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Posted: Sat Nov 03, 2007 11:36 pm
by JellyFish
I've been having the exact same problem.

Hey, what if everyone on the forum had to pay ¢1 every year?

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 3:54 am
by Ollie Saunders
JellyFish wrote:I've been having the exact same problem.

Hey, what if everyone on the forum had to pay ¢1 every year?
You couldn't possibly organise that. The donations idea seems sound, works for Wikipedia.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 6:37 am
by feyd
Direct "donations" of money requires a "responsible holding account." We've discussed the idea before: We would create an internationally acceptable nonprofit. If memory serves, it was decided to be a lot of hassle for little return.

A for-profit corporation would be even worse.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 7:00 am
by Ollie Saunders
How much hassle and how much return?

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 10:32 am
by Kieran Huggins
I nominate avoiding incorporation and just giving it to feyd for safe keeping in a paypal account. Or a shoebox.

I get the distinct impression he's not going anywhere...

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 12:39 pm
by califdon
Kieran Huggins wrote:I nominate avoiding incorporation and just giving it to feyd for safe keeping in a paypal account. Or a shoebox.

I get the distinct impression he's not going anywhere...
I'm sure that Kieran meant that in a good way . . . not that feyd will never amount to anything . . . :lol:

Yes, that's what I had in mind: just an informal suggestion that those who use the forum a lot may want to send in $10, $20, whatever, to help out. No pressure, no formal legal status. The IRS isn't likely to bust down feyd's door, trying to collect taxes. It wouldn't take many contributions of even $10 a year to cover the cost of a professional web hosting account.

The weakness is in what happens next year, and the next. But I don't see that as a major drawback. The worst possible scenario is that either (a) one or two people would end up splitting the cost, or (b) the forum would have to return to some freebie host (yeah, a lot of work migrating everything again). I don't think there will be any problem finding a dozen or so users to contribute a bit each year. Hey, if there aren't at least that many who feel the forum is useful, it wouldn't deserve to continue anyway!

As to the limitations of low-cost hosting services, I don't think it's a CPU issue, but bandwidth certainly is a consideration. Anybody know what our monthly bandwidth looks like? As I mentioned before, the service I've been using for the past year has tiers of account types based on monthly transfer and total disk storage. There shouldn't be any problem with selecting an appropriate account with a reliable provider, if we know what our requirements are.

@feyd: would you be willing to collect the donations and pay the bills? I, for one, wouldn't expect any accounting. Hey, we're not talking about big-time money here.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 1:50 pm
by Weirdan
Anybody know what our monthly bandwidth looks like?
30-50GB/month if I remember correctly.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 2:00 pm
by s.dot
It wouldn't be hard at all to manage, but I was informed that the decisions all go through Jason.

The two web sitesi frequent most often are having problems. One's down for maitenance.. and devnet's too slow/unstable to browse properly. :P Good thing it's sunday.. football!

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2007 9:05 pm
by Kieran Huggins
I'd kick in to support DevNet - maybe other people would if there were a paypal donate button? There are loads of thankful people all the time, some of them might not be cheap.

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:19 am
by califdon
I know nothing about who the people are who make such decisions, but it's becoming obvious that the forum is next to unusable, the way it has been this past week. The time I waste just trying to post anything is starting to wear heavily and I may give up trying. If I can help in getting something rolling, please let me know. Time is of the essence, I think.

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:28 am
by Benjamin
I can encode the script into a highly optimized bunch of opcodes. I'm not sure that will help though, as the bottleneck are the db queries. I'm sure we can find a way to implement some sort of file based caching system for all the hits from non-logged in members. Heck, I don't think it would take more than a day or two to write a script that would statically create html files and delete them when a post is udpated. These can be created on pageviews then deleted on udpates.

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 3:16 am
by Ollie Saunders
astions wrote:Heck, I don't think it would take more than a day or two to write a script that would statically create html files and delete them when a post is udpated. These can be created on pageviews then deleted on udpates.
That sounds like an excellent idea. Also have a look at putting any inline JavaScript into files. Consider memcache?

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 9:54 am
by Kieran Huggins
IME it's typically searches that kill phpBB's DB performance, not browsing. In that case, caching opcodes is a bit like taking up yoga whilst being shot.

The only thing that would REALLY help is a completely new data model.

*I don't mean to insinuate that caching opcodes would be bad. Or yoga, for that matter.

Posted: Mon Nov 05, 2007 10:02 am
by Ollie Saunders
Trouble with PHP BB is the code base isn't Object Oriented so any changes would be quite a lot of work.
IME it's typically searches that kill phpBB's DB performance, not browsing. In that case, caching opcodes is a bit like taking up yoga whilst being shot.
We can speculate all we like but if you want to know, you have to profile it.