CacheControl.
I don't really understand how caching makes the pages static. It makes them cached, not static.
Of course you could define "dynamic page" to mean "the content is generated from a database or algorithmically every time the page is requested". However, I wouldn't say that's the definition of "dynamic page". The contents are still generated, rather than being hard-coded (as would be with a static html file), even if this generated content is updated only every 10 minutes.
(One could even go so far as to say that if you are requesting a .php file rather than a .html file, the page is dynamic because a PHP script will be run to give you the content, even if that content is always the same.)
I suppose that in the end it's a matter of definition, but at least to me "static page" means a hard-coded html file which is modified manually.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Warp wrote:
Nach wrote:
Warp wrote:
So once again, exactly how would static pages be "done right"?
Probably exactly how we're already doing it.
Non logged in users and web bots are being served static content 99% of the time for the site itself.
I advise studying Wiki: CacheControl.
I don't really understand how caching makes the pages static. It makes them cached, not static.
Read!
"Entire page is cached to file"
Warp wrote:
(One could even go so far as to say that if you are requesting a .php file rather than a .html file, the page is dynamic because a PHP script will be run to give you the content, even if that content is always the same.)
I suppose that in the end it's a matter of definition, but at least to me "static page" means a hard-coded html file which is modified manually.
It's a static hard-coded HTML file served without PHP. It is modified by "users" using PHP to modify it.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I don't know what's more depressing, that there's no easy way out of intrusive advertisements, or that Bisqwit has fallen in with the nutcases spewing garbage ideas like "End Times" and "Islamofacist" and "Christians are sooooooo persecuted!"
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Joined: 11/18/2006
Posts: 2426
Location: Back where I belong
After reading the complaints, I fully expected to see that Phil and Xkeeper had donated.
Of course, with all things related to Phil or Xkeeper, I was disappointed
Wait, I've got it, the most depressing thing is that we won't get enough people to believe climate change is a real problem until it's too late to prevent most of the damage from it. Let's all be depressed about that rather than about silly online casinos!
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
Bag, to be fair, Bisqwit has been really crazy for a pretty long time, should you go by his posts on this forum.
Other people, on a scale from 1-10, how outraged would you say you feel over this horrible abomination that is a link to a casino? Better or worse than Hitler? Xkeeper, I'm putting you down for around 8.5, maybe higher? Please describe your sense of impending doom and despair in greater detail everyone, thanks.
Bag, to be fair, Bisqwit has been really crazy for a pretty long time
Crazy enough to establish this site! Heh.
For many things ― be it an April Fools prank, a joke, a column, or an aphorism ― in my opinion, the best and most effective one is the one, that contains so much truth mixed with completely preposterous claims, that it forces you to give it the benefit of doubt. You cannot be completely sure, whether the author honestly stands behind their word, and exactly which part of it, really.
And this is exactly what my statement above is about: I urge anyone to do the research.
This is core to my nature so much, that of many of the things I say in general, I am not sure even myself which parts I believe. I stir things and see what it develops into. If you represent view A, I will defend view B, or vice versa, to be sure to get the best (and worst) of both worlds. Not to say that I do not have my own view ― by now it should be rather obvious what I really believe in ―; but it is just that to build and reinforce any view, I try to collect the best arguments from all sides. Which is why in the dnd system, I associate myself most with the chaotic good alignment.
As for the evilness of the casino link, I think that it is a tradeoff between one evil and another evil.
When people come to tasvideos.org, surely they notice the randomly chosen starred movie before anything else. I didn't notice the preamble until this topic pointed it out to me.
Memcache Server 1 (localhost)
failure
mmbossman wrote:
After reading the complaints, I fully expected to see that Phil and Xkeeper had donated.
Of course, with all things related to Phil or Xkeeper, I was disappointed
I see no real reason to donate when they are already making "many" dollars off of that link and there is no easy way to tell just what the costs are. What amount would be appropriate? $5? $10? $100?
I could throw $10 at the problem, but would it solve anything? For me it is impossible to say because there is no information. My VPS costs $11/month as it is and it runs fine (under fairly light load with a MediaWiki installation that hogs resources)
Fabian wrote:
Bag, to be fair, Bisqwit has been really crazy for a pretty long time, should you go by his posts on this forum.
Other people, on a scale from 1-10, how outraged would you say you feel over this horrible abomination that is a link to a casino? Better or worse than Hitler? Xkeeper, I'm putting you down for around 8.5, maybe higher? Please describe your sense of impending doom and despair in greater detail everyone, thanks.
Actually more like 2, 3 tops. It's just that trying to get the other things that annoy the shit out of me about this site now doesn't work (the methods behind judge/publishing are still terrible), but given the current administration, I don't expect this to change at all.
Besides, it's just an eyesore. It's the introduction to the site and it's got a scammy link right off the bat. Terrible, terrible idea.
I like it. I clicked it. Only to find out that doesn't help us. I think you should put more links on the front page.
mmmmmmmmbiasmonster, clearly Xkeeper and Phil are Anonymous A and Anonymous B. Stop ragging on the people you hate just because you hate them. Also listen to my advice on how to behave on an internet forum. Yup.
Has there been any investigation into how well Project Wonderful or other banner ads would fund the site? PW shows how much it'd cost to buy a particular ad per-day next to each ad, so I know that popular websites can easily get over $10/day from tower ads, for example (MS Paint Adventures currently shows $18.80 for one of its tower ads).
Granted this would be more obtrusive than a stealth embedded link...but it'd also clearly be an ad, unlike the stealth embedded link.
Pyrel - an open-source rewrite of the Angband roguelike game in Python.
Granted this would be more obtrusive than a stealth embedded link...but it'd also clearly be an ad, unlike the stealth embedded link.
Ding! We have intelligence! Ding! We have a person who understands that people like being told the truth.
Also, if anyone points out that people using adblockers would not see the ads, they are in the group that would not click the ad anyway. Also, some people using adblocked have unblocked PW. So, yeah.
Joined: 3/9/2004
Posts: 4588
Location: In his lab studying psychology to find new ways to torture TASers and forumers
Xkeeper wrote:
Nach wrote:
blah blah cache blah
Memcache Server 1 (localhost)
failure
So? We haven't used Memcache since we transitioned from Bisqwit's server to ours. We use XCache instead which is listed right below it.
Warning: Opinions expressed by Nach or others in this post do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, or position of Nach himself on the matter(s) being discussed therein.
I like it. I clicked it. Only to find out that doesn't help us. I think you should put more links on the front page.
mmmmmmmmbiasmonster, clearly Xkeeper and Phil are Anonymous A and Anonymous B. Stop ragging on the people you hate just because you hate them. Also listen to my advice on how to behave on an internet forum. Yup.
Can I get a name change to Anonymous A? That sounds pretty awesome.
(Also, I use PW on both of my sites. It rakes in about 75c a day, which is about $22 USD/month. Not enough to fully cover hosting (doubly so as I use it as my own profit as motivation to actually work on them) but it certainly helps.)
