Quote:Original post by ArchWizard

Quote:Original post by coldacid
*rolls eyes*

You know, you can always donate money to the site so that they can get better hosting, pay for fixes and improvements to the site, etc.

I tried that and it didn't work. It didn't work at all. And every time I got a 500 error, I wondered where my money was going.

Washu was probably spending it on tentacle hentai.

GDNet has become a victim of its own success. It began as a cooperative arrangement between separate hobbyist websites and grew into the Giant Spaghetti Monster of the game development world. The slow crash'n'burn of the old FlipCode site -- the only true rival to GDNet for much of its life -- added more and more users. The "500" errors people are seeing now are a symptom of too many users trying to access heavily strained resources.

GDNet's codebase has been substantially rewritten multiple times, but this was done in a hobbyist, ad-hoc, "Hey! Why don't we put on a show!?" fashion. Featuritis reared its ugly head, along with some truly bizarre design decisions. Most of all, the existing code isn't particularly efficient. Many common actions require complete page refreshes -- i.e. re-querying of the database -- and there are far too many UI issues to mention.

The new team -- Messrs. Rhino & Hawk have decided to hand over the reins of day-to-day site administration to the likes of Oluseyi, Superpig, and more -- intend to take a more professional approach, as befits a site that is now even cited in mainstream media.

As Oluseyi has stated, 2007 will be the make-or-break year for GDNet. Either it grows up and becomes a professionally run community-led resource, with a rock-solid infrastructure fit for purpose, or it will simply collapse under the weight of its own popularity. One thing is certain: standing still is not an option.

Change will take time, effort and a lot of patience on the part of our community. Expect much wailing and gnashing of teeth before we hear the cries of the reborn GDNet. There's bound to be some pain ahead. But it'll be worth it.

(I hope.)

I don't think the community members mind that GDNet is having problems. However, most people are thinking nobody is doing anything about it.

A lot of us remember the search being taken down, and the "It'll be back up soon" message. We're 3 years further, and the search is still down.

In the meantime, GDNet has been compromised, has had a few times spyware installed and the constant stream of 500 errors. Take along with that there are a large amount of people who believe certain people shouldn't have been made moderators, the elitism of the mods in #Gamedev and the fact that people don't see anything being done with their gdnet+ money.

GDNet is in my eyes a glorious community. If GDNet would collapse that would be a huge blow to both the community and the industry. Nobody would want to see GDNet collapse, but I think a lot of people believe GDNet will explode sooner or later.

What can we expect in the future? Will GDNet buy another server and load balance the site? Will you get guys get rid of spyware that's sitting on the site right now? I don't believe there isn't any money. GDNet has quite a few GDNet+ users, and I refuse to believe all the money is going to hosting and bandwidth.

I for one, wouldn't mind lending GDNet a hand. I cannot donate money, but I can be patient, or help out a hand with fixing stuff.

Toolmaker

With all this site gives you, I find it hard to believe people can complain.. Especialy the ones that are too cheap to even make a donation.

Quote:Original post by Dragoro
With all this site gives you, I find it hard to believe people can complain.. Especialy the ones that are too cheap to even make a donation.

In the OP's defense, he did buy GDNet+.

I was referring more to the responders than the OP.

Quote:Original post by Toolmaker
I don't think the community members mind that GDNet is having problems. However, most people are thinking nobody is doing anything about it.

Speaking as a person who has spent most waking hours of the past week working on GDNet - to the extent that my girlfriend would get home from a day at work, and I would make her wait while I continued to work on it - there's definitely a mismatch going on here.

Happily, it's one that we're aware of. You may have noticed that from time to time I post about GDNet dev stuff in my journal; Oluseyi reckons that's a good idea, so he's going to start trying to do it as well. We want to give everyone a better idea of what's going on behind the scenes.

The problem with GDNet - as stimarco hinted at - is that it started out as a hobby project, a bunch of guys doing stuff in their spare time. When you're doing that you skip on certain things that a business does not. Things like security. Backups. Failover support. Project management. Hobby projects tend to care about those less. And suddenly before you know it your hobby project has over 100,000 members and the lack of those things is really hurting you.

Want to know something terrible? The GDNet web site used to connect to the database server as the administrator user. Anyone managing to compromise the site would have complete control of the database server. It's things like that that cause problems for the site - not Windows and ASP.

It's not that the people who built the site are stupid. It's just that "proper practices" are what they did at work, and GDNet was the nice thing they could just have fun working on at home, where they didn't have to worry about being so formal. A place they could experiment with new technologies and new approaches. Consider that businesses use those best practices for a reason...

Just to pick up on a couple of things you mentioned:

Quote:
the constant stream of 500 errors.

Have you seen many of those recently? I made some changes during that 10-day downtime that should have taken a lot of pressure out of the system.

Quote:the elitism of the mods in #Gamedev

Speaking as a #gamedev regular I still don't see where this opinion comes from.

Nevertheless, sure, there are problems. I would probably cite the extremely slow rate of feature development as bigger than the ones you picked up on. We've had so many good ideas for things we want to do, yet they never happen...

Quote:
Will GDNet buy another server and load balance the site?

We're probably not going to buy a server up-front - virtualization will do to start with - but yes, we're headed away from the single-server setup for our web application.

Quote:Will you get guys get rid of spyware that's sitting on the site right now?

Of course we will. The situation is a delicate one and has taken time to plan out, but we finally know how we're going to bring that server back under our control. Expect to see the problem solved within the next week. (If I'm as good as I think I am, then you can expect not to see much of the Rhino either).

By the way, you know how it kept disappearing before coming back again? That was me. I've been in combat with this thing since before GDC. Please understand if I am thus a little depressed when I read that it's percieved that "nobody is doing anything."

Quote:I for one, wouldn't mind lending GDNet a hand. I cannot donate money, but I can be patient, or help out a hand with fixing stuff.

I will be recruiting for the site's development team in the relatively near future. If you want to send me a CV or something, feel free.

Just wanted to drop in a workaround for at least part of the spyware issue. Something kept crashing my IE when I visited GameDev, until I noticed it's somehow trying to load content off of newx0x.com (or www.newx0x.com). You can block this server on your firewall or redirect the name to your local machine in your HOSTS file. This will prevent this content from being loaded and your visit to GameDev should be relatively problem free.

Quote:Original post by Scet
Is something going on with the FTP space? The only journals I can find that work are the ones that have their pictures hosted elsewhere and I can't access my own files.

Edit: The IOTD also doesn't work.

Someone mentioned earlier the problem stopped after restricting FTP access, and reoccurred when it was loosened, perhaps they tightened restrictions again?

well, now with those tightened restrictions where the images don't show up anymore, there is no little iframe in the forum anymore.

_BUT_ there is one on the main page now...

i'm with all of you gamedevers working hard on solving that problem and wish you all the best to get rid of it.




and it's back, and it's gone, and again..

at least we can see you work on it!! :)