We want to share with you some changes in our software/ platform for the next few weeks and how that will affect you.
Server migration (warning: geek talk ahead)
Our current server was over-provisioned, meaning we are using too big of a server to run the site. The reason why that’s the case was when there was a series of hiccup / slowdown that happened a year or two ago, we upgraded quickly to address the issue, though later we noticed that the server doesn’t need as much CPUs, storage space, and memory to serve our users, and it doesn’t have the flexibility to scale up or down when traffic changes. The downside of this inflexibility is that we are paying for too much server capacity most of the time.
By migrating to a new, right sized, flexible, server, we’ll save money. Right now, the total monthly cost of running the site is about $120/ month. We believe we can reduce that amount to about $70/ month.
The new server will also use faster, modern server CPU and faster storage hardware (NVMe for those who cares). A speedier server will mean a little faster surfing.
Email delivery optimization
We found a different email vendor (who sends you site notification emails). We’ll switch vendor which will bring our bill further down to $55/ month.
Finance
Amazon affiliate referral fees brought in ~$48/ month in 2023 (with a great deal of help from you all at the end of the year when we asked everyone to do their holiday shopping through our referral link in November and December. We were averaging ~$25/ month before November). If we get 1. and 2. done, we should be very close to breaking even.
Forum software updates
Migrating the server requires both server running the same version of the forum software. So we’ll take the opportunity to update the forum software to a new version. There will be some changes:
a. Introduction of AI. Where you will see improvements? The software will now use AI to recommend more relevant ‘Suggested topics’ at the end of a page. There will also an ability to use AI to help you proofread, suggest titles, translate to English when you type up your post. It will also summarize a topic in a few sentences if you just want to get the gist without reading through hundreds of posts.
b. Reactions. No more just kniving and forking people (figuratively). You can soon add various reactions.
c. Interface change. The forum software in the most recent versions has introduced sidebar for navigation. See here to get a sense of how the new navigation may look like: link. The new navigation will allow you to customize so you only see the categories you care about. With this change, the info that’s in the hamburger menu currently (or the wriggly bacon-looking menu, in our case) will no longer be used.
Timeline:
Forum software update (3, 3a, 3c): most likely Friday night pacific time. Server will be down for 1.5-2 hours.
Server migration: most likely next Friday night pacific time if nothing goes wrong with the forum software update. Server will be down for probably 2 hours.
Reactions (3b): some time in the next couple of months when we get to it. We tried to get it done last year but couldn’t get it to work without losing our ‘knife and fork’ icon, or without forking over like $10/ month to a vendor (just for an icon?!).
Mail vendor swap (2): some time in the next few months.
We’ll ask for your patience as we go through the changes. Stuff may break. Just flag any oddities. Thanks.
That said, I welcome a more diverse reaction menu than just ‘like,’ and it may cut down on the one word responses / comments like “yum” or “I agree,” etc. pp. that clog up some of the already longer threads.
I meant well done putting in the work and money you have so far, analyzing the current situation, and coming up with what is potentially a cost effective solution!
Also, I don’t even really know what those things are, let alone how to do them.
This will be interesting. So much “personality” comes through from people’s writing (with language changes, typos, style, and so on), wonder if/how this might homogenize / flatten that.
Will be interesting to see how the summary changes vs. the current one.
so appreciate your offering this forum and keeping it going…all these changes sound worthwhile.
if there were one enhancement I would want for the interface it would be for the highlighted regional dining posts on the landing page we land on to be identified by forum - as it stands not everybody includes a location in their subject line an some topics are non-obvious to those not in the know. Just the geographical icon for the topic/region would do it.
Can we please leave the general Amazon referral link pinned up permanently?
Many of us shop there regularly (for better or worse), but I’ll be honest that I don’t always remember, so it’s worth having a reminder up so that we can contribute a little towards the upkeep of this oasis.
We all asked for that feature from the developer since day 1 of the forum. We requested it, but it doesn’t look like they are interested in implementing since there has been no movement on this for years.
I’m a retired technologist, I wonder how hard it would be to write a post-processor that does this? the post-processor would identify the forum and edit the subject line of the post to include the forum name.
also, I did a bunch of consulting for AWS before retiring, I wonder if you considered cloud computing for your host? the advantage is that you’d no longer need to perform server migrations to scale your server up or down and in fact, you could dynamically allocate processing power based on a number of factors.
Have no idea how the cost works out but it’s a very flexible compute model.
For some one who’s fluent, probably not that difficult. The challenge for us is that we can write have someone write some custom code to do this, but the moment the forum developers change their codes, stuff breaks and we have to update our custom code. Its a never ending cycle.
We are on the cloud. By server migration, I meant going from one cloud server to another. We don’t actually maintain a physical bare metal server. That’d be too much work.
Perhaps I misunderstood your post but it seems to me you are using a hosting service as opposed to what has widely become known as cloud computing. With cloud computing from companies like google and aws, there is no need for server migration because you can dynamically scale up or down based on resource utilization. This will also cause your bill to scale up or down.
Does the forum software offer an api? If so, the api should insulate you from software updates. If there is no api, I do agree a spider might encounter changes in the html it reads but potential damage to posts could be limited by having the spider read a bounded list of forum names at startup and if it didn’t find the expected html, it would do nothing. Also, by having search strings in a file, someone without knowledge of programming could make changes to the behavior of the spider.
I really haven’t thought through a robust design but if you’re interested, I could think through a design and share it with your team.
Finally, I’m guessing I’m not the first person to think of this and there may be code or product which acts as a post-processor.
Yes and no, we run the forum software in a container on the cloud server. So we do our own hosting.
every half year or so we upgrade the software to a newer version. I am guessing you are referring to someone hosting the forum software and we access and load the forum content via API. But that requires us to code our own frontend, or mobile app, no?
We could also go the route of having the forum software developer hosting the forum for us, and we won’t have to worry about updates. but that will be a much higher financial commitment than we are able to.
This has sometimes been appearing on my screen since yesterday, February 13. It had never happened before. I’m on HO via Safari on an iPad Mini. If I repeatedly click on “OK”, it eventually goes away. But I have no idea why it happens.
502 errors are related to a server error … so a guess would be your device still wants to connect to the old server setup. If that’s the case, you could clear history and data in Safari and see if that clears it up. If you did that it would mean that you would need to sign in again afterward.
BTW, if anyone has the following skills and want to offer backup help in case something goes wrong, please let us know!
