Posts made by Arkandel

(Double post!)

@ganymede said in Forum wonk:

I concur with Sunny: this community is its members, not the location. But I also promised Arkandel that I would safeguard this place, the keys for which he was handed by someone else, all the way back to Emmahsue.

I don't consider either 'MSB' (as in, the acronym or the domain name) or the platform it runs on to be this place. It's the role.

Game-agnostic, MU-hobby oriented, open-door policy, speak your mind - within certain limits - even if that means flaming the admins.

I can't speak for ES - who probably wouldn't care too much at this point but a promise is a promise - but if you can get this done I'm sure it's all good no matter which direction things take. This was never supposed to be about who 'runs' MSB. All of us were just caretakers, keeping the lights on for people to wander in and post cat memes or discuss mechanics or whatever.

Also folks - I get not wanting to lose data. History, continuity and legacy are important. The question is, are they $500-important? Especially because there is no way to test that the issues with memory consumption would go away by moving it over to MongoDB until after the data is migrated.

And to be clear: I'm not MU*ing but I'm not planning on vanishing either (sorry!). I'll help with any migration, give what technical advice I can and support transition efforts as needed.

@misterboring said in Forum wonk:

How hard would it be to keep the URL and the name, and just start with a fresh instance of a newer, more robust forum software?

The easiest thing in the world.

The problem with paying for anything is that... well, players are entitled enough as it is.

How long before someone throws that around? Don't think "you can't ban me, I paid!". That's easy to deal with. Think "you didn't ban him because he paid!" Staff is on the spot for looking like they favored someone without dollar signs in the mix.

And let's not even go into expectations from coders ("your code is buggier than the other game that's actually free"), admins ("I've been in CGen for three days, imagine if I hadn't paid!") etc.

The question isn't really if it's worth paying for a MU*. The real question is whether it's worth the hassle getting paid to run one.

The only risk factor here is that eventually something will finally give. Today it took me 45 minutes to bring the forum up after the upgrade, and that was after the oom-killer led into a kernel panic and my attempt to turn virtual memory on for Redis (which should have worked, and might have even been efficient, since most threads don't need to be stored in memory).

Well, one of these days it won't come back up and the choice will be made for us.

The thing is I'm not a MU* player any more. Realistically I don't have stakes here. But I honestly like (some of) you folks and it'd really suck if there was no central place where people could come together, maintain identities outside of a single character or game and talk - sometimes rant - about their hobby without fear or reprisal.

I think this hobby deserves having such a mostly safe place. I just won't drive that effort any more.

@faraday said in Forum wonk:

Redis is probably the reason that you need so much RAM. Using it as a cache layer to speed things up makes sense, but using it as a primary data source for a forum of this size seems non-ideal.

Yeah, I agree. We've been saddled with it though unless MSB is willing to start over.

@ominous That'd be up to Gany. But I think it's better (and cheaper, and more reliable) to increase the VM's specs.

Another option could be to migrate the redis database MSB currently runs from to mongoDB.

I am not sure why redis was chosen in the first place - I suspect it's because it is very fast, albeit also very memory hungry, but when MSB launched it simply didn't need to worry about that. As we progressively add more threads and content that's becoming an issue.

However nodeBB's solution for a migration costs something like $500 which is a no-go. However someone determined could do that as a custom solution.

It's probably cheaper to just find a hosting company that gives more RAM than Linode for a comparable package. Atm we have 4GB which isn't ideal, and much more CPU/disk than we're utilizing.

@derp It's running on a linode VM.

It could run anywhere. I just wouldn't want to be in charge of migrating it - although I'd be happy to help.

@ganymede Generally we are one version behind. In fact I should probably update to the newest version soon.

The first issue with nodeBB is sometimes the updater doesn't work and I spend hours fiddling with it until the forum comes back up. And the concern is always that if I can't then I might need to downgrade or set up the whole thing from scratch, resulting in downtime.

The real issue though is there's a memory leak... somewhere. Although the specs for the VM I got MSB running on are pretty generous, this thing eats memory. Eventually it craps out and I need to manually restart it.

The ideal solution is that someone with more time than I do wants to take over the task of supporting MSN on a technical level. I'd then pass over the credentials and they can take care of it going forward. But such a person hasn't stepped up.

Another solution is to get more hardware. It'd cost more though (double) which at some point will be a burden on me. It'd also not remove the leak issue, just mask or make it happen more irregularly.

A third approach would be to migrate to a different platform. However there are definite downsides to that, too; for starters it might have other, new, exciting problems of its own. The other is that we'd almost certainly lose all the existing post going back years, and that's definitely not ideal, unless there's a migration script that will work.

As a side note I do take nightly rotating backups of the whole site so there's never a time we don't have 14 days' of rollback. Those are kept both on-site and on a separate host I run at home. But even this mitigates, it doesn't remove risk.

The short of it is... if someone wants to support MSB technically I'd love it.

@derp I'm not sold on it, just based on the trailer.

The comment I read that stuck is that it looks like one of those generic action films The Rock puts out once a year.

@atomic

Managing people can be tough. It can also be rewarding.

Telling someone who's doing a great job that they got a higher raise than the one they asked for makes my Friday.

@faraday said in Movie / TV / Streaming Peeves or Whatever:

It's really really hard to imagine how you're going to improve safety by making actors with minimal firearms training do anything more than hold the gun and pull the trigger under the careful supervision of an expert.

And people (at least online) seem either entirely unsympathetic or entirely unreasonable with their expectations.

A thread I was reading lately insisted that it was the responsibility of an actor 'as long as the gun was in their hand' to individually check and go through all the gun safety steps regardless of what the armorer said.

That's all well and fine but they are actors. They are not necessarily trained. And on top of that they are playing a role at the time; their mindset can be set to playing a panicked person or an angry killer who happens to be armed. It's not easy to suspend all that for a minute, meticulously go through the firearm then slip back into character.

@too-old-for-this Yeah I'm waiting to see what the landlord's agent comes back with. We're pretty easy, and don't require them to fix stuff often and nothing that's not really critical, so hopefully it'll work out.

The good news is I don't need the oven, frankly. Between a pressure cooker and an air fryer most common cooking tasks can be delegated.

@too-old-for-this said in Critters!:

@macha Even cats, as sight-based predators

I know they are predators. I believe it. Rationally I recognize the effect they have on ecosystems. Cats are hunters.

I also live with these dumb motherfuckers. Sometimes I give Gus a treat on his tree and he drops it by mistake (the dogs steal it) or he pushes it behind his bowl and then can't find it so he gives up. Predators my ass.

@too-old-for-this What I hate is that maybe I caused the damage? I don't see how, I don't bang pans on the ceramic, but I don't see how else that crack got there.

@betternow I agree about the Rock, but he's also in a position to be both in charge of and impacted by the risk himself.

Most actors and most producers are one or the other. They are either the ones in front of guns and hope no one shoots them in the face with live ammo and little control over it, or they're trying to speed up production and cut costs with no direct stakes in the game.

G'dammit, somehow there is a crack in our oven's ceramic stovetop. Now I don't know if I did that somehow or not but I got to talk to the landlord to send someone and have it fixed, which is annoying.

@snackness said in Critters!:

@silverfox The crossed eyes are killing me.

I've a cross-eyed black tomcat. He's a complete idiot who, despite being gorgeous, runs and hides when anything happens. Anything.

However he doesn't classify "online meetings" as something. In real life he is a rare sight for people who don't already live in this house but online he gets in front of the webcam all the time and begs for pettings.

@mietze said in The Work Thread:

This morning at work one of the 5 year olds told me

On an unrelated note, I wish I had 5-year olds at work.

What I have instead is adults acting like 5-year olds.