The Mana World Forums

In the last week or so we had a lot of downtimes and server shut offs. I am quite sure that the server itself is not responsible for that but the internet connection of the server.
I wanted to know if anyone besides me would want to seperate the gameserver from the webserver or at least part of the webserver.

As some of you are aware of I currently host the Update-Service for the Testing-Server. I have webspace and can maybe arrange for a ssh login (not sure about that though, I would have to negotiate with my server admin). I feel that it's very hard on the community besides the game-server being offline also not being able to get any information whatsoever as wiki and forum and homepage are usually offline too.

Therefore I have a proposition to make:
We could move the homepage to my server (or pretty much any other server available)

• Move solely the Homepage
• Move solely the forums
• move solely the wiki
• or any combination of the above

I would like to hear your comments on this. As I said above I would volunteer to host any part of the project.

Platyna hosts the wiki, forums, and main TMW server on her machine. While the code and art assets are GPL, I am guessing that the operational iteration of them that reside and function on her machine are her property, so you would have to ask her. Also, it's a bit premature to start moving stuff until we know what is going on and if / when it will be corrected.

One thing we can do in the meantime, is to put more effort into our TMW facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/themanaworld

I am hoping that this link belongs to the TMW GHP by now, and if so, it can be beefed up a bit, and maintained as a failsafe line of communication when everything else goes down. I don't use it as much, but I suppose the TMW IRC channel can function in a similar capacity.

If there is a way to automatically copy, synchronize, and clone the forums onto another machine, as opposed to outright moving it, that could also be another option worth exploring.

blackrazor wrote:Also, it's a bit premature to start moving stuff until we know what is going on and if / when it will be corrected.


TMW is such a cool special place, and I feel we will overcome this and any obstacles, as a community.

As you said in your other post you think we as a community can overcome these troubles. But I feel we can only overcome them as community if our communication system doesn't also break down. This can be easily fixed by outsourcing to another host. This could save us some trouble in the future.

This is a proposition I made and I just want to discuss this. I just wanted to offer the possibility to improve things on this side.

greetings

Tux, I know. I gave three viable alternatives:

1) Improve our Facebook page, if we control it (there were past issues with this, hopefully resolved by now).

2) Use IRC to maintain communication.

3) Synchronize forums with a cloned copy on another machine.

I'm in favour of moving the website somewhere more stable.

blackrazor wrote:Tux, I know. I gave three viable alternatives:

1) Improve our Facebook page, if we control it (there were past issues with this, hopefully resolved by now).

Not really viable as we don't all use Facebook. It is important, though.

blackrazor wrote:2) Use IRC to maintain communication.

Very few people actually use IRC and it's great for instant communication but not a replacement for the forums/wiki.

blackrazor wrote:3) Synchronize forums with a cloned copy on another machine.

This sounds good. The rest of the website should also be mirrored.

I wonder, is there any reason the wiki couldn't be hosted on Wikia?

blackrazor wrote:Use IRC to maintain communication.

Isn't the IRC server also hosted on Platinum?

Wings of Steel wrote:I wonder, is there any reason the wiki couldn't be hosted on Wikia?

Forced advertisement which doesn't even benefit TMW and very limited control over the software configuration of the wiki.

Or just setup a load balancing server ( http://wiki.nginx.org/LoadBalanceExample ) and have multiple servers; that would make the most sense to me for the web servers anyway.

Crush wrote:

blackrazor wrote:Use IRC to maintain communication.

Isn't the IRC server also hosted on Platinum?

IRC is hosted on two servers (irc.themanaworld <-> ircd.q3.pl)

It would be very nice to be able to access the forums etc. when the server is down, but move tends to imply remove as well. The load balancing server sounds best, but having a mirror on the testing server might do as an interim measure.

Moving Wiki and Forums to a different machine would make sense for the above mentioned reasons (balancing could solve it though) but also because they are databases and can represent a quite heavy load on the server; and their management can compete sometimes with the game's databases one. I don't like facebook as a substitute because of the way it manages privacy (same applies to MSN, Google+).
What about cousin projects? Manasource, Manaserv, Land of Tales...

Oh come on. 2 downtimes in 4 weeks (due to DDoS) isn't tragedy. Also, if everything is down people do not post panic posts on forums. ;-)

Regards.