Byennie's thread update on CelticsStrong

[ozgod]

Referring to this thread to help Byennie defray the cost of running the site - OUR site. He may run it, but we make it what it is, by our content and our participation and our community.

This is the thread: https://forum.celticsstrong.com/index.php?topic=110200.msg3360501#new

Byennie was asking for suggestions on the thread but unfortunately it is locked, probably because it's in the Announcements forum. I wanted to say I think a Patreon is a great idea and will allow people to contribute as they can.

[Donoghus]

I'm down for whatever to keep this thing afloat.   It's been a part of my life for nearly 20 years now and I'd like to keep it going if we can.

[chicagoceltic]

I'm down for whatever to keep this thing afloat.   It's been a part of my life for nearly 20 years now and I'd like to keep it going if we can.

Byennie, I just sent a PM before I saw this thread. I am happy to contribute monthly or I could send a bit more right now. I appreciate all you have done to keep this site afloat and am happy to help. Please let me know how best to contribute.

[hwangjini_1]

we have been here before and i have not changed my mind. let me know about this and i am in as a contributor. it is worth keeping celtics strong around.

[ChillyWilly]

I'm all for helping out but someone from the tech community explain to my why a sub 1000 member forum board requires more than a $20/m VPS or some mini AWS account?

What is happening here that this site is taking up so much server resources? Does the database need a clean up? Does some of the code need a look at to see if something is causing issues?

[byennie]

Thanks guys. First step was just to call out the situation and see what the community had to say. Right now the plan is to do a round of cost cutting (there might not be much left there, but always worth a shot) and set up some Patreon options where people can help me chip away at the monthly bills.

[byennie]

I'm all for helping out but someone from the tech community explain to my why a sub 1000 member forum board requires more than a $20/m VPS or some mini AWS account?

What is happening here that this site is taking up so much server resources? Does the database need a clean up? Does some of the code need a look at to see if something is causing issues?

The short answer is we inherited a legacy forum running on 2007 era forum software, that outgrew its database about a decade ago.

At the end of the day the hosting requirements are something like:

SMF 2.0.x (same major version released in 2007)
PHP 7.x (end-of-life unsupported for several years now)
Terabytes of bandwidth per month, more than any of the major free/cheap hosting tiers
Upkeep from things like AI bots going crazy indexing the whole site
Hundreds of database connections during peak times (a lot of free/cheap hosts would cut this off way sooner)

The software, unfortunately, is just really old and those requirements violate pretty much every economy hosting plan I've seen. Everything about it is slow and not very scalable, and patching 20 year-old spaghetti code in PHP is challenging without turning it into a game of whack-a-mole. On top of that, there's no record of what kind of changes and tweaks were made in the CelticsBlog days... what I received when I took over the site was literally a dump of the database and an undocumented pile of files that appeared to be an SMF forum. So as a bonus, it's quite brittle.

Interestingly these days with AI it might be more feasible for someone to pick it up and make more fixes and changes, but that's not something I can commit the time to myself right now, despite being a software engineer. I will say, I'm pretty handy with performance... my day job involves shaving microseconds off of a trading platform and I've personally built much larger systems than this forum. So while it's totally possible someone who simply invested time in it could make a major upgrade, it's also not a blind spot. Decades old PHP querying a gazillion database rows very inefficiently while keeping all of those pages public just adds up, when it's getting hit 10s of millions of times per month. Death by a million cuts.

All of that said, I'll probably still look around to see what other hosting deals are out there right now. The risk is, we move to another host to save a few bucks and all of the duct tape comes flying off and the site stops working, and it's all for naught. So my 1st, 2nd and 3rd instinct is usually not to mess with it. Long as it's running identical software on identical operating systems that I fully control, it should run indefinitely, if not inefficiently. 3rd party host decides one day it doesn't want to support something critical? Dead overnight.

Anyway, it's a fair question, but yeah -- it takes a lot more than you'd think, but also despite my abilities, I'm not exactly diving into it as an engineering project either.

[ozgod]

I think there are things we can all do in the short term and long term.

Short term:

• cost cutting (Byennie can do)
• help Byennie with the cost of hosting the site via optional donations (Patreon will give people the choice to either donate an amount they want, or Byennie can set up donation tiers, or whatever works best for each person who is interested in donating)

Long term:

• alternative hosting options to improve site stability and experience, allow us to increase member pool. I think we can all provide recommendations on this and Byennie and the admins/mods can determine if any are worth pursuing
• I think being able to increase the member pool is important, who knows how many people might be browsing and want to participate in our community but are unable to and they end up going elsewhere, to Reddit, RealGM or elsewhere. Bigger pool of members = more active site = more potential donations

[Boston Garden Leprechaun]

1) set up donation tiers- we need this tracked and shown on users profile so we(the users) can keep track ourselves. run ads. see if we can get new advertisers. See if we can get sponsors. Let's calculate how much $$ we would need monthly to keep this afloat. have it posted in a banner at the top of the board for all members to see. We will need to hit  X amount of $$ each month to continue. members can see and donate as we go along each month to keep this running. That way all are involved here and can see what it will take each month to keep this going. Any extra donations over the amount listed on the banner will be applied to next months expenses. The banner will show that once the new month starts.


2) Look, it is great most all members here are old dogs who have been here for ages. some have been here 20 years. i have been here 14. long time regardless. we need new members. I do not go to any other boards so i do not know where the competition lies. We need to compete with other boards. so we may need a new site. i would scrap a bunch of boards on this site that get little traffic. I think we have way too many.

3) for being an old site the format is not bad at all. update if you can. if not i would not sweat it. see below.

4) again, this board is like a planet in a far away closed galaxy that nobody can contact because we are so far away. Must have new members to keep this afloat.

5) i am not an IT guy but if switching servers caused a site shutdown get an estimate on what a new build and update would cost. I am in for paying for a completely new website/software/etc. We will sub it out for someone else to build so byennie only has to monitor and make sure it is done his way. he will not have to worry about all the details or day to day. or actually doing the building. We will tell the builders exactly how we want the new site built.


what year did we bail from celtics blog? 2014?

[Boston Garden Leprechaun]

message deleted. found a fix for something.

[byennie]

Thanks guys, I think we're all roughly on the same page with some priorities:

1. I've already done some cost cutting, with any luck it won't be noticeable at all;

2. I'll post a Patreon over the weekend. I plan to just keep it open-ended, this is a small pool of people who know what they are able to contribute short term. The best thing for me is just to have that bit of monthly float on top of #1 while we sort things out. It makes more sense than doing things like prepaying servers if we're considering migrations.

3. I'll take a crack at fixing signups, so that door is at least open again;

Longer term it seems like there is an openness to migrating the forum to new software (within reason). It's something I've played conservative and avoided in principle to preserve what's here, but if the community is onboard let's look more into it.