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[SiC]

17 minutes ago, loserone said:

Clink!

Just to touch on costs and for the avoidance of any doubt/those that are curious, it hasn't always been this high. The current high point I believe was when the hosting provider screwed around with things recently and stuff had to be recreated. In the haste, the old broken stuff wasn't deleted. That's what I gathered from my clear out of orphaned and legacy resources.

 

It hasn't always been this way. Just 3 years ago when I believe hosting was moved to this provider, it was a lot cheaper. Over provisioned server with plenty of room to grow wasn't an issue when the costs were half what they are now.

 

The provider putting up costs this year doesn't help. 

Speaking to our infrastructure and cloud teams at work, it's a common thing across the industry from small scale to the hyperscalers that costs have increased dramatically. Power price increases especially are a becoming a big factor in compute costs. New lower power servers are paying for themselves in the matter of months compared to stuff even from a few years back. 

[reb]

If the costs are by hour, I have an idea to halve the costs!

 

 

Reduce the duty cycle from 100% to 50%; switch the server off for an hour every other hour.

[loserone]

3 minutes ago, reb said:

Reduce the duty cycle from 100% to 50%; switch the server off for an hour every other hour.

I think we tried that recently and it didn't go down that well

[SiC]

Maybe this is the DVLA excuse on why you can only owners between 7am and 7pm... Someone turns off the server when they turn out the lights for the night. 😅

[reb]

I always thought they did that because filling in the online form actually prints a change of keepers slip into some pale character's in tray and he spends 12 hours manually changing things on the system each night.

[SiC]

Yeah I imagine it's batch processing changes overnight. I really wouldn't be surprised if it's some old mainframe either cranking along in a Swansea basement or a virtual mainframe running on some overpriced Linux server. 

Had another flick through the hosting bills. Looks like the site had a 25% promo discount on the first year of hosting. So a year after it went up by that. 

I'd still like to get the bill back down to €80 pcm in the short/mid term. Maybe change providers in the longer term. But tbh I don't think there is that much scope of a cheaper provider. Certainly the hyperscalers like aws/azure/etc aren't cheap. And don't want some two bit outfit where the server falls off the network because some remote hand tripped over a feed wire and pulled out a rack commando plug. 

[Talbot]

1 hour ago, loserone said:

If you have any intention of printing the images, for example, for a calendar, then you might as well have a six year old with a crayon for the quality that they print at.  

At that point you surely ask the OP to either email over the camera raw / original full-size jpeg, or get them to upload it to one of umpteen free image hosts online that will host at uploaded quality and not compress it.

Compared to many other forums, we host at a decent size and quality.    Some are restricted to 640x480 with jpeg compression so hard it looks like the borg are in the sky.

2 hours ago, loserone said:

I certainly had the impression that uploading videos and people DMing ISO images was the biggest impact to the storage space, where a few GB extra in image storage, whilst an ongoing cost, was probably having less of an impact.

We're currently running at something a bit north of 200GB stored, which is fairly significant.  As mentioned before, that amount has grown exponentially over the last decade or so, hence why we had to address it.  I think we have the right balance now.

[SiC]

1 hour ago, loserone said:

Still, I appreciate that would be reliant on folk not abusing it

If it's there, it'll get used. If it gets used, it'll get over used. Before the more modest upload file restrictions were imposed, you could upload 100mb files or so. There was one particular user (who probably was the worst offender) that sent a few PMs to various people with a GB or so of files split across a multi zip packages. Then left it sat there. I mean if the forum software allows such sizes to be sent with no restrictions, then it must be okay right?

So yes, if the functionality is there then it will get used and over used. There will no doubt be a case where a whole museum worth of photos are uploaded at full quality that are 20 to 30 fold size over compressed versions. I mean why not, as people will likely want to zoom in for full detail and the forum allows this override...

How do I know this will happen for certain? Because I am that person I've just mentioned above who did that! 🤣

Hence if I will do it, I know for certain others will do too. 

Little implication or worry for the user doing it but certainly implications for long storage and costs.

[loserone]

1 hour ago, SiC said:

Maybe this is the DVLA excuse on why you can only owners between 7am and 7pm... Someone turns off the server when they turn out the lights for the night. 😅

I understood they got an early deal on spot instances which makes it significantly cheaper than if they had to pay AWS the current costs  

[reb]

I have a rant brewing about wasteful use of digital resources, but I'll put it somewhere else so as not to clog up this thread. That would be wasteful.

[High Jetter]

2 hours downtime? Has to be done, I guess, and 3am may not be convenient. Thanks to all involved in the maintenance.

[Uncle Jimmy]

Hello, hoping you maybe able to assist, whilst I am able to view the forum and leave 'likes' I cant seem to contribute to threads or send any messages using my Samsung android phone,
no problems using this desktop though. Is that possibly this forum as I have no issues elsewhere?

[High Jetter]

What do you get when you try to reply to a post, on the phone?

[SiC]

9 minutes ago, Uncle Jimmy said:

Hello, hoping you maybe able to assist, whilst I am able to view the forum and leave 'likes' I cant seem to contribute to threads or send any messages using my Samsung android phone,
no problems using this desktop though. Is that possibly this forum as I have no issues elsewhere?

Try deleting all the site data and relogin. 

The problem may magically go away after the forum software is updated tomorrow too. It'll possibly force update any cached scripts/data in your phone after the update and I imagine this text editor has a script error/missing/not loaded or similar. That would be fixed with a cache clear.

[Uncle Jimmy]

43 minutes ago, High Jetter said:

What do you get when you try to reply to a post, on the phone?

It just churns over and over when I press 'submit reply'.

[SiC]

16 hours ago, High Jetter said:

2 hours downtime? Has to be done, I guess, and 3am may not be convenient. Thanks to all involved in the maintenance.

There is a fair bit of work that needs attending to and backups will take a bit of time to finish before that can even be started. In the current state there are some unknowns (I've tried to reduce to a minimum) but stuff can/almost certainly will crop up during the process that will need to be taken care of as it comes up. Hopefully it'll take less time (certainly my target). If it takes longer then I'm having a rather bad day and everyone will have to just hold on. Absolute worse case if it's turning into a shit show, I'll hit abort on the process and recover the current state from backups, then redo a later time with a new plan. 

3am start? If you're prepared to pay me the industry standard day contractor rate then it may be something I'd entertain... 😉

[Remspoor]

I spy new font style.

[Merryck]

Just now, Remspoor said:

I spy new font style.

It's DIFFERENT.

Change scares me.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

I like the thumbnails below the thread updates. Not sure about the font though...

[RoverFolkUs]

On 8/16/2023 at 2:53 PM, SiC said:

Maybe this is the DVLA excuse on why you can only owners between 7am and 7pm... Someone turns off the server when they turn out the lights for the night. 😅

Then a mysterious* corruption turns Invacars into Invacares 😅🤣

[RoverFolkUs]

Yes, what's with the font change, is it an update? Going to take some getting used to! Is there an option to individually personalise it like you can with the layout and theme? I doubt it, but thought I'd ask

[LightBulbFun]

@SiC (and other mods/admins involved etc!) many thanks for getting the forum up to date and keeping everything ticking along  

is it possible to change the user tags back to the darker beige they once where? I find the blue to be a bit jarring against all the lovely brown/beige  

[Talbot]

Given the severity of the update that has just happened, can we keep the requests for cosmetic changes to a minimum until we're happy that it's all worked properly?  SiC has just made some fairly huge changes to the overall running of the site, so whilst I am sure minor colour/font/etc changes may be possible in time, they're not critical right now.

[SiC]

I'll have a quick poke around for a bit to see if I can fix anything while I have everything open. 

Fonts I could possibly revert to old style, but I suspect they may become deprecated or removed already, so may not be an option. Then it'll revert back again on the next update. So they really should stay as they are.

I'll have a look in the colours now. Tbh I haven't really noticed as I use the default IPB blue theme as I've always found the brown/beige colour scheme hard to read the text with these dyslexic eyes.

[SiC]

19 minutes ago, LightBulbFun said:

@SiC (and other mods/admins involved etc!) many thanks for getting the forum up to date and keeping everything ticking along  

is it possible to change the user tags back to the darker beige they once where? I find the blue to be a bit jarring against all the lovely brown/beige  

 

If you could find a screenshot on the forum (there must be one somewhere) of a previous mention, I'll snag the colour code and push it into the theme. I could make one up, but colours aren't my forte and it may end up looking worse.

[yes oui si]

New font upsets me at a very base level. 

[SiC]

Okay just reverted my personal test install and checked the settings. Looks like the update reverted the font out of a couple that could be chosen.

Lato is the font that was previously used. Inter is the font used on the default theme.

I've just changed it back to Lato. It still _may_ not exactly the same due to the font upgrade may change the rendering a tad, but it should be near enough identical unless you're a font aficionado.

[High Jetter]

Details. Downtime was less than forecast, main thing is we're back online. Massive thanks to the back room boys for generous gift of time and skills. Much appreciated.

[hairnet]

just tried to close a thread i started 

it wouldnt let me - only delete

is that right?

 

[SiC]

2 minutes ago, hairnet said:

just tried to close a thread i started 

it wouldnt let me - only delete

is that right?

Not sure I follow. Was there an option previously to lock a thread? I thought that was an admin option only.

I believe delete has always been there to the OP.