2341

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Search is case sensitive

« on: December 07, 2013, 04:24:11 PM »

Do you observe the same strange behaviour (ie getting different returns for the same search at different times?)

Yes, but I can at least explain that one. Quick search seems to apply to the current forum/thread, so if you quick search from S&C, you get different results from searching in FEIR.

Quick searching from the homepage seems to return everything.

2342

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Search is case sensitive

« on: December 07, 2013, 04:14:41 PM »

I've just spent 15 minutes or so reading through the 1500-line PHP function that implements SMF's search algorithm, and I both want to kill myself and am no closer to knowing how to fix this. I'll come back to it, but it could take a while to decipher what the SMF developers were thinking when they decided it would be a good idea to code while on acid.

2343

Announcements / Re: We have our first cloud-hosted subdomain!

« on: December 07, 2013, 02:59:51 PM »

Will you, have you, won't you, consider hosting images on this website?

Yes. However, it's not a priority at the moment.

I suspect you could then serve such pictures to the forums at stupid efiiciency.

Like you wouldn't believe.

2344

Announcements / Re: Intention to set up CMS homepage

« on: December 07, 2013, 12:02:46 PM »

Thanks to our graphic design whiz kid Blanko, we now have a FES-styled theme for the website:

http://www.tfes.org.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/

Now all it needs is content!

2345

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFlare for serving static content

« on: December 07, 2013, 09:15:33 AM »

I decided to run with CloudFlare in the end. The library is now being served via CloudFlare, and the homepage will soon follow suit.

2346

Announcements / We have our first cloud-hosted subdomain!

« on: December 07, 2013, 09:11:44 AM »

For those who have been keeping up in S&C, I've been researching different CDN providers to reduce the dependency of the various tfes.org services on my VPS. I've just moved the least critical of these services into this new cloud thing you kids keep talking about these days.

The Flat Earth Library is now served by CloudFlare, a global CDN which caches web content to provide high-speed page loads around the world. The backing store for this is an Amazon S3 bucket here in Sydney, Australia, which provides high availability for these files at low cost.

The directory indices look very similar to the output from nginx's autoindex directive. That's because I like nginx's indexing format, and I wrote about 30 lines of horrible shell script in a Makefile to emulate it.

I'd appreciate it if any volunteer guinea pigs could try using the new library, and let me know if it performs reasonably well for you, or if you find any weird problems.

2347

Technology & Information / Re: How to Subnet, an Example

« on: December 07, 2013, 06:59:31 AM »

lol no one uses presenation layer willingly

How would you know? You're not qualified.

2348

Technology & Information / Re: How to Subnet, an Example

« on: December 07, 2013, 06:48:03 AM »

You subnet to get IPs.  I can also teach you all about the OSI, especially layers 2 and 3.  I am a pro, almost qualified.

Can you teach me about layer 6? It's the one I know least about.

2349

Technology & Information / Re: Laptop needed

« on: December 07, 2013, 05:56:54 AM »

Why exactly is a HDD necessary for playing games?

2350

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 07, 2013, 04:29:11 AM »

After trying out various CDNs, I can say that all of the ones which aren't geared for big business suck in one way or another. Incapsula was the closest one I found to being usable for our purposes, but they don't offer IPv6, which I consider to be important.

Therefore, I'll be serving the homepage from my VPS for the time being.

2351

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Nelson Mandella is dead

« on: December 07, 2013, 04:19:09 AM »

EJ, my patience with you is wearing thin. Keep it civil in the serious fora, or you'll find yourself the target of this website's first ban.

2352

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 07, 2013, 02:28:39 AM »

AWS' CDN uses their slower S3 servers - it's more about offloading requests from your servers, rather than actually using faster servers. So if your VPS isn't under strain, it's probably better to leave it like that. Probably better to just focus on preventing your VPS from going down

I wasn't expecting faster servers, only shorter latency. Also, downtime is inevitable. While my VPS is up most of the time, it can't hurt to plan for what happens when it's not.

2353

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Use CloudFront for serving static content

« on: December 06, 2013, 01:28:45 PM »

This is really quite incredible. The www.tfes.org homepage loads slower using Amazon's CDN (which has a node here in Sydney) than it does directly from my VPS across the Pacific. For images around 20-30 kB, the load time is around the same.

I'm unconvinced of the merit of using this CDN at this point. There would be the benefit of high availability, which means I could use the main website to post status updates if and when my VPS goes down. I think I'll sleep on it.


For anyone who wants to test it out, you can access Amazon's copy of the site at https://dxg6c29e1dr2m.cloudfront.net/. (Yes, this will appear in your browser as www.tfes.org eventually if we switch to using it.)

2354

Technology & Information / Re: The Flat Earth Society official IRC chat

« on: December 05, 2013, 10:36:56 PM »

Just a suggestion, but an irc chat thing could be in the header of this forum.

Upside is easy and everyone gets to be part of the discussion as it happens live. This i really like. + its not saved so you can be a bit more out there.

Downside is it is more moderation.

But it may well be fun. If it can be done, why not trial it? Putting everything in one place is simpler and easy for users.

IRC change is coming, now that the people running IRC and the people running the forum are the same. It's just not a priority, and keeping things the same for now will help people continue to settle into a familiar-looking forum.

2355

Announcements / Re: Comments wanted: Switching domain to tfes.org

« on: December 05, 2013, 10:12:53 PM »

Still a little over two weeks out, but I have the only bid.  I'd be happy to host e-mail unless Parsifal would rather.

I will be setting up e-mail for tfes.org this weekend, and it'll be easier if I do the same for any other domains down the line. The reason I want to do it is that I want to change the e-mail address this forum sends from to something at tfes.org rather than my personal e-mail address, and thus want to manage the path of any return mail.

2356

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Message thing broken

« on: December 05, 2013, 08:34:28 PM »

It works as long as I start typing the name in the proper case.  It may have worked that way all along as I hadn't tried.

Yes, it would do that. It only just occurred to me that people might want to use it in a case-insensitive manner. Fixed.

2357

Announcements / Who is doing what

« on: December 05, 2013, 01:58:25 PM »

I thought I'd compile a list of people who are taking charge of specific parts of the new FES setup, as it's easy to lose track of these things. In fact, I already don't know if I've missed some, but I'll be trying to keep this list up to date going forward.

Since there is some confusion, please note: This is not a list of people who are helping. A large number of people are helping in many different ways, and it's appreciated on all counts. This is a list of people who have taken charge of various different things, so that if you need to talk to someone about a specific part of the site, you know who to contact.


Blanko
Logo/theme design

Irushwithscvs
Reddit

junker
Google+
tfes.org domain registration

Parsifal
Forum co-admin
Homepage
IRC
Web hosting

pizaaplanet
Forum co-admin
Wiki
Facebook

Secret User
Twitter

2358

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Saddam's Troll concerns

« on: December 05, 2013, 12:06:51 PM »

We have no policy as yet. Decisions will be made on a case-by-case basis, erring on the side of leniency, until we have actual rules in place.

This is a good opportunity to discuss what people think the policy should be. Let's use this thread as a place to do that. Thoughts, anyone?

2359

Announcements / Forum should now be accessible from all IPv6 clients

« on: December 05, 2013, 11:56:13 AM »

I noticed at the office today that some IPv6 clients were unable to access the site, getting the helpful message "Database Error". The problem is that IPv6 addresses in human-readable form can be up to 39 characters long, but SMF logs all requests in a table with the IP address encoded into a column limited to 32 characters in length. If you are on IPv6 and your address happens to be longer than that, you can't use the forum. Like, at all.

I've redefined that column to have a length limit of 100 characters, which should be enough for anyone, and confirmed that it Works For Me now. Let me know if you notice any more issues on IPv6 clients (although, if you do, you likely won't be able to post in this thread...).

IPv6 still won't work perfectly. Your IP address will be logged as 0.0.0.0, for instance, because SMF can't handle the fact that this isn't 1995. But you should at least be able to browse and post with IPv6 now.

2360

Suggestions & Concerns / Re: Set up server monitoring

« on: December 05, 2013, 11:22:58 AM »

On closer inspection, New Relic isn't well suited to our needs. I'll look at what else is available; I may simply end up using an open-source solution.