Summary of 2018

[Simon]

I (Simon) have been the head admin. I haven't done as much as I could have: At least, I've deleted spambot accounts and their posts within a few hours. 1-2 spambots per month successfully bypass registration.

namida has done the most on the technical side: He has moved the site from NearlyFreeSpeech to a VPS (virtual private server) with full shell access, we can install anything we want. After some trouble with IPv6 routing, everything was on track soon, and the site has run extremely well on his VPS ever since. namida still funds the site himself, plus any donations that go 100 % into hosting costs site costs, excluding transaction fees.

The code of Lemmings Forums (Simple Machines Forums and some custom changes) is on Nessy's github repository as a backup.

Gigalem requested very sensible changes, e.g., change the ICQ personal field to a Discord account field in forum user profiles. But we haven't implemented any of these changes, sadly. I think we haven't changed the code in 2017 or 2018 at all. We merely put the change requests on the github issues page and let them sit.

The database (accounts, topics, posts, private messages, attachments) has no automation: We still have to back it up manually. We aren't diligent with this, occasionally I push Nessy to back it up, maybe once every 3 months. This is not smart; if the server dies, we lose around 3 months of culture. Bad. We have to look into automation.

Around November 2018, we had a massive traffic spike: For about an hour per day, we had 600 currently active guests, nearly everything from a few IP addresses in China. This didn't look like an attack, and it's well over now.

Our level designers still create and test each other's levels, the culture continues. That's what counts the most.

-- Simon

[namida]

namida still funds the site himself, plus any donations that go 100 % into hosting costs.

Let's reword this as "100% into site costs, excluding transaction fees". This is a bit less misleading - firstly, of course, Paypal and the like have transaction fees, which go to the provider. Nothing I can do about that. Secondly, while so far I've always used donations for hosting specifically, it's entirely possible in the future that I might use it to - say - renew the domain registration or SSL*. Still site-related, but not "hosting" per se.

* yes, I know about LetsEncrypt, but the high renewal frequency is annoying and I've had problems in the past with auto-renew scripts