CHANGE IT ALREADY! Support needed!

I joined over there. I'm not sure that proboards is the right solution though. It's slow as heck.

Proboards shouldn't be slow. Not sure why that's happening for you.

It's a massive forum provider (3 million forums). 71 Servers.

Software is based on YaBB too, which should keep the familiarity.

more info:

b

although i appreciate your idea of having a temporary forum i dont like the idea for several reasons.

  1. A second forum would split up this great community, no matter if this one gets better or not, this will be permanent.
  2. I dont like providers like proboards. It's as easy as that.

We shouldnt think of temporary solutions that make even heavier problems what we need is a finally a way to talk to our hosts. Is there anyone having mellis Email address? mellis@arduino.cc just returns and to be honest - i have never seen anyone else of the team...

The root problem is that the admins of this forum have proven themselves nearly totally unreliable. That's a serious problem. What really needs to happen is to find someone (several someones preferably) who can better administer this forum. Or try to figure out why the admins/moderators seem to nearly never have anything to do with their own forum.

I hope that things can be resolved without any splits and quickly. Anyway it goes, the forum really could use an overhaul!

Nachtwind: I agree. Any changes disrupt communities. But as it stands, the current resources for arduino.cc are deteriorating. As I understand it, none of the Arduino Team are IT inclined (save maybe David and Tom). And they are rightfully very busy in their regular jobs (just like the rest of us).

The fact is that a lot of people use the forums as a timely resource for finding information about Arduino, and currently, the resources are in disrepair.

I proposed the switch-over to the proboards because of the similarities. And there is a possibility to migrate all posts over to that forum.

Unfortunately, no one can change your mind on preconceptions of using a service provider. All I can say is you better stop using Google then. :stuck_out_tongue:

Agreed. The best solution is to talk to the Arduino Team. It would be nice to know what their intentions are.

b

I just saw this talk:

If you love something:
Give it away.

Hey guys, we know this is a problem and we'd like to fix it. Unfortunately, it's a lot of work, and no one on the team has had the time to sit down and do it properly. We're hoping to hire someone who can fix the forums, improve the templates, and various other IT / infrastructure type tasks. Please hang in there.

sorry for being a PITA now, but why the hell do you want to hire someone for a job dozens of us already sworn to do?!

You could make it as simple as doing a casting here, asking people to do it and i am sure it wont take more than a damn weekend to make all the stuff work. It CANT be an issue of disc space or server features as this is in this times neglectible because a server that is able to run a site like this costs not even 5$ a month, even less.. and people here would donate for it.

The problem is that this website hasnt changed in years (Wayback Machine) and now we should 'hang in there' to wait for SOMETHING to happen? Come on, i dont to call you anything, but be honest, you wouldnt believe this more than we do if you were on this side.

The whole Arduino community is about experimenting. We experiment all the time, we have big achievments, we have grave setbacks to deal with - so, what would be wrong about 'experimenting' in a new way, leave it to the community to fix the website. I am sure you could do a backup at any time needed and if we fu*** it up you could easily revert it, call the experiment failed and go on as it is now. But we have had our chance then.
And i am sure as hell we would ue it.

We have been making changes to the server. About a year ago we migrated to a new host. A few months ago we switched to hosting our downloads on Google Code. The current hosting package is about $90 / month. The provider (servint) is supposed to be one of the best around. I'll look into the possibility of upgrading to an account with more RAM to see if that can provide a quick mitigation of some of the problems while we look for a more permanent solution.

So thats 1k$ per year.

How many active and committed users do we have ? If 100 would pay 10$ per YEAR - which is dead cheap for what we get in return ! - the costs are more or less covered. Make it 200 users and that could go down to 5$ OR even better use 2k$ and get a machine that makes us SCREAM with joy.

So we've heard the arduino team spends about 1000$ per year for the current server plan - which right now leaves a lot of things to be desired.

To emphasize the community driven character of the Arduino project and to literally pay back for all the efforts AND to get a rugged, strong and healthy server, I (personally) think we could help out.

What annual donation would You be willing to make to improve things ? This is totally on a voluntary basis and just to find out where we stand. There shall be no limitations for users who can't afford this.

This is just my personal idea and does not (yet) represent what the core team might have in mind.

Thanks for working on the fundraising, but money isn't the problem. I'm looking into upgrading our account, and if spending more money will solve the problem, we'll do it.

This forum SHOULD be able to run on a $20/month server.

Either there is some type of attack or mass download of every post in the forum, or you aren't getting your $90 worth.

My feeling is that YaBB is collapsing in on itself but even a flatfile forum should not choke so hard.

Maybe we're being DoSed by microsoft? The forum home page says:

Most Search Engines ever online was 111 on Today at 5:38pm.

and:

Users Online
...
Search Engines: 68
Yahoo! Crawler (2), MSN Search (65), Googlebot (1)

Why does MSN Search need 65 bots crawling the server????

-j

"You know your a redneck server is faulty when you have people accidentally triple posting."

Yeah... something isn't right if they are using a $90/month account and the forum is still slow. And 10GB a day!?!?! Forums aren't that bandwidth hungry. Think of it this way: If 3000 people get on the forum each day (I doubt that very much!) and each person uses a megabyte of traffic (also very unlikely) then the total bandwidth would be 3GB. Traffic compression could probably bring the actual per user bandwidth down to easily under 100kb. In short: Somebody is DDOS'ing the forum. There is no way that a forum this size would even remotely approach 10GB of traffic a day.

It depends...
I dont quite now how a flat file system works, but i guess it produces much more overhad than any database driven BB which might first of all add to the overall performance and secondly to the bandwith... but especially the performance is influenced by this. Just look at the statistics how many files this forum must have. I can imagine this slows every system down...

Back to the topic of a new bb... why the hell should we keep the old forum 'alive' and not as 'read only archive' anyway? From looking at it 75% of the posts are outdated anyway, so how about a nice new board, a mediawiki (at best connected directly with the board!) and then start all over again. Make stities for the most important stuff/questions and keep the old one as archive?

It depends...
I dont quite now how a flat file system works, but i guess it produces much more overhad than any database driven BB which might first of all add to the overall performance and secondly to the bandwith... but especially the performance is influenced by this. Just look at the statistics how many files this forum must have. I can imagine this slows every system down...

Back to the topic of a new bb... why the hell should we keep the old forum 'alive' and not as 'read only archive' anyway? From looking at it 75% of the posts are outdated anyway, so how about a nice new board, a mediawiki (at best connected directly with the board!) and then start all over again. Make stities for the most important stuff/questions and keep the old one as archive?

There might be something to the theory that the MSN bot is DDOS'ing the forum. It's at 46 bots right now. Nobody with any self respect even uses MSN search. :wink: I'd blacklist the MSN bot if I were the admins!