Missing posts

[Tourist Trap]

First of all thanks for the nice people who grant us this great plateform. There is something a little out of topic I would have liked to add also. It's possible to charge a few things around the open source world without breaking the main spirit. For instance, it's possible to provide a paypal link for the people who may want to contribute to maintenance is some way. Other thing it's possible to pack the documentation and distribution in a material support like DVD or paper, on demand, and charge for this (as well as the delivery by mail) with a litlle gain.

This kind of distribution service could be very useful for instance if it took the form of, choose some usage you want your distribution optimized for and get it cleanly packed. For instance, I've been reading something about "curl" library and fb, for doing networking. It would be normal to charge if some fb developper was packing a fb distribution with curl, with the best examples highlighted, on a material support with the documentation as well. Ok, this is a true quality service, but it's also why it would be natural if it was not free at all.

For sure this all wouldn't drain profit on a regulary basis but it may satisfy some needs from some users, as well as bring some revenue in direction of the kind people who support the project financially. As an example that I've recently seen, the author of ccs64 (c64 emulator) that asked for a free participation, has admitted having drained 5000 dollars , via paypal I think, over the whole period he was maintaining it. This is of course not so much, but that may help.

[petan]

Very good analysis words, guys; more less I can agree with all.
Maybe words like criticism are inadequate, maybe my english understanding is not excellent.Nobody has critique to blackout, simply
because he doesn't know a reason of this accident.
(Sometimes such things happened, no defense against it.We can only minimize a risk with using solid web services&providers;
and if something happens, online users can make a quick alert to right person for checking troubles.)

I remember maybe 2 or 3 such ones in all 7 years period I am the FB language & forum user, and I am really grateful for both pages to
all people, which keep it running, forwarding a developing and paying for all - not only money, but their free time, of course !!
My hat down, gentlemen.

I must say I was on doubts in a beginning (year, or two) whether my decision for FreeBasic was right.Did.
Now I see and have very close position for moneymaking with FB.Just locked in this stupid terrorist country due family matters.
When it'll be running I plan to do a few interesting donations as my thanking for all the help and other things.

I think an adding a few popular donations channels (PayPal, Moneybookers/Skrill, Neteller, PaysafeCard) to FB sub-site,
on free basis for money support in any amount, from anyone, without any conditions - is an optimal way for member's participation.
IMO a simple link (placed on the bottom of FB page) e.g. "Free donation support" will not be frightening to anyone.
Personally already now I am able to do a small (dollar, or two) support monthly to keep things up.

[counting_pine]

Plasma, thanks for the hosting you've provided to freebasic.net over the years, and for the occasional necessary troubleshooting. This site has been a vital foundation for the FreeBASIC community.
If you want help with hosting costs, then I'm sure many of us would love to help with that. Or if you ever wanted to pass on the responsibility, maybe someone else would be able to step up.

I've noticed since the forum/site redesign, we have lost your hosting credit on the forum and front page. I don't know how to fix that, but it seems wrong to leave it off unless you've explicitly asked us to. I think we should re-add that.

[Plasma]

Ok let me clarify some things.

I'm not trying to paint anyone as ungrateful, or demand thanks or donations. Just giving my perspective.

As I said before, the most recent downtime was due to the server moving and the DNS being outdated. I apologize for this. This is obviously not a regular occurrence. I think the last server move was like 8 years ago. I can't just copy the old forum db because now there are new posts on the new server. I don't have time to deal with merging them (if that is even possible). But if recovering the posts is a priority, I can get the backup from the old server and someone else with admin access can take a stab at it.

Now as far as the occasional outages/slowdowns: phatcode.net, freebasic.net, and all subdomains are hosted on a reseller account on a shared server. Because there are hundreds of other websites on the same server, all operating on the same OS, uptime of 100.0% is virtually impossible. The probability of some other site on the server being hacked, DoSed, sending spam, or using too many resources is just too high.

I have been hosting websites for 16 years with 5 different shared hosts. I haven't used every webhost, so I'm not going to claim that Site5 is the best. But I have had the best overall experience with them. Support almost always answers tickets in under an hour, 24/7. They do a very good job of keeping things running smoothly and fixing problems when other sites (or sometimes ours) misbehave. Average uptime was 99.8% last month and 99.9% last year. But as I said before, it's simply impossible to have 100.0% uptime with shared hosting.

(And as a site note...the server is located in the US, and maintenance is usually done at night. So those in Europe are going to notice more downtime in general.)

There are plenty of webhosts out there advertising cheap "unlimited everything!" hosting. But they are all shared servers; the uptime isn't going to be any better, and the support is probably going to be worse. The only way you are going to see significant improvements is with a managed VPS or dedicated server. Which is going to cost more.

So I don't think the bug report analogy quite fits here. It's not a matter of someone spending a couple hours to fix a bug and then the software is permanently improved. It's someone spending more money every month.

If someone wants to step up and take over the hosting, that's all good with me. Donations aren't a bad idea, but I don't have time to chase those down. Someone else needs to be running things if that's the route you want to go.

Otherwise, I'm fine with maintaining the current level of hosting. But somebody needs to email me if there is a problem.

[MrSwiss]

... recent downtime was due to the server moving and the DNS being outdated.

OK, plse. let me take it from there:
the Servers Name used to be r2-dallas ... is this still the case, or what is the Servers Name now?
(I used to be able, to check Server status, on Site5's monitoring system.)

Also, as pointed out by St_W: there are no more any Mod's I know of, only the 2 dev's: dkl and
perhaps counting_pine, who seem to have Admin access.
Since their interest is naturally focused on Compiler development and far less on the running of
the Web-Site, this should probably lead to the "employment" of some new Moderators to take
care of this end (phpBB and related issues, far from development).

What I'm trying to get at, is: the Times have changed, and this should be considered.
After that, certain changes seem to be needed, to keep everything running as smooth as pos-
sible.

That's it, in a nutshell.

I'd be interested in feedback from the community, on above issues, as well as corrections, if
for any reason I've misinterpreted some of the voiced comments made recently ...
(Please to all, remain constructive.)

[Tourist Trap]

Ok Mr. Swiss, if we need a barking dog "far from development" as you say, we'll call you for sure... It would really help to make fb forum really more popular than ever. Or just transform a friendly place into a minefield??

[Plasma]

The server name is still r2-dallas. The hardware and IP have changed (174.121.162.194 to 143.95.239.63).

http://www.site5.com/support/uptime/r2-dallas/

Again, let me clarify. This isn't my website or forum, I just host it for vic. And I don't have the time to get involved in the operation unless it's a problem on my end.

[MrSwiss]

And I don't have the time to get involved in the operation unless it's a problem on my end.

This is clearly understood.

But I think that the community has a need to adapt to the present situation.

More Persons, to share important information, just in case of troubles.

[v1ctor]

I didn't notice the problem, nor I think the other site admins did, or we would have contacted Plasma to check what was wrong.

If it happen again, you guys could contact any admin (me, dkl, counting_pine) by e-mail. Mine is v1ctor[at]users.sourceforge.net.

I can't express how much Plasma was important to keep the project alive. He is paying for the domain and hosting for over a decade, switching web hosts, helping when the site goes down etc. If he decide to stop now, and that's completely acceptable of course, we will have to create some funding to keep the site up. Without a forum and the wiki, I guess the FB project will disappear really fast.

So again, Plasma, thank you!

[Tourist Trap]

I can't express how much Plasma was important to keep the project alive. He is paying for the domain and hosting for over a decade, switching web hosts, helping when the site goes down etc. If he decide to stop now, and that's completely acceptable of course, we will have to create some funding to keep the site up. Without a forum and the wiki, I guess the FB project will disappear really fast.

Hello v1ctor! Aren't you , seasonned programmers , all wired by irc or some similar stuff? Whatever, not at all what I wanted to say.
Just a word about the funding option, I'm sure it would be something useful to think of, even if those currently in charge are on duty for an undetermined amount of time.
It's very common now. Wikipedia or firefox have popularized the idea. Of course, there is no need for something as visible as what wikipedia does with a popup spawning in the middle of the screen. But as an option, it can not hurt.

By the way thanks again to the whole dev. team for keeping all this fresh and very alive.

[sancho2]

I have been waring with my internet/tv provider and have been without both for a few days. I back on now thanks to mobile phone tethering.
The things I missed the most were Reddit and this forum.
Sincerely, thank you very much Plasma.