[BAILOPAN]

marvel - It seems like you're angry, and I'm not sure why, but I'll try to address what you're saying.

(1) If you know bigger communities that are able to manage their loads better, I would love to hear about it.

(2) The site was not "always down". Downtime is rare for us. Yes, we had responsiveness issues. No one has been able to diagnose or solve these yet.

(3) The downtime lasted three days, not "almost a week". I can understand if it felt like a week to you - it felt like a month to me!

(4) I regret not having a way to communicate the downtime. In the past, the server worked enough to put up a tombstone page. This time, the server was dead, and I didn't have the time to go through all of our DNS bindings, write down the old ones, and temporarily flip them.

I take offense at the word "disrespectful," given how much energy I and others have put into this, but I'll let it slide.

(5) It's easy to sit from your chair and say, "you should have done all of these things." I *wrote* SourceMod, built and acquired much of our sites' infrastructure, and in many, many cases paid for its expenses out of my own pocket. That was while I was in college, failing classes and broke because I spent too much time here. Sure, I should have done those things too. Did I have the money? Did I have the time? Did it matter, given that the community wasn't as big?

If you know ways we can improve our infrastructure, or can connect us to people who would be willing to give advice, or even help out - I'd be grateful. You don't need to donate to help, and it has been very difficult to find knowledgeable people who also want to involve themselves with our site.

[zeroibis]

I would say that in the future if you wanted to improve communication it would be nice to post updates on the steam community page.

My website sometimes goes off line for work, or due to a DDOS or due to me breaking something. When this occurs I post info about the down time on my steam community page and update it whenever I learn more. This makes it so that the users who are effected know almost as much as I do and therefore will have a better idea when to expect service to return and also feel less anxious.

[deathcurse]

Well done guys. I know how frustrating it can be when servers play up and I think it is unfair to say you didn't do enough because a lot of the time you will learn from your mistakes.

The speed of the site has usually been great for me. RAID + off-site backups should do the job. You could have a hard disk outside of the RAID array and just use it for backups, might work out cheaper.

EDIT: You should look into getting a status blog or something in case of future downtime. I don't mind giving you a little space to do so.

[kwski43]

Originally Posted by marvel I've seen lots of bigger communities that do it with less cash and run far better.

Do they have compiler online ? Plugin stats tracking ? So much views per day? So much uploads/view post/new posts at the same time? Are hosting few sites?
Think about it. I've worked too with 'those' things and the big user activity is killing HDD's like hell.

Good job BAILOPAN!

[marvel]

BAILOPAN thanks for your post. And yes it felt like it was down a month to me as well since all my servers mostly depend on this website

So forgive me my ranting and I'll keep donating, I have to agree with zeroibis though that some form of communcation, like twitter, or on the steamgroup about the downtime would've been nice.

And well, if u need to manage the loads better u probably need more webservers load balanced which is a lot of $$$$ and maybe more disks for your db server. One way to solve the money problem is to add a small non-annoying google ad to the site, so you won't depend on donations that much.

@kwski43

No but they do have hundred thousands of members but they have ads and more webservers to handle the load. I'm just pointing out that the site has been sluggish and a lot of times unreachable for the last couple of months and that this was bound to happen some day and that maybe it could've been prevented, but I'm glad things are back up and running right now.

[Fr33m@n]

Is someone here have link to csdm package and wc3ft package (at least the forum link) please ?

[SeToY]

Donation made, keep the work up.

[scso1502]

As many others have done, I too want to thank Bailopen and the staff here at Allied Modders for keeping things going here all these years.

When something unfortunate like this happens, you realize just how important it is to the people who rely on it. I think of it this way; without this site and the efforts made by all who contribute their time and money to keep things going here, literally 1000's of game servers and 1000's more players would suffer the eventual loss of the game servers they love to play on as plugins dies off and go away.

Also, despite how it may appear to everyone, I'm sure this site and all that the work and labor it takes to maintain it and its affiliate sites, rests squarely on the shoulders of only a handful of people willing to go the extra mile to keep things going for all that use it. This is typical of any community and only those who run them will understand how much work it is.

Honestly, how you've managed to keep things going all these years is beyond me Bailopen. I've run a gaming community since 2005 and the stress from maintaining servers, a website and the costs associated with both has almost caused me to shut it all down several times. Add in all the usual everyday life stuff like family, work and kids and....well, you can see where I'm going with this. To many, gaming is a hobby we fill the voids in life with; to the staff of Communities like this, its just an additional full-time job to add into our already busy lives (I know there are people reading this right now saying "Amen Brother").

I'm sure many of the people here understand the work involved to keep things running. I know I certainly do. So if it every gets to be too much, reach out and ask. There may not be too many people who are willing or capable, but there are those who are ready to help and will gladly do anything they can to take some of the load off you.

Best regards and thank you again for all you've done, and all you with undoubtedly continue to do for this Community.

[Lin]

I'll add a hearty "Amen Brother!" to that, I run MoonGamers and we've been providing games since Feb 2004. We've been blessed in that we have had fantastic volunteer staff over the years; we've not pulled the plug yet, although we've been tempted. The past couple of days have shown us all what Allied Modders means to us and our communities. It's a job, most often a thankless one, and Bailopan has been carrying the monetary load...and who knows how much of the workload, FOR US, for years.

I'm unemployed but I will be asking my group to donate what we can here. It's time for us to give back, people. Have a little less takeout or beer this week and send it in here. If we have used this site at all, we should give back what we have freely taken in value. If you kept clicking on this site's link several times a day for the last few days (as I did) then it means more to you and your servers than you previously realized; so give back!

Bailopan, once more to you and those who give their time to run this place, a HUGE thank you from all of us!

Lin
Founder
MoonGamers Gaming Community

[Xuqe Noia]

Good job BAILOPAN.
donation made.