I just noticed this thread. Chitown, you are too much, thanks for posting this! I was wondering where the members were coming from this weekend. I haven’t had a lot of time this last week to keep up with memberships. I will try and knock them out today since I have some time (but oh, God its nice out!).
dasronin wrote:I have contributed to a site that had to do with AR15 rifles. There are constant send money requests. Then a limited number of lifetime memberships that started at $250. Some missed out and asked for that opportunity and the response was if they did it would be $500 or something like that. Well... the "make the site better" was really a drive to collect capital to make the site a large for profit business. The focus was on increasing membership to charge businesses more for advertising. Bod of the day was added as soft happytime. A 13 year old was posting soft happytime and the admin did not care (he was a paid member and it required a credit card to purchase a membership
). All the experienced knowledge base of members drifted away and the firearms equivelent of Squids took over the site. There was limited moderation and short of threatening to kill another member, personal attacks in posts were overlooked in the general discussion. The site turned into a huge money maker for the owners but the concept of the site was killed in the process.
I think anyone who has been a member of this site knows that I have a serious personal commitment to maintaining civility and a comfortable atmosphere here. I deal with inappropriate behavior and rude comments quickly and with a heavy hand because after running this site for 5 years, I've learned what starts fights and what ends them. Some of you 'ol timers may remember the large blowout the site had as a result of differing opinions, and overnight about 1/8 of the common posters left the site and create their own (Which I heard is dead and full of happytime now.. I don’t visit it, anyone know?!). At first I was a little upset that people felt the need to leave and follow the raucous ramblings a certain few that had an opinion about how this place should be run.
But you know what I realized later? All of the people that made this site a constant headache for me LEFT too! IMO, ever since that dilemma, I've really enjoyed the group of guys and girls we've been able to hold onto. To all of you who have stuck with us, I salute and thank you!
I also want to comment on the site performance as of late. There have been a stream of issues arising from the updates that I have performed on the site in an attempt to increase the user experience here and keep up with the newest technology (security issues, bugs, etc). I had been putting them off for a long time (because I knew it would be a painful process) and I finally had the time and IT backing of our ISP to go forward, so I did. After the forums were updated, we realized we had to update the backend database and some other web tools like cpanel that I use to administer the board. Some things broke, some things had growing pains, some things are better. We also had a coincidental attack on the main server that houses our ISP, and the slow-downs as a result were out of mine and our ISP's control. We just had to wait it out. I am working every day to make sure that the board runs as smoothly as possible, but we still are experiencing a memory leak that causes the site to slow down. The ISP is working on tracking down which of its sites is the root cause, he doesn't think its us.
We have a VERY large site here now and we produce up to 3gb of traffic a day (keep in mind, that’s 90% textual, so 3gb is an amazing amount of content and traffic if you think about it). I also pull down nightly backups that eat away at bandwidth, but after a couple scary moments with the last upgrade (almost losing data - can you imagine losing all of the old posts?!) I went out and bought a 4TB Network backup appliance for this purpose. I've wanted to do this for a while but their cost was prohibitive. With the raffle funds coming in, I didn’t waste any time purchasing and setting it up; it was time (you can all thank MikeCam for allowing this to happen). I also have the ISP doing backups so I can sleep at night knowing that if the site was ever attacked or we had a real issue, our data and site structure is safe and repairable from two separate locations.
Also, with the influx of cash, I was able to raise the bandwidth to 75GB from 35GB so we should not see the bandwith limitation for a long time (or until I have to throtle it back again!). I realize it went down a couple days ago - This was a result of all of the backups I had done while upgrading the site. I had pulled down about 60Gb in data during the backup process and it never occurred to me that those transfers would hit the site's GB quota. I assumed it would just be looking at external connections, not connections to me. Now I know!
So, I appreciate all of those people that are as committed to the site as I am. I think we have something really special here and if you've been a frequent member of any other message boards, I think you know what I mean. Thanks for everyone's support, civility and general good banter. I love it!
-Doug
Ps- about the login/logout issues. Please try logging out, clearing your cookies AND cache, close the browser, log back in and select "log me in automatically". This solves the issue for most. If you are using Internet Explorer, I highly recommend you try the free FireFox browser instead:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
in one place.
this is where you go and if the sites down we are all out of luck with no where to turn...
