He was admin'd due to running the torrent tracker yes. Then he gave up on it, kinda, and just installed himself as a defacto iron ruler. I do understand him - all admins go through that phase when they first get their power. Unfortunately he takes it a little too far.
Of course, I think there are a few people with a lot to answer for: Gamespy sucked ass, and we did need to move. However, it clearly wasn't planned properly since the budget has gone way over what is reasonable to expect to gain from a non-profit community site. I still can't believe $600 isn't enough to run HLP for a year.
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We prefer to call that "taking initiative". It lets the rest of us slack off.vyper wrote:He was admin'd due to running the torrent tracker yes. Then he gave up on it, kinda, and just installed himself as a defacto iron ruler.
Basically, yeah, we hired him because he had lots of experience running the BitTorrent tracker for TBP. Then, when the HLP tracker got discontinued (for reasons I'm not even sure of myself) we let him stay because we really had no reason to fire him. Then he proved himself quite adept at upgrading and configuring various PHP and server things, which helped a lot in Styxx's absence. He was actually doing the lion's share of move-related activities for a while.
I freely admit I have no idea how to handle a server move, but from the discussions I've seen I'm not sure how it could have been done better. We outgrew about three hosts in the space of as many months, and during the move(s) Fury was looking for new hosting on a regular basis.vyper wrote:However, it clearly wasn't planned properly since the budget has gone way over what is reasonable to expect to gain from a non-profit community site. I still can't believe $600 isn't enough to run HLP for a year.
Keep in mind also that we apparently use a huge amount of bandwidth. People download Inferno and TBP (especially TBP) on a regular basis, and both of those campaigns are pretty big. There's also the Port, which has grown quite a bit in popularity since the releases of 3.0 and ShivanSP's torrent.
We're currently working on a shared hosting arrangement with Game Warden, but that's proving tricky as well. MatthewPapa could shed more light on that part.
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Goober5000 wrote: We're currently working on a shared hosting arrangement with Game Warden, but that's proving tricky as well. MatthewPapa could shed more light on that part.
Right now I am working on moving all of the stuff over from the HLP shared server to the GW dedicated server. I am making sure that moving HLP is do-able to begin with. It is basically a dress rehersal, so when I get it down right (the process and what needs to be done), we can move in a pretty easy and painfree fashion. Thanks to that, HLP wont have to experience weeks and weeks of downtime like it did last time.
I havent worked on it lately, but it is proving pretty tricky. I have met only limited success so far. All of the MODs that are installed in on top of SMF are being a pain and not working correctly. I am tempted to drop them all and just start from scratch, but i dunno.... FTP transfers are painfully slow for some reason also, sometimes only 50kb/s. This is hard when you are having to constantly download and moniter a 1.3gb sql database.
Personally, I absolutely hate the way that SMF works. Its faaar to complicated, to the point were a simple database transplant is darn near impossible. With vbulletin and phpbb its just drag, drop, modify a config file and voila. With SMF, there is about 5 config files that I have to change and 4 tables in the database that need to be totally revamped for each new server. It is extremely difficult to modify a table that is 100mb long in wordpad, thus I am having to do most of it via mysql command prompt, which isnt a walk in the park either.
Thats about it. Its painful, but I feel that it should be done. Hopefully I can get things rolling again before the month is out.