Posted on 10/23/2012 3:58:44 AM PDT by PittsburghAfterDark
The 4th and final of the Presidential and Vice Presidential debates have come and gone for 2012.
Here are the three things we can walk away with.
- Romney can't lose a debate coin toss, going 3 for 3. Which of course means nothing.
- Obama gets more moderated debate time, going 3 for 3 in the time column. Which of course means nothing.
- Free Republic crashes before any debate and doesn't get back to normal until dawn the next day.
I would like to state that I have been here since the 2004 election season. I can't lay claim to being an old timer here compared to some of the posters here. I can safely say though that I am not a spur of the moment account meant to come here and spam, insult and run away.
Here's my point; Free Republic is in danger of not being relevant and it's purely because of technical reasons.
I know your technical team or advisor is trying like mad to isolate why this site is unavailable for hours on end surrounding the debates this year. It's not working.
This debate season for Free Republic has been the equivalent of having a TV network go out for a wild card round, divisional round and conference or league championship. The network knew the times of the contest, they knew tons of people would be watching, they knew where the technical problems might arise yet failed 4 times over the course of every scheduled event.
Now the Super Bowl of American politics is 2 weeks away and the same team that has aired loading screens for every head to head political contest this year must realize this simple fact; if you're not up and running on election night 2012 you might as well close the door on any thought of continuing your political relevance.
Online communities do not build themselves overnight but they can collapse overnight. As inconceivable as it may be this could be a swan song moment that you were warned about, tried to prevent yet ultimately could not control. If your traffic can't get to your site, you have no site.
If you fail in giving voice to this community during what should or could be a glorious night for America your role in history will be noteworthy, just like print edition of Newsweek's coverage of the Presidential inauguration in 2013. Non-existent.
History will indeed be made on November 6th because of the nature of the event. The question Free Republic needs to determine is if it is going to report history or become part of it.
*That* is the big question.
Are the servers -physically- located in CA or are they located in Colorado where the ISP he’s using is?
If they’re in CA, like in somebody’s basement or something, I’d -strongly- advise going to dedicated servers located on-site at a major, dependable web hosting company.
FatCow offers -unlimited- space and bandwidth for a pittance and they have a 100% up-time rating.
[as do *many* other good web hosting companies]
If the Robinson’s are hand coding FR, they can easily upload the code to a dependable web host.
If they’re using an add-on forum feature offered by their ISP’s web host package, it’s obviously not working right.
When I look at FR’s source code, I’m only seeing CSS and PERL.
I would think that PHP would be better.
I found FR during the Gore re-re-re-recount and, not having Foxnews available on my cable yet, I would have gone *mad* if I hadn’t had a sane, honest source of information.
For some of us, this place serves as a reality check against whatever crap the MSM is pimping at any given time.
Since FR will probably be crashed on election night, I’m probably just going to go shopping until the stores close.
I’ll go crazy watching the returns without alternate input from FReepers chiming in with their on-the-ground info.
Who’s taking bets?
;D
Seriously doubt it will be zotted. There are knowledgeable folks on here who are willing to contribute expertise if given a chance. Not just a whining thread, not by a longshot - more of a "let's fix it" discussion.
Sure hope so.
Something’s gotta give, soon.
I couldn’t even get a single page to load last night.
The last debate, I could at least wait 3 minutes [hitting refresh like crazy] and see *something* once in a while.
This is a free forum creator I found and though it’s nothing fancy, it’s free and it works.
http://cold-djinn.forumotion.com/f1-your-first-forum
Rather than the mess that yahoo forums are, it [or something like it] could be a viable alternative on ‘big event’ days.
“I think FR needs professional help. It will be expensive, but less expensive than buying more hardware that won’t help. I suggest they start with a database performance consultant, as I suspect that is where the problem is.”
The first (and maybe only thing) they need to do is to quit trying to operate their own servers. They need to farm the servers out to professional hosting companies with dedicated staffs of professional, trained specialist engineers who know how to make large-volume blogs work. Professional hosting also has the big advantage that a single piece of gear failing doesn’t take the whole site down for hours (or days) while a new one gets purchased, configured and installed. It’s really that simple.
FR has moved WAY past the point where volunteers and dilettantes can successfully run the technical show, keeping a major international service reliably humming under tremendously diverse load conditions.
Other sites don't have this problem...they have the same volume...and a lot friendlier user interface...you know...one which allows you to EDIT and insert a picture without having to know basic html formatting.Eleven million hits in one day?
Which sites are those?
Those sites with edit (FR should not have edit, allows posters to pretend they didn't say something that they did say) and the picture thingie don't have a friendlier interface than FR in my experience.
HMTL is simple to learn, at least what is needed to post on FR.
Your last sentence, stats are readly avaiable.
Do you have the link for the freerepublic facebook page?
Do you have the link for the freerepublic facebook page?
Well, I’m very sorry about the slowdowns on the big traffic days but none of the above applies. We have a server system that we have built up over the years which has for the most part worked fine. There was no scientific study done to find out how much capacity we needed. We started on a leased server and all worked well for a couple years. When that ran out of steam we purchased two new servers and moved to another provider. Then a couple years later outgrew that and added a couple more servers. We continued adding or replacing servers every couple years until we had about a dozen of them and it became pretty complicated keeping it all up and running. Over the last few years more powerful servers have become available, so John has installed some of those and has taken some of the older failure prone servers out of service. I think we’re now down to about a half dozen servers and he’s moved to something called “virtual server,” I’m guessing to make it more manageable.
We simply do not have the financial wherewithal to hire a “professional staff.” I have 40 years of programming and software project management experience myself (mostly financial accounting systems on now antiquated DEC VAX mini-computers), but I’m not a hardware or systems software tech. John is. And he has 25 years experience providing tech services (built and operated his first online bbs system when he was 14). And he has done an outstanding job of building FR during the last fifteen years or so mostly by himself with no “professional” management or any staff whatsoever. He’s also rewritten all of my old software and added many more functions than I originally had. He also handles all of the hardware/software system maintenance and all other systems and programming tasks and systems security. He’s basically a one man shop.
But it does look like we’ve hit a major stumbling block and it is killing us. I had asked John a couple years ago what it would take to replace the entire hardware system with newer servers. He guessed at that time that we could probably replace the bulk of it for $15,000 or so. So last year when we were have so many crashes I decided that maybe we should tackle at least part of the task and decided to try to raise $12,000 by adding half of it to out first quarter’s fundraising goal and the other half to the second quarter. All went well the first quarter and we raised $6,000 for equipment (still sitting in the bank) but the second quarter I got so many complaints about our increased budget and accusations that I was ripping off the donors that I finally said the hell with it and cancelled the equipment portion of the fundraiser so we never brought in the second half. In fact we’ve reduced our second two quarterly fundraisers from our normal base a bit and decided to cut back where we could.
Unfortunately, I guess I jumped the gun on new hardware. Apparently John was not ready to tackle expanding or replacing the hardware yet. He’s still wrestling with systems software problems that would still be there even if he added more equipment.
And it’s not about ROI. We just haven’t solved the problem yet. The moment John discovers the problem and decides on the solution, we will purchase the equipment, change providers, go to “Cloud” or whatever the solution calls for. FR is far from being dead or irrelevant. As long as people yearn to be free, God willing, we will be here.
John is my partner. The hardware and systems software is his domain. I know absolutely nothing about either. I cannot order him around and I cannot offer him anything other than advice that is probably mostly irrelevant and I know he’s tired of me harping on him every day. It’s getting to the point that he doesn’t want to talk to me. He also has some difficult problems in his personal life right now that are taking a toll on him. Even so, I have complete confidence in his abilities to get the job done. He’s managed to solve all of our technical problems in the past and I’m sure he’ll get this one fixed too. I’m just praying that he gets it fixed before Nov 6. If not, it’s going to be hell around here for awhile.
By the way, Free Republic on facebook worked fairly well last night as a standby site. But there’s no place like home.
Prayers up.
P.S. If John does not use the $6,000 we have sitting in the bank for equipment we can either return it to the donors or reduce future freepathon goals or possibly just hold it in reserve. If what ails us doesn’t kill us, we will be growing again soon.
http://www.punditpress.com/2012/01/jim-robinson-founder-of-free-republic.html
And no...I don't want to learn it. I will go with it's a personal choice. Good for you...you like living in an interent era that is stuck in the mid-90's.
This is the key point. If the chatter was simply off-loaded to a chat channel, FR wouldn't need a makeover.
Most of the replies to the "live threads" are nothing more than conversation. They don't have to be saved for future reference. It will let people sound off, laugh, cry, or whatever, and broadcast to everyone else is listening.
If someone really wants it, they can capture a log and post it as a single thread later. But while the event is in progress, there's no need to have to re-broadcast every thread 50 posts at a time, to everyone that hits refresh.
Live chats would be a good substitute for all kinds of things: the Sunday talk show thread, election nights, debates, breaking events, etc. It could even be automatic: if a particular post sees more than 500 refreshes or 50 postings within a certain time period, it could automatically be spun off into a live chat until the activity dies down.
Sorry, I don't use Facebook, and I know a lot of people that won't. I refuse to be an "eyeball asset" for Facebook to market to their advertisers.
You’ve addressed every single concern and accusation on the thread.
BTW, straight-talk — you are not exactly in the sort of physical condition to be ‘ripping off’ or ‘grifting’ or whatever the naysayers might say. That you can moderate FR at all is a testimony to your spirit.
I like that you directly address that there is a problem.
Different topic: Jim, I never want to be accused of going behind your back, so I will keep you in this important loop:
I’ve decided to author some software. It will be in .NET and C#, SQL server backend. It will not be browser-based, but an executable. It will run on a persons machine. The concept is to have, in the middle, the actual news article the forum is addressing: CNN, ABC, WaPo, whatever. No possible way to be a copyright infringement there, is there? It’s THEIR presentation. Around the edges, in an inverted U shape, will be: Left bar, FR-like tools. Top: Text formating, other tools. Right: Reader Comments, just like FR. Additionally, a commenter will be able to point at, highlight text in their comment section. Normal buttons but the addition of a Like and a Possible Troll button.
If the user has two screens (not uncommon these days) the right-side comments will expand to occupy that entire screen.
If I accomplish this and battle test it, I would be delighted if you would at least look at it. I know John is your partner and this software is good, but I’d like to offer John a new platform to look over. Source will of course be available to him (he must non-disclose, obviously).
I know your gut reaction: Not interested. :) LOL... I know you that long. But along with the “Not interested”, leave a tiny bit of your mind that might be open to the concept.
I am definitely not trying to replace FR. I am trying to offer it alternatives, and a future direction.
We’re here for the doo-ration, JR! Thank you for all you’ve done to make a user-friendly home for conservatives! I know you’re working hard to keep it up to speed and I trust that will will get done! :)
Don’t worry about it Jim.
Backtrack one post. Don’t want to design this without JR knowing. Seems too ‘sneaky’ for me. Conceptual design and storyboarding from now until Feb 1. Feb 1, I begin actual development.
Prayers out to you, sir.
Laz, I think you have a great concept, but your execution will doom it. Installing a client on someone's computer is just asking for trouble. You will have to support it on all the different platforms, and the minute ANYTHING goes wrong while it is running, you'll be blamed for it.
However, I think you can do it in a browser frame. You should be able to render an article within a frame, and then put additional content above/below it. The user would download the article from the original source into their browser, and your server would never handle it.
Unfortunately, the original article may change, or the URL is invalidated. That would result in a mismatch between the display frame and the added content. But, it would eliminate all complaints about copyright.
*Boop*
You are a good man, Laz! (I know it’s a dark secret you don’t
want out, but it’s true!)
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