Missing Threads, AGAIN!

[Lida]

Perhaps if y'all donated a single dollar a year for this forum you so love, the management would be able to afford more reliable hosting.

I would be more than willing to pay for the service this Forum provides, but we have been told that the owners are relying on paid advertisers. Anytime they feel they need to change the status quo, I'm willing to ante up. I realize it is very hard work to keep something this large and complex running.

Now, OT, the URL for the missing Jason Momoa/Ronon Dex thread is (I hope):
http://forum.gateworld.net/showthread.php?t=12496

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[ShadowMaat]

$1 spread among 10,000 users still adds up nicely. Heck, even if a quarter of the "population" refused, it'd still be a pretty good deal, and personally, I think it'd be worth every penny.

[Three PhDs]

You do realise this is all provided for free? If someone was required to pay for the setup required to host the forums/site, you would be looking at thousands of dollars a month.

I realise perfectly the costs of running this forum, having run many myself. If you're paying thousands a month, you're being shafted so bad you shouldn't even be able to sit down.

[Madeleine]

Ah. Of course.

I'd recommend people try PM'ing Darren or David, since they're the most senior in the chain of command. Or even email them. Then keep your fingers crossed.

David's not senior in command. Darren's the owner, Greg's the Admin, Gipsy's the forum manager, the rest of the mods are all just... mods.

If Greg's not PMable then Darren's the only one able to fix missing threads (only Greg and Darren are Admins on this forum), but it's probably best to post in here in one of the threads greg visits.

[ShadowMaat]

Technically, David's not senior in command. Gipsy's the forum manager, the rest of the mods are all just... mods. .

Really? Huh. That explains a LOT.

I withdraw my suggestion, then. Pester Darren or pester this thread. Either way, keep your fingers crossed.

Oh, but feel free to pester David with useless nonsense unrelated to anything. He LOVES that. And it'll make him feel important. lol

[Greg]

I realise perfectly the costs of running this forum, having run many myself. If you're paying thousands a month, you're being shafted so bad you shouldn't even be able to sit down.

Shafted how? Do you realise how many servers are involved in just hosting the forums? There are six servers in total. We dont pay anything for the colocation or server management fees as i said earlier as it is all provided for free, however a comparable setup would run into the thousands of dollars a month..

1x Dual Xeon DB server
1x Dual Opteron DB Server
2x P4 3Ghz web servers
2x P4 2Ghz Cluster Controllers

The forum uses relatively little bandwidth, only ~2Mbps during peak periods, however the huge size of the database/user base means that a very large hardware setup is required to allow for scalable growth.

[Qasim]

I dont actually get PM's, as i have PM turned off.

Well that explains a fair few things

David's not senior in command. Darren's the owner, Greg's the Admin, Gipsy's the forum manager, the rest of the mods are all just... mods.

LOL - according to the FAQ Davids at the bottom

Darren - The forum's founder, GateWorld's owner and managing editor
GateGipsy - Forum manager, small brown flightless bird, and gadget geek
Major Clanger - U.K. dominatrix and spoon wielder (with boots on)
Feli - the long fingernailed skipping one
Shipperahoy - Major Clanger-in-training
MadeleineW
Skydiver
David - GateWorld's assistant editor

the huge size of the database/user base means that a very large hardware setup is required to allow for scalable growth.

As I have said before if you removed the people who have never posted and never intend to post you could reduce the size of the database

[Greg]

I have said before if you removed the people who have never posted and never intend to post you could reduce the size of the database

The Forum's SQL databse is just over 1GB. 600MB of this is posts, and postindexes (used for searching), and the remaining ~400Mb is mostly attachments and thread information. Guests on the forum really dont use up any kind of SQL storage, which is our main area of resource consumption.

The areas that utilise SQL the most include, searches, the New Posts, and similar threads sections, viewing users online, and some admin functions (such as merge/prune etc). Having said that, we have resolved a number of bugs with regards to SQL usage now, where we can easily cope with around 5000 users online. We only have to wait until the next SG1/SGA episode next Friday to really push this theory

[Qasim]

1GB Wow - a few months back it was only 700 meg

Hopefully the theory wont get pushed too far