I agree. And I think when this was put to a poll about 70% of members agree with you. I think this is an overwhelming mandate to upgrade. But there are some vocal members who disagree. I think it's odd that 30% can hold up the upgrade process.
Steve
The update is not blocked by the minority. When we asked for the update, after the poll, we were told that our sponsor would probably not bother. The only thing we managed to get was to get Sam add the pgn viewer plugin (he did what he could with the current software, and did it well). That's not much.
Maybe it's time to move Talkchess to a place we (Talkchess' users) can control ? I've been told the database would be around 500 GB, which is a lot to host and to move...
thats a good point.
the community should get back the control about the forum.
What seems like a fairy tale today may be reality tomorrow.
Here we have a fairy tale of the day after tomorrow....
jdart wrote:I am an old guy. I don't do anything on my phone but make phone calls. And I'm not so attached to talkchess that I have to have it everywhere I go. Sorry, but that is just not a problem I have.
Maybe it is also time to remember that everybody here is very prepared to talk about this or that improvement, but when the moment come to pay a cent, everybody get cold feet.
I'm not sure I understand why the process is made to sound so complex/expensive. Hosting providers have unlimited bandwidth/ Unlimited storage plans for about $10 per month. Intro rates for signing up for 3 years are as low as $4 per month. So even if just a few motivated people (who want high tech access) contributed every year, the fee would be covered in full.
More importantly many many people have these hosting accounts already. Meaning, you can just point the Talkchess domain at the persons hosting provider and create a new PHPBB subdirectory - done. Since the person is already paying for unlimited everything for their own use, the additional cost is zero dollars. The only real cost is to the person(s) that maintains the site (time) and many hosting providers allow you to create multiple credentials with restricted access to different sub-directories. Is it that absolutely no TalkChess user has a host account for hosting their own domain, email or a website?
What am I missing here? It sounds like the debate is about a between zero and $120 per year problem. People donate more electricity to Stockfish testing every year.
mbabigian wrote:I'm not sure I understand why the process is made to sound so complex/expensive. Hosting providers have unlimited bandwidth/ Unlimited storage plans for about $10 per month. Intro rates for signing up for 3 years are as low as $4 per month. So even if just a few motivated people (who want high tech access) contributed every year, the fee would be covered in full.
More importantly many many people have these hosting accounts already. Meaning, you can just point the Talkchess domain at the persons hosting provider and create a new PHPBB subdirectory - done. Since the person is already paying for unlimited everything for their own use, the additional cost is zero dollars. The only real cost is to the person(s) that maintains the site (time) and many hosting providers allow you to create multiple credentials with restricted access to different sub-directories. Is it that absolutely no TalkChess user has a host account for hosting their own domain, email or a website?
What am I missing here? It sounds like the debate is about a between zero and $120 per year problem. People donate more electricity to Stockfish testing every year.
This is a common misconception relating the hosting. A website with this many members and that uses the amount of traffic that we use, a shared hosting account would _never_ suffice. I host (just moved it to my server) my own personal blog on Dreamhost and I've been suspended 3 times for "excess resource usage" if I happen to post anything that gets a lot of hits or has documents that people can download. I did it for educational purposes to show a client just how easy it was to get suspended from a provider for a high traffic/resource website.
We'd need at minimum our our VPS server.
Peter
I was kicked out of Chapters because I moved all the Bibles to the fiction section.
Peter I know you are sincere in trying to find a way to move the site to a more advanced platform, but this type of reply is counter productive. You have now convinced everyone that something called "VPS" which 90% here don't have a clue about is needed and inferred that it is so expensive the problem is unsolvable because no one will pay for it. So was your intent to convince everyone to give up and move to another thread?
There are many very bright minds here. Bright minds can solve all kinds of problems if the problem is presented. That hasn't happened yet and will only prevent a resolution.
Julien said the database is 500GB and Ronald de Man replied it can't be that big, maybe 500MB. So how big is the database? How fast does it grow per month? How much bandwidth does this site consume per month? What other technical requirements does the site have? If you detail out the problem, you'd be surprised how many solutions might get presented.
Who can provide those figures and requirements? I'm very curious to know just how much bandwidth a text website really uses every month. How many hits does this forum get a month? How many users are there?
This type of information will define the problem. Without a problem to solve, the thread is just bantering about which users are fine as is versus those users that want more. I don't think that's what you want.
Why not turn the thread into a project, with a scope of work, problem definition, goals, etc. Get people talking about how to make the change rather than endlessly debating whether or not it should be done.
JuLieN wrote:Maybe it's time to move Talkchess to a place we (Talkchess' users) can control ? I've been told the database would be around 500 GB, which is a lot to host and to move...
We have been here before. I can believe a monthly data traffic of 500Gb but not the database itself. The old CCC archives of 1997-2006 is just 1Gb unzipped and I may assume (good) forum software zips its storage. Perhaps you should ask again.
