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I've noticed the insane amount of guests on this board at any given time. I figured it was all bot traffic. I didn't realize they could suck up all the bandwidth to the point of bringing the site down. As if I needed another reason to hate that shit.

Thanks TSI for keeping the place going. It is greatly appreciated. I didn't know AT was on Blue Sky so I jumped on that to stay in the loop.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
During an outage, please check ArticulatedThoughts25 on Instagram or ArticulatedThoughts.com on Bluesky for updates. I didn't think to send notice until about four hours after the site went down this morning (about 6:40 a.m. PT).

The site went down this morning because we reached our 2GB database storage limit. As I mentioned last night, we've seen a concerning level of bot traffic over the last week or so. The bots are search engine crawlers and AI training bots. The search engine crawlers are acceptable, within reason. The AI training bots are not. Between the two of them, they executed so many searches that they filled 1GB of storage. I was able to reclaim another 250MB by wiping our IP logs. Tomorrow, when I haven't been staring at this for half the day, I plan to see if we can automatically clear those caches regularly. We don't need to store that data.

Because of the search abuse, I had to disable guest search permissions. If you're a guest, I hope you use this as an excuse to join up. You'll get the full forum experience that way.

This has been a learning experience for me. For one, I'm going to check our server dashboard much more frequently now. Before, I was afraid of breaking something. Now I know it's a necessary evil.

Unfortunately, we're not out of the woods yet. As of this post, we have more than 18,000 guests. I need to crack down on that. Again, hopefully tomorrow.

That's where we're at. I'll keep you posted.
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TSI is there a way we could help you with that monetarily? I'll be happy to help keep this place going.
 
TheSameIdiot said:
During an outage, please check ArticulatedThoughts25 on Instagram or ArticulatedThoughts.com on Bluesky for updates. I didn't think to send notice until about four hours after the site went down this morning (about 6:40 a.m. PT).
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Apparently my tired brain didn't finish this thought. Next time, I'll be sure to get out an update as soon as I'm aware the forum is down. If I'm sleeping, at work, or out of town, it might still take some time, but when I know, you'll know.
Shinigami Customs said:
TSI is there a way we could help you with that monetarily? I'll be happy to help keep this place going.
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I don't think I've given a recent update on this. I've been courting a sponsor for a few months. No luck as of yet. If that does happen, a few things would change, theoretically and actually.

First and most obviously, this place would become a business. With it, I would need a business license and probably a PO box, a lawyer, and a web developer on retainer. That would push my expenses from $250/year to I have no idea what. If I skipped the lawyer and web developer, let's say $750 a year.

I think you all know I'm not trying to get rich off of this place. I would love to cover my expenses, send a minuscule thank-you gift to the moderators, and pay community members to write Spotlight section posts. If I opened a voluntary tip jar or premium membership, I would still need the business license and PO box. $750 is a lot of money to raise before we break even. If I had the sponsorship anyway, it'd be worth doing. By itself, I don't think so. You guys have been very generous, but that seems like increasing expenses for the sake of increasing expenses.

Personally, I think a sponsor would get their money's worth here—Hell, my dollar alone would cover most of the sponsorship costs. I know a lot of you would be willing to shift your toy purchases to a retailer that contributed to forum upkeep, but I admit it's a tough sell from the outside. We're a niche 294-person community, not a YouTuber with 100K subs.
 
PO boxes are prohibitively expensive, too (he says, as the price for the one he pays for for his author website increases in price again and is now almost three times what it cost ten years ago). the longer you can avoid that the better, honestly.
 
I have a PO Box because I need to have an “official address” on record for my board licensure but I do not want clients/business bros/etc to be able to look up where I live. It’s a very annoying expense.
 
AceofKnaves said:
I have a PO Box because I need to have an “official address” on record for my board licensure but I do not want clients/business bros/etc to be able to look up where I live. It’s a very annoying expense.
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I had to go clean out my PO box because it's JUST there as a requirement for owning a website and the box was overflowing with spam mail. Mostly from the local museum which spends a ton of money on beautiful physical marketing nobody looks at.
 
docsilence said:
I had to go clean out my PO box because it's JUST there as a requirement for owning a website and the box was overflowing with spam mail. Mostly from the local museum which spends a ton of money on beautiful physical marketing nobody looks at.
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Further proof that our entire country, top to bottom, is run by people way too fucking old to be allowed to make any goddamn decisions.
 
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