THN - a discussion on where we go from here.

[Haven]

[mod]Moved to General chat for everyone to take a look and comment. Haven[/mod]

Been meaning to write this for a while now and I've discussed some of the topics informally with a few folks over the last couple of months. These are my thoughts on three questions we need to answer regarding THN's future. One of which has already been answered but will be included for completeness. The other two are open for debate and your feedback is appreaciated. I'll be making this thread public next week but as mods and admins we'd like your feedback before we open it up.

The questions are:
* Finances: Managing THN's finances - paypal vs community bank account.
* Server Hosting: Dedicated vs Virtual vs Co-located
* Web Software: VB3 vs VB4

Finances:

This question has already been answered - the issue is that paypal currently takes a huge chunk of our donations as commision. A few of us (myself included) also feel that paypal is a little "evil" and whilst useful up to now we'd not like to use them forever. The alternative is setting up a community bank account with three signaturies which we will slowly transition to during the year. Eventually we'll be able to have a single direct debit running on this account which will make server paypments a one step process rather than the two step we currently have. The signaturies will be Docbot, RoninStorm and myself. The account will be in my name although all three of us will have to facility to manage it.

We'll keep the paypal running (as long as Waterproof bob is happy with this) for as long as its needed but we hope that we can migrate donations from paypal ones to direct bank transfers to simplify things in the future.

If you want more information on the account we'll be looking at using please see this link.

Server Hosting:

We have three options in the future of THN's hosting.
a) Keep as we are with Promethius paying £65.95/month
b) Move to a dedicated server offering of similar or greater performance for the same money
c) Move to a cheaper virtual server offering and lose our games hosting ability.

Currently we pay quite a lot for hosting Promethius - as its an old system it uses a lot of power. Whilst it has done us well up to now, we could be getting more for our money with some of the dedicated server offerings on the market.

A principle I feel that THN should have is that is owns no physical assets. Currently Promethius is owned by me as I paid for the original hardware. When Prometehius eventually fails (parts of it are over 7 years old now) I do feel that THN should not purchase hardware to replace it. Its much simpler to maintain THN if we don't own anything. It cuts down on any potential issues of ownership in the future.

For the same money we could get 2-3 x the performance from a dedicated server (hosted in Germany).

Or, we could cut out our ability to host games and run just web, teamspeak and ancillary services from a low power virtual machine (cost around £15/month).

I'm torn between the virtual and the dedicated options - making the virtual option work would rely on the community hosting games that we are interested in themselves (as discussed in this thread). Given the response I'm currently erring on the Dedicated option (12GB or 24GB RAM options and KVM virtualisation).

Web Software:

Vbulletin 3 is currently used to host our board. VBulletin 4 has been available for a while but we've chosen up until now not to pay for the upgrade licence.

VBulletin 4 contains many new features including some social network integration that I feel we should be looking at using to advertise our gaming events and keeping people involved in a more useful way. There's a full breakdown of its features listed here. The cost will be either $250 or $285 (I'm not sure if we count as an upgrade). Either way its not insigificant in terms of cost.

If we do upgrade then we will have the facility to provide our members with blog space, we'll be able to retire gallery.THN and bring our images into the publishing suite. And we'll be able to integrate better with twitter/facebook/myspace.

I personally think this is a good idea as long as we can rustle up a few volunteers to help us set things up - folks interested in theming and module integration would be needed to make sure we make the upgrade worth it.Take a look at the above information, have a think and read the links and if you have any thoughts or opinions then please let us know. The strength of THN is in our ability to bring folks together to enjoy social activiities (Real life and Virtual). I think there's still room for improvement and we can do more to create fun for all of us with the right tools in place. The above are all achievable options that we can look into to improve things. Whether we choose to or not is now open for debate.

Regards

Haven

 

[Ronin Storm]

I'm mid-project at the moment and short on time so here's my brief thoughts:

1. Financials - perfectly happy to move to a community bank account as linked on the main proviso that there's no exposure; that is to say that there's no chance of running up debts that the signatories become liable for.
2. Hosting - noting that I have both personal hosting and THN activities on Promethius, I believe that part of THN's identity is in the ability to host game servers at whim. We don't pull on it a lot, partly because of the shift to peer-to-peer hosting (e.g. L4D) or centralised servers (e.g. BF:BC2), but even being able to host a TF2 night I think is pretty important to THN. Compared then against the general THN inertia to actually, y'know, picking up the slack, I think the obvious choice is a dedicated managed service ala the high performance option indicated.
3. Forums et al - we are behind on our upgrades for VB3 but I think this is significantly because we haven't paid for our support renewal in over a year. My capacity to provide hours of administration and configuration work is currently a lot less than two or three years back, though I retain a moderate interest in it and a strong interest in the outcome. Within technical and effort constraints, THN Games reflects my choices in configuration and I think it works fairly well. I'd not be keen to go all the way back to the drawing board. I guess that's the thing that vBulletin 4 would offer: a chance to move from where we are and add functionality. Conversely, I notice that vBulletin is being passed from owner to owner and I think it may be on its way to becoming a dead development stream over the next two or three years. Ultimately, for me, I think it's about this: is there sufficient appetite to actually do a migration to vBulletin 4 and who, practically speaking, will do that? I can guide, advise, even manage, but I'm unlikely to put significant time into implementing anything before August.

 

[DeZmond]

Just some preliminary thoughts:-

1 - Seems fine.
2 - Unless I'm missing something, there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of difference between the dedicated server options other than RAM, disk space and price - surely the most basic option would be sufficient for our needs? (It's not like we have multiple active game servers running 24/7 anymore) It would also reduce the monthly cost.
3 - I'm personally not that fussed about vBulletin 4 - certainly the new features are interesting (especially the publishing suite) but I have to wonder how much use they would get.
One potential advantage (at least, from my read of the features) is that it would be easier to include several branches of THN within the software - eg the main page would direct to vBulletin 4, games.THN would be the main forums, and dedicated sites could be set up as needed for WoW, etc while maintaining the overall integration of THN.

 

[BiG D]

Conversely, I notice that vBulletin is being passed from owner to owner and I think it may be on its way to becoming a dead development stream over the next two or three years.

I have exactly the same worries. I think it may be time to start investigating other options.

If we do go with vB, is there a reason we'd go for the full publishing suite license? Do we really have content that requires a blog/cms?

 

[Haven]

Just some preliminary thoughts:-
2 - Unless I'm missing something, there doesn't seem to be an awful lot of difference between the dedicated server options other than RAM, disk space and price - surely the most basic option would be sufficient for our needs? (It's not like we have multiple active game servers running 24/7 anymore) It would also reduce the monthly cost.

I guess this brings us back to the question - do we want to host games or try and let the community host them instead? In which case we could settle for the far cheaper virtual server option.

Currently when hosting things on Promethius we are finding ourselves RAM limited - we have 4GB at the moment. To justify an upgrade we need to at least double that. If we start running virtual machines (one for games and one for everything else) then we could really do with 12 GB (8 for the games virtual, 2 for the services virtual and the rest for the host). The virtual seperation makes it easy to move entire virtuals should we need to in the future and also protects one from the other i.e we can give more folks access to the games virtual without fear of compromising core services.

Virtualisation may of course be overkill but it gives us many options - including running a windows virtual for games that cannot be hosted on Linux. The more RAM you throw at it the more options it opens up.

 

[Haven]

I think it may be time to start investigating other options.

If anyone finds anything that could serve as a replacement for vBulletin then please throw it into the mix, the only thing I've found that caught my interest was http://vanillaforums.org/

I'd also love to investigate using some sort of Python Django framework but both of these options will require a lot of effort up front just to get us back to where vBulletin is now - I'm not against paying for the right software if there is anything comparable if it makes our lives easier. Much like Ronin I'm going to start struggling for time later in the year so I can put in some effort/time but not enough to get it all done on my own - I'll be happy to sort the server setup on my own though as I don't need to think too hard to do that

 

[Ronin Storm]

Much like Ronin I'm going to start struggling for time later in the year so I can put in some effort/time but not enough to get it all done on my own

I suspect I'll have more time when you have less, perversely...

I'll scout around for realistic forum/community options. Happy for others to do the same. It's a potentially useful business investigation for me but that means I probably won't do that 'til late next week given other things I've got on.

 

[Wol]

1) I agree with the bank account method. No point in giving money to paypal when we dont really need to.

2) I'd personally agree with Ronins comments: Part of THNs identity I feel is to be able to host games. I'd personally be more comfortable with the admins of THN to be the admins of the game server, rather than having to rely on other peoples' dedicated servers without them falling over. I feel that spreading stuff out to a distributed fashion would just segment THN a bit too much. Things like when I ran the beta MC server from home for a month or so for testing is fair enough, but for live servers, I feel this should be from "prom" or whatever we call it, itself.

3) I don't have Facebook, Twitter, or MySpace, so care very little about "social" integration. And I agree with D's comment of "do we really have content that requires a blog/cms". There are more than enough FOSS CMS systems out there. I don't think paying for a vB upgrade to have this is worth it personally.

Thats my 2p anyway.

 

[thatbloke]

1) I can understand wanting to not hand over part of our monies to paypal, seems like a good idea.

2) Whilst I agree that part of THN is all about being able to fire up various game servers whenever we like, it seems to me like we're not even using Prom to its fullest capacity. Now while there is a general shift in the market conditions with regard to how game servers are created and used, there are still a number of games that we could host.

I think that something we can do that will be of benefit is to make the fact that we can actually do this for people more apparent. For instance, there seems to be this interest in the MechWarrior game - is this something we could host a server for?

My only concern with that is with administration. While certain numbers of us are certainly willing to make these things happen, there can sometimes be a lack of capacity on the technical side of things. Perhaps some kind of drive to have these servers going but also for willing admins to learn to look after them properly too.

Also, you mentioned gallery.THN above - there is that, the wiki, and other bits of THN that are perhaps not documented or well known, also things like the social groups functionality too that could get more use were people more aware of them.

3) I'm really not sure that a blog/cms system hosted by and for THN would get much use - I think there might be an initial "oooh, that's cool" phase where it gets used for a bit, but after that I suspect that interest would die off. If people want such facilities then they can easily look to wordpress or something like that. I don't have much experience with other forum software but as long as we can maintain our current forum functionality I don't see there being a problem were we to upgrade

 

[Wol]

it seems to me like we're not even using Prom to its fullest capacity

That reminds me of a thought I had a while back.

Is it:

We're not using prom to its capacity, and therefore should get a smaller server

or

We're not using prom to its capacity, therefore we need to recruit more people to use it.

I'm personally for the latter there.

 

[Haven]

Its generally the latter case, finding folks with the time, inclination and experience to organise events regularly and reliably whilst also sorting out what needs sorting server side ... and maintaining enthusiasm throughout sometimes in the face of apathy.

Therein lies the challenge

For those who do however it can pay good dividends and a great sense of achievement when the nagging finally pays off.

Having a server with enough RAM for me to virtualise sub servers on will also give us the option of a windows server to run games on which may be more comfortable for some folks. We will be remaining predominantly a linux setup though.

 

[Nanor]

1 - It makes sense to have the community bank account rather than using paypal.
2 - I like the idea of moving to a dedicated server. It's nice being able to host servers when we need it to our specifications. It's come in very handy in the past à la BF2 and TF2. Undoubtedly similar situations will arise in the future.
3 - The idea of social integration doesn't matter that much to me. I'm not sure if it's worth paying almost $300 for something that may not be used. The technical side of forums isn't my forte but if you guys find something that makes the administration and setting up easier then I'm all for it.

 

[Silk]

1, Bank account gooood
2, Dedicated server goood
3, Current forums (VB3) gooood

 

[Ronin Storm]

For instance, there seems to be this interest in the MechWarrior game - is this something we could host a server for?

In this case apparently not as we run a Linux platform. However, with a Windows virtual, that could be an option.

Over the past decade or so, I've felt that the support for Linux game servers has been slowly declining. I suspect this is because games developers haven't got the cross-platform skills or, if they do, they've moved to more populus markets such as smart phones.

My only concern with that is with administration. While certain numbers of us are certainly willing to make these things happen, there can sometimes be a lack of capacity on the technical side of things. Perhaps some kind of drive to have these servers going but also for willing admins to learn to look after them properly too.

Yep. This is certainly a problem in two parts.

1. Event organisation
2. Technical administration

All those in the second category (at the moment) either have almost no time, or actually no time. Perversely, there's a fair correlation between those in the second category and those in the first.

I don't know how to get over that hurdle. Game server administration on Linux isn't hard, but it does rely on a basic understanding of *nix and that's not in ready supply. Add to that the side problem where most of our game servers are hosted under a single user account, which needs moderate privileges, a person fumbling around has the capacity to arse things up a fair amount.

Open to suggestions there.

We're not using prom to its capacity, therefore we need to recruit more people to use it.

Yep. Absolutely.

Our best recruitment has always been done with team games, when we're in a league or running a well maintained and populated public server. Goes for Natural Selection, Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, and World of Warcraft.

Outside that, our recruitment has generally sucked. I think because we don't know how to do it. But also because a gaming community needs an active game to draw people in and our federation of random games is probably not sufficiently "sticky" for new people to grab on to.

Its generally the latter case, finding folks with the time, inclination and experience to organise events regularly and reliably whilst also sorting out what needs sorting server side ... and maintaining enthusiasm throughout sometimes in the face of apathy.

Open question for people who would be interested in "doing stuff" for/with THN: what would help you do that?

It's nice being able to host servers when we need it to our specifications. It's come in very handy in the past à la BF2 and TF2.

Yeah. A reflection of where we've come from. Thing is, I think we've been struggling to find "the next big thing".

I wonder whether this is because we're trying to make something out of BF2-shaped bricks; that is to say that they fit together over BF2 but we're constantly baffled over how we make those same pieces/people fit together over something new.

I'm as obstreperous as the next person (okay, much more so) and somewhat jaded on new releases, so I end up on fringe mods, story-led single players and a short collection of the same old 3-4 player games. I also have much less gaming time than, say, 6-7 years back, so I use it carefully. I imagine others here have a similar story, especially amongst the Admins.

Totally up for comments on that. And suggestions for what we could do there.

Still hold as a THN goal "a game with THNers on any given night of the week". A good goal, no?

 

[thatbloke]

so perhaps slightly off-topic, but I'm certainly a competent linux user. Not that good at administration, but that's something that will come over time.

I'd like to volunteer myself to help with the technical/game server sorts of things

 

[Ronin Storm]

Thanks TB.

To be clear, there's three kinds of administration (meaning "technical management") that THN does/needs:

1. Server administration - managing the platform that is currently Promethius. Largely done by Haven, with tiny bumblings occasionally done by me. Not really open for contributions (unless Haven says otherwise).
2. Board administration - managing these forums, including permissions, security, forum modifications, and the most neglected area of styles. Largely me or D, though mostly just manages itself. However, styles need a bunch of work but the granularity of admin controls means that access to one style is access to them all so modifications to them needs to be safe and trusted.
3. Game server administration - installing, patching, bumping, configuring and otherwise making sure game servers are appropriately up or down at various times. We get assistance in this from various people, including elD, Trax, Iron Fist, luc and probably others that I'll be embarrassed about forgetting to add in this list. Pretty much always needs doing when we have an active game, such as TF2.

What's your interest?

 

[Silk]

Outside that, our recruitment has generally sucked. I think because we don't know how to do it. But also because a gaming community needs an active game to draw people in and our federation of random games is probably not sufficiently "sticky" for new people to grab on to.

How about me and Solemn occasionally grope and kiss and tackle each other with nerf guns outside our clan box, with one of the THN banners above us?

 

[thatbloke]

Number 3 - I have an idea for a couple of small servers I'd like to set up and manage on behalf of THN - namely Trackmania and Teeworlds

Would be good if I can get these going in time for i42 too

 

[Wol]

How about me and Solemn occasionally grope and kiss and tackle each other with nerf guns outside our clan box, with one of the THN banners above us?

..... /me makes sure I bring my camera along.

As long as we dont find someone stripped naked and bound with the banner!

 

[Ronin Storm]

namely Trackmania and Teeworlds

Sounds good.

How about me and Solemn occasionally grope and kiss and tackle each other with nerf guns outside our clan box, with one of the THN banners above us?

Ah, cheap thrills.