Server Hardware Fault

[hunterwolf]

In an effort to raise funds, how about holding an auction or raffle, with the funds going to FA!

Not only does FA get extra much needed funding, but something (aside from free furaffinity accounts, image browsing, social networking, dating service, porn downloads...arf...sorry, yiff downloads, advertising for artists, hell, Dragoneer...most sites out there CHARGE for shit like this ^.^), gets given back!

A piece of art, a commission, whatever, put up to help draw in funds!

Furs, hell, anyone, will pay a lot for something they really want! Look at ebay, look at the auctions at cons.

Some will be happy to share some extra funds to help out, but having something extra on offer will tempt those with more funds into coming forward!

Just an arb idea, thrown out there.

I myself have a few things I would donate...and they sure as hell aint starbucks or dunkin donuts gift cards

 

[WarMocK]

Those who don't ask for commisions can keep their free account. Those who do, have to pay a.. $5/mo to FA and maybe get some extra features or something?

And what do you do if artist offer submissions but do not get any customers? Oo
And what if they earn barely enough to pay the five bucks in a month? Do you want to ban their accounts for a month or two?
Sorry, that idea sounds good for a moment, but considering what all could happen your system would be extremely unfair. :-/

 

[HiroJudgement]

do you have that link by chance? :3

The link's in the original post.

 

[princessbunny99]

Just another FA fan saying thanks for all your hard work!

I too would be willing to pay 5-10$ for a monthly subscription for extra features. Maybe for those of us who are trying to do comissions and such, we could get links on the front page, stuff like that.

I'd also be willing to donate stuff for a raffle too, if that ever gets off the ground

-pb-

 

[nrr]

I got a friend who's offering an IBM eServer p570. 16 CPUs, 64 GB RAM. Personally, I don't belive him. Dragoneer, he wants yer mailing address so he can send it to you.
I dun have his contact info on me, though if you email me (It's in my profile somewhere), I could prolly get that info for ya next week..

That box isn't actually as impressive in this application as you'd think.

He also mentioned showing up at FA:U with a Silicon Graphics Onyx 3200, but I dun believe him on it...
Still, something to check out. Free servers are better than free food, eh?

Fat fucking chance, that. I'll eat my hat before your buddy shows up to FA:U with anything remotely resembling SGI hardware meant for heavy computation.

 

[mukichan]

Okay, folks, seriously, you all are the weirdest group of people I ever had seen.

I can not express in words the amount of appreciation I have for you all donating your money to FA's needs, even though we can not provide you with guarantee that the money will be spent in the best possible way. This blind goodwill and overwhelming support is what amazes me in you guys. You've been here before, helping out, and you are here again now.

The amount of money some of you are willing to, and actually do donate is really impressive considering it is going towards the needs of simply a website on the internet. And the amount is not what is most important, the will and the thought is.

This puts us in a very responsible position to command what was raised, and I will personally try to do as much as I can to make sure the hardware that is being bought, it's deployment and configuration will make FA as fast, stable and reliable as possible.

I am overwhelmed with the amount of support you guys are showing.
Thank you all.

It shows how much people really really love fA and want to see more porn. xD lol jk jk

We all care an awful lot for fA and do the best we can to support it. I mean, heck, each and every one of us is just a little grain of rice in a rice bowl. Not very filling for a single grain, but when combined can make the best meal for even the poorest person on earth. ^^; (okay, maybe that's a horrible analogy... But I hope you know what I mean.)

 

[kewlhotrod]

How about I give you an old copy of the source code, and YOU implement a search feature that scales? Oh, and bring it up to current functionality! Sounds fun?

God, I'm not even a coder for the site and I'm tired of hearing gripes about the lack of search feature. It's not gonna happen with this codebase.

Probably not the smartest thing you could have done. :/

A LOT of furs... Ummm... Personal details are in there. Those that they might not want released. ;.;

Glad I'm not in there. YAY NEW USER(ish)!

 

[Busterdrag]

Man, FA has some more serious probleme than normal, and soon the fucking trolls apear on the surface, bashing Dragoneer for shits and giggles.

You guys need to be beaten with a stick full of rusty nails.

Anyway, while I like the 1$ idea, it puts people like me in distress, becuase where I live, having a paypal account is pretty useless (just as useless as a credit card) and my bank account can't be used for linkage to a paypal account.

 

[mukichan]

Probably not the smartest thing you could have done. :/

A LOT of furs... Ummm... Personal details are in there. Those that they might not want released. ;.;

Glad I'm not in there. YAY NEW USER(ish)!

Was gonna say the same thing when I backtracked a lil to check other replies. I wonder if an admin or someone will notice it. I don't want anyone to mess with my stuff. T.T

 

[Pi]

Probably not the smartest thing you could have done. :/

A LOT of furs... Ummm... Personal details are in there. Those that they might not want released. ;.;

Glad I'm not in there. YAY NEW USER(ish)!

oh no, an old list of emails from nearly 3 years ago

I wonder if an admin or someone will notice it.

And what do you expect them to do?

 

[mukichan]

oh no, an old list of emails from nearly 3 years ago

But still, that's an awful lot of personal information even if it is 3 years or so old.

 

[mukichan]

And what do you expect them to do?

Psh... I don't know, geez. I'm just a lowly furfag that knows nothing about coding~ xP

 

[Pi]

But still, that's an awful lot of personal information even if it is 3 years or so old.

Well, that's the risk you take providing personal information to a website.

 

[mukichan]

Well, that's the risk you take providing personal information to a website.

Well then excuse me for being the most idiotic person on the planet. :/

 

[Pi]

Well then excuse me for being the most idiotic person on the planet. :/

Let's keep in mind that your email address is 1 click away right here? Mkay?

 

[xionos]

I realize it will sound as an excuse right about now, but I will say it nontheless.

Yes, previously FA did not go down a much as it does this now. But the website was slow to the point where it was unusable, and was running on a rather badly written and optimized codebase. A lot of time was spent to make FA run on the same set of hardware much faster then before, all that considering the site never stopped growing and had accumulated over 180% of the userbase and content of when I started working on it.

In the past year, FA ran like a stick of butter 90% of the time for me ( despite its bimonthly crash ). Browsing the site was quick, smooth, and has been quite enjoyable. Sure, your going to have to put a bit of time in the maintenance and upkeep of the site, not to mention tending to life's necessities. All in all, it's still no excuse.

 

[Wolf_Fox_Guy]

But still, that's an awful lot of personal information even if it is 3 years or so old.

stuff like that is why I signed up using an email I dont use for anything else. everything on the email account is fake, and I never ever ever give it to anyoe for anything such as buisness. Its nto perfect but its a good first step.

 

[DJDarkViper]

what sorta bothers me is the information was stored in a TXT file instead of a dedicated database like mysql lol i mean flatfile databases are cool n' all but not for login information, not only is that incredibly oldschool, and proven to be rather dangerous lol

 

[mukichan]

stuff like that is why I signed up using an email I dont use for anything else. everything on the email account is fake, and I never ever ever give it to anyoe for anything such as buisness. Its nto perfect but its a good first step.

I don't even remember what email I had registered my account with before changing it a couple months ago to an email I still don't use that often.

 

[ibengmainee]

I'd be willing to do art commissions and all the proceed go towards donating to the site. I'll even throw some of my own cash on top of it.

I absolutely love this site and I definately feel I need to give back to this site for all the exposure it has given me so far.

I would also like to put my 2 cents of saying I am all for the subscription idea. I understand there my be a loss in users but I have a slightly different purpose of using the site than to just log on to check out any new art that has been uploaded. This site gives me exposure to more people than FAP, Yiffstar, and others combined. Not to mention when I am looking through the browse option of what had been submitted since the last time I logged in. Im a little tired of having to browse through 7 pages oh mostly crap (I.E. pictures of peoples houses, cars, their pets, some little doodle they made on a stick-it note) to spot any pictures of actual importance.

Anywho, dont sweat over what some say. What you guys do for this site is more than I could ever do.

 

[Houshou]

First of all, thanks for doing all of the work needed to keep the site running. I'm sure it's maddening.

One thing I don't understand is why people are proposing software solutions to a hardware failure problem. If there are server load issues slowing down the site due to inefficient software then expanding the hardware to fix that is indeed merely working around a problem with the software, but if the hardware is actually failing that is not a software problem.

While heavy load may increase the likelihood of a hardware fault appearing, isn't it true that hardware is designed to work? If hardware is faulty and fails, that's not the software's fault. Inefficient software can't break a properly running machine; it can merely bog it down.

If overworked hardware had anything to do with this, I'd imagine it merely accelerated the deterioration of already faulty hardware. Properly functional hardware doesn't just break all because of a bit of inefficient code.

And besides, isn't Ferrox underway which will address many of the software issues anyway?

You sir, have never fixed an aircraft.

Airplanes break when:
They take off
They are in flight
They land
They are parked in a hangar and do nothing, and nothing is done to them, for more than 48 hours.

Only God knows why something can break when nothing, and I mean nothing is being done.

When you work in a job where all you do is 'repair' and make things work again. You really start to notice how, when shit breaks do to usage. It's the part that broke 98% of the time. But when shit breaks because it was sitting there doing nothing, and there is no god-awful reason as to why it broke...now your in for the job you'll never forget. And yes, the word and expression: HOW THE FUCK?! is said every time something breaks when nothing human, natural, foreign, and/or otherwise happened to it.

I don't know how or why it is possible. But take it from me, it happens.

 

[Redregon]

if it comes down to a "pay for service options" idea, i'd probably recommend something more along the lines of Deviantart rather than draconian rules pertaining to artists.

something like larger submission preview thumbnails, no limit to the size of the picture when viewing, weekly featured artists or submissions (with links to easy sales of prints through Rabbit Valley maybe) and a more robust feature set...

and for free users, no thumbnail previews save for on the main and browse page? (this could cut down on the bandwidth use as well.) and smaller sized images on the pages.

and a monthly service fee would be a little bit much imo... i'd probably suggest something like a yearly subscription... that way it's less of a hassle for the user to re-sign up each month.

limiting submissions of an adult nature to paid users would be a very VERY quick way to kill the site entirely as i know enough people that would not want to have to shell out to post or view adult stuff, they'd just go elsewhere.

 

[Rianu]

the same is likely to happen if the preview thumbnails are disabled for everyone - in my eyes that was one of the bigger advantages of furaffinity over deviantart

 

[starlite528]

what, who said solaris? yep, true, sparc can run 24-25 years without rebooting... but... look at the prices! and sun stopped them...

Whaddaya mean, Sun stopped them? They certainly did not!
Read, under the list of procs;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC

 

[Grimfang]

I agree with Redregon.

FA could benefit from offering enhanced access or browsing with a small subscription. The donations barely trickle in, or so it seems. Keeping the site would be nice, but not if it's breaking the admins' and owners' backs. Implementing some extra services could provide an income boost for the site, but still make it essentially free for those who are unable or unwilling to pay for any kind of subscription service.

The only thing I'd hate to see (not that this whole thing is even being considered) is a way for artists to pay to be featured. I think dA had or has something like that..