We all are experiencing more and more downtimes of the website. Although we got used to the sporadic downtimes in the past we face a whole new quality of problems. Each 2nd posted text gets a 500 in return, most of the long threads are no longer visible at all and the forum index, if loaded at all, is either outdated or takes two cups of coffee to load.
Therefore i ask the admin team in this thread to change the board software.
If need be there are dozens of users who will help you in migrating this to any other software that is faster and more stable than this ages old Yabb (As a paleontologist i feel like making a u/th dating of the board to see if the version came before or after the split up of )Pangaea..).
I know there is the problem with the links on other pages, but who says all will be lost? There are ways to preserve this. It might not work right from the start but it will do sooner or later, and i guess it will be sooner since the community is as willing to sacrifice time for it as it wants a stable software
Now this is a cheap trick, but i would like to ask the users to make this some sort of list of signs by simply adding a post to say they support a change...
Agree absolutely. Somebody suggested just abandoning this one, locking new posts and leaving as a read only board for google to find. Nice easy solution, since most threads only have a lifespan of a day or two. Meanwhile we start out afresh.....
The most fustrating part of the site's performance problems is the total lack of information or explanation from the site owners/managers/moderators, unless I've missed any feedback given.
If we at least knew that the powers that be are aware of the problem, explain the situation to us, share their plans for improvements then at least we would know that someone cares.
The most fustrating part of the site's performance problems is the total lack of information or explanation from the site owners/managers/moderators, unless I've missed any feedback given.
If we at least knew that the powers that be are aware of the problem, explain the situation to us, share their plans for improvements then at least we would know that someone cares.
Yea, I guess it hears OK, just problems talking back
I assume the problem must somehow be with costs or cash flow. Who can we send money to to help make it better? A member supported site might at least keep the electric bill/server bill from being the problem.
Tis not only the forum, also the playground is affected by the "Error 500" mess. We need a good solution for all of this. One solution to rule them all.
Let the community take care of it. We write the posts anyway
As this may drift into the direction of system architecture, may I suggest to split the forum from the blog/playground server. I suppose the load on the blog/playground is rather minimal, so it could run on a feeble virtual server of its own. Even if the forum should get down for some reason, at least the main entry page would still be there. Most of the software downloads have been shifted to google anyway. This can still be improved by adding bittorrent to the equation. Running a dedicated tracker is easy enough, as I've shown.
The forum gets all the traffic, so it needs a more rugged machine. A DNS entry for 'forum.arduino.cc' already exists, so it should be simple to make that point to a new server for hosting a speedy forum.
Just for reference:
A virtual server package with 2GB of exclusive RAM (+4GB dynamically), 40GB disk space, 5TB of included traffic, full root access, 24/7 phone support, running on an 8 core dell poweredge server, costs about 19.99? per month (CentOS 5.3 or Debian and some others, no openSUSE).
although i appreciate your idea of having a temporary forum i dont like the idea for several reasons.
A second forum would split up this great community, no matter if this one gets better or not, this will be permanent.
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.
Agreed. The best solution is to talk to the Arduino Team. It would be nice to know what their intentions are.
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 $90 / month. The provider (servint) is supposed to be one of the best around. I'll look into the possibility of upgrading to an account with more RAM to see if that can provide a quick mitigation of some of the problems while we look for a more permanent solution.
How many active and committed users do we have ? If 100 would pay 10$ 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.
