New Testingstan

timmy wrote:I'm wondering if things were exciting in NORAD or similar places yesterday

Was it like this, or was in more like some USAF NCO sitting at a computer going 'hey I've got a report of activity coming from PACOM... Uh, I'll get back to you (acronym as a job title)

I'm not sure what was going on at NORAD but I watched a bit and just noticed this

500 gigatons :L

phongn wrote:Holy shit, no wonder they've been having server problems. And yeah, CRW has some really popular authors on it. I should take a look again...

They where spamming >25000 post threads in under a week. Not to mention Xenforo had some structural issues where it would read an entire thread after a post to rebuild cached parts.

This becomes a major issue when the forum has dozens of +10k threads all being hidiously active on a low memory server

Infinity Biscuit wrote:500 gigatons :L

lol. That's like twice as much kick as the most powerful volcano eruption in the geological record.


.5% of the KT impact thought

xon wrote:Late 2009, the Creative Writing (CrW) and Quests/loose play-by-post(BROB) forums went nuclear and show no signs of slowing down.

Part of this happened when they closed anonymous viewing in an attempt to reduce server load due to vBulletin being crap and the server being way way unpowered. This caused a massive spike in the user-base which quickly translated into increased posts.

Why CrW got so damn populate appears to be snowball effect of popular fanfiction authors finding the site and getting crowds, people migrating to where the authors are and then the cycle repeats.

Once migrated to Xenforo they made moderators able to be moderate every forum to rebalance the load. And that Xenforo reporting system doesn't make you want to cut yourself like phpbb or vBulletin was a significant help.

Interesting info, thanks!

Do you know what brought the popular fanfic authors to SB? Just random chance? They happened to be lurkers who signed up when they closed anonymous viewing? SB somehow got out a reputation as a great place to post fanfics?

Probably the second, if what happened with them is the same kind of thing that is happening with another board I frequent.

xon wrote:

phongn wrote:Holy shit, no wonder they've been having server problems. And yeah, CRW has some really popular authors on it. I should take a look again...

They where spamming >25000 post threads in under a week. Not to mention Xenforo had some structural issues where it would read an entire thread after a post to rebuild cached parts.

This becomes a major issue when the forum has dozens of +10k threads all being hidiously active on a low memory server

I'm half surprised they didn't do a fund drive just to buy a new server.

EDIT: Whaat? Complete re-read to rebuild the cache? Well, I guess it sounds like a good idea under low-load and easier than incremental cache updates ...

Anything sounds like a good idea when you think inside the box

phongn wrote:I'm half surprised they didn't do a fund drive just to buy a new server.

The money isn't the issue, it's more that the owner would have to personally go to where the server is and change it over. and that would entail a transatlantic trip.

I think one of the real take-off points from Spacebattles had to be the fact that it's the home of Nobody Dies and it's author. Nobody Dies is arguably the biggest Evangelion fanfic ever, and the way it gets posted on Spacebattles is sort of like an advance screening where you get to give the author ideas. As the population grew it spun out from there and drew more people in.

Is Nobody Dies an accurate title?

Aaaaand on a completely different topic:

I'm reading N.A.M. Rodger's 2 volume history of the Royal Navy. It's really interesting and well written, although it's very academic. It's not so much a narrative history, which is what I was expecting, as a textbook for British (and pre-British) maritime history.

The chapters are divided into different sections, such as "Ships," "Social History," "Men and Manning," "Operations," and "Administration."

So far, I'm finding the "Administration" and "Men and Manning" sections to be absolutely fascinating. Looking back from a modern perspective, its very easy to assume that similar structures to the modern ones always existed, maybe not the same, but analogous at least. Reading about how feudal magnates ran their navies is very interesting.

phongn wrote:I'm half surprised they didn't do a fund drive just to buy a new server.

The issue is time. Kier Darby is the only guy with the proper access to the server, but the forum admins have a hell of a time getting contact with him.

Throw in that Xenforo is being sued by vbulletin's owners and Darby's former employers Internet Brands. So throw in the usual life shattering event of being dragged through the US court system by someone with more money than you and yeah.

The court appointed settlement conference is on Feb 13 at 10:00am California time (GMT -8) linky, so hopefully the lawsuit will be out of the way soon.

Xenforo's prospects are very dim if the settlement breaks down and the court forces an unfavourable judgement on them. And even appeals on a favourable judgement may go poorly for them simply because it will drag shit out for a long time to come.

EDIT: Whaat? Complete re-read to rebuild the cache? Well, I guess it sounds like a good idea under low-load and easier than incremental cache updates ...

Official bug report: Linky. It's the cache for tha thread, not the entire cache.

After locking thread limits to 10000 posts, the site only slows to a crawl for maybe an hour when whatever the hell is beating it up at a given time most days instead of being utterly unusable for most of the day with tons of micro-stutters and slowdowns when it is "working".

F.J. Prefect, Esq wrote:The money isn't the issue, it's more that the owner would have to personally go to where the server is and change it over. and that would entail a transatlantic trip.

Nah. The whole server is managed remotely. It's just really damn time consuming to migrate websites to new hosts if you don't have practice.

Having a new machine built to spec, installing everything, and transfering gigabytes of data out of the database & back in again isn't particularly fast and honestly quite tedious.

I would say that Spacebattles.com being more successful and having a broader gene pool of posters is partially due to not having such a stuffy debating enviroment that leads to tedious rounds of shit flinging over pop entertainment and things getting so unbearable that even posters held in high regard end up losing it, then getting forcibly banned or freely leaving in a public huff (Poe and Shep), with the rest more quietly and gradually voting with their feet.

Ralin wrote:

timmy wrote:What do YOU think he looks like?

I always just assumed his avatar was a picture of him.

You mean that guy who's a cross between Terry Pratchett and Kyle MacLachlan from his younger Dune/Twin Peak years?

But I always imagined he resembled this:

is that tommy wiseau?

Questor wrote:Aaaaand on a completely different topic:

I'm reading N.A.M. Rodger's 2 volume history of the Royal Navy. It's really interesting and well written, although it's very academic. It's not so much a narrative history, which is what I was expecting, as a textbook for British (and pre-British) maritime history.

The chapters are divided into different sections, such as "Ships," "Social History," "Men and Manning," "Operations," and "Administration."

So far, I'm finding the "Administration" and "Men and Manning" sections to be absolutely fascinating. Looking back from a modern perspective, its very easy to assume that similar structures to the modern ones always existed, maybe not the same, but analogous at least. Reading about how feudal magnates ran their navies is very interesting.

I fucking love those books. They're well written and interesting. I think I may have lost my copy a whole back but of I can find it I want to retread it.



Also, I think there's some things that he explores that need to be wider read. Prepare for a Straha original thought process:

One of the things that a couple professional historians have talked about at length is why France spent as much money as it did financing the American Revolution. Financing it is a no-brainer but the amount of money spent was downright crippling and unnecessary, and no historian seemed to have a satisfying answer for why the French would throw themselves to the wind like this. Rodger talks about how the public perception at the time was that a majority of British sailors were recruited and trained in the colonies (an erroneous, but widely held, perception. ) That, for me, seems to be the missing piece, bankrupting your economy to destroy British naval dominance and to have a chance to grab its overseas colonies and get long-term gains therefrom has a strong logic to it.




Feel free to use that for your own purposes. Since my switch to 'philosophy' I doubt I'm going to be able to use it.

It's so easy to manipulate people's opinions through appeal to emotions it's downright disgusting.

Well, since there isn't much to be done about that, just try to use it for good, okay?

thejester wrote:is that tommy wiseau?

sure fucking looks like it

*ttp://img594.imageshack.us/img594/7754/stommywiseautheroommach.jpg

artemas wrote:

thejester wrote:is that tommy wiseau?

sure fucking looks like it

I was staring at it going, "Damn that looks so familiar, why can't I place him?" Then I see jester's post and actually proclaimed to the cats, "That's IT!"

I love you, Tommy, people like you are why riffing is a timeless phenomenon.

YOU'RE TEARING ME APART, LISA!

o hi mark

I feel like I'm sitting on an atomic bomb that's about to go off!

Hope your toilet has a strong flush.

And people said the acting in the TGWTG specials was bad.