I’ll be reworking some stuff around the hosting of mudspike.com, so this is a heads up for that if you see anything super weird (other than Eric buying an xbox to flight sim without a joystick). Here’s the changes:
To reduce some storage costs the image uploads are being reduced in size a bit. Today the forum does a good job of resizing at upload to save space, but since we’ve been going since 2015 and that feature didn’t exist then, we’ve got lots of old huge images in posts people never read costing storage. I’ll be ‘rebaking’ all those old posts to reduce those 16 MB bmp files of stuff people don’t read anymore. I am not sure how long that background task will take, but it probably won’t help system performance. The plan is to do that soon, e.g. today.
We’ll be taking down the main www.mudspike.com site in the future, so this is a heads-up for @Chuck_Owl that we will no longer be able to host his guides (EDIT: see https://chucksguides.com for where they are now). We are looking at preserving some/all? of the articles in the forum as posts (in #articles etc), but that process will take a while. https://www.mudspike.com will then redirect to https://forums.mudspike.com. I’d guess the main www site won’t be taken down for at least a month or so, so this is more just an early warning that it’s happening.
We’ll be moving all the forum images/files to somewhere cheaper. When this happens the forum will probably need to be put to ‘read-only’ while the transfer takes place. The forum will be locked for edits etc, but I’m not sure for how long as we’ve not moved 150 GB of tiny files before. There’ll be another post in #meta before this takes place. I’d guess it will be read-only for a few days. I am not sure when we’ll do this, but probably not super soon. I guess use Discord or something.
These changes are to save some costs plus more appropriately fit the usage that the sites get today.
Just so we have some idea @fearlessfrog, what are the monthly costs (ballpark figure) involved in keeping the lights on around here? I’m guessing this means we are not likely to see Chris coming back in the immediate future…
Yeah thats correct @jross chris receives the money that way
Ive never asked if he actually “got” the money as i didn’t want to look like i was hunting for a thanks so ive just periodically made a small donation to help out
I’m not sure of the exact costs, as Chris does all that. I think we’ll see him again, so I’m personally just choosing to think of it more like a reorg of stuff that’s actively used and a Chris-batical before he returns. If we get more articles going in the future then super easy to put back a www site. If we need larger forum images in the future then I can up the limits etc. I don’t really want to speak for him, but I’d guess he doesn’t really want any donations, just some time off before he comes back and says hi. I’ll chat to Chuck for other options as well, so he won’t be left in the lurch.
The image resize has being going for about an hour and is 1% done, but it looks like the forum is still working ok while it happens.
Thanks Fearless, that makes me feel better. Please shoot me a PM if there is anything I can do to help. I view Mudspike as being my local pub… where I go to meet my friends and have good chat (and I have even been known to have a glass in my hand as I read the forum ).
I buy hosting and a website for my company, I wonder how those people would feel about me hosting something wildly popular and neccesary as Chuck’s guides…
I know Chris gets and appreciates the donations because he’s reached out to me to say thanks for the little monthly $5 donation. I’d be willing to bump it up a lot if I had some idea what level would be needed to keep the current web address and content. I know that there is risk in having users foot the bill. Not the least of which is that today’s enthusiastic supporter might be tomorrow’s rage-quitter while the site managers are left with the same bill but less funding.
That’s the risk. But some of us are never going away. The Xbox should be taken as proof of my permanence.
Also, not to be poking the bear, but hosting Chuck’s Guides is probably the biggest Mudspike contribution to the community besides the forum. Isn’t there something we can do?
Yea, the question there being is the issue just the location that they are (main site)? - If so, would perhaps a special forum category and sticky threads + PDF attachments work fine?
OR is it storage and bandwidth related? (As an example, the F-14 guide - likely the largest - is a 104MB download.)
I see that with the jpg’s - nice and compact! Just a technical question out of curiosity, was WEBP format an option or considered?
I see it popping up on more and more sites - wondering if it really does provide a significant advantage over older formats in real world use cases.
Oof, yea - small files always make it fun……and slow.
The main site was set up for articles and there aren’t any anymore, with the last one about a year ago. It might come back one day if there is content to see. The intent nor desire is just to be a place to read the DCS missing manuals.
Eventually it’ll come, there’s still a few devices that can’t upgrade that webp is not compatible with.
Also, it would be remiss for me not to say, but the people that use this forum day to day should really all go give @Troll a huge group hug. Without his time and effort he’s put in here for the last 6 months then the site would have been turned off to be honest. He literally saved it. Stuff like that is pretty much a thankless task, as stuff on the internet just gets like furniture and things don’t ever go change or go away, but in this case it’s pretty much just down to him.
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