On the recent outage and the future of TCS

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On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby cmsellers » Sun Feb 14, 2021 6:37 am

You may have noticed that the site went down again for about a day. I had my suspicions about what the problem was, so when Tess called the host, I was on part of the call. As it turned out, I was wrong about the cause of the problem, and the problem was easily fixable … for now. We’ve been using php 5.6 for years, GoDaddy automatically upgraded us, and the customer service agent was able to downgrade the platform.

The problem is: GoDaddy won’t continue to support php 5.6 forever, and we don’t know how long. They recently pulled support for 5.2. MySQL also pulled support for the version of MySQL we use (also 5.6) this month, and will be pulling support for 5.7 in 31 months, though GoDaddy may well support them for longer. After that, it’s a jump to version 8, which is dramatically different.

We’ve been using the same version of phpBB for years because the reputation system won’t work with anything newer. Both avi and I looked at the reputation system and concluded that it would be too much work for us to port to a different reputation system. And of course we all love our rep points, so we’ve kept the forum software antiquated.

However, when the day comes that GoDaddy ends support for 5.6, we can probably upgrade the forums to a newer version of php, at the cost of losing the rep. Unfortunately, the website itself was written years ago in php 5.6. I’m not interested in porting the website to php 8 and I know avi’s not, and other solutions may prove similarly excessively demanding for the userbase we now have. So, if there’s any articles you want to save, you should save them now, though I’ve checked and the Internet Archive has also preserved them.

Basically, this is a heads up that at some point in the next few years—and unfortunately we don’t know exactly when—we’ll be losing the reputation system and likely the main website as well.
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby Pedgerow » Sun Feb 14, 2021 6:03 pm

I imagine you've looked into most of this, but there are plenty of versions of PHP v7 (I think the modern one right now is 7.4). Could you do this temporarily? I assume there is some plugin that handles the reputation system; if this is deprecated there is usually a different one that would replace it for the newer versions. Would a new plugin remove all the old scores?

I don't work for GoDaddy, and my employer is microscopic in comparison, but we usually have a couple of servers where websites with legacy interfaces can still be hosted. If this site is hosted on a cPanel server, ask if GoDaddy have any CloudLinux ones, because those are made specifically for older sites that can't upgrade. And even a new server (on cPanel) can install certain old versions of PHP back to a certain point through the EasyApache interface.

My work charges a lot more than GoDaddy and we're much more helpful, so maybe GoDaddy don't offer any options for server migrations or abnormal servers for old sites at all. If they don't, well, I've always suspected that karma and reputation systems make people more reluctant to post anyway. You're less willing to take a chance with a post, in case nobody likes it. Losing these systems might increase forum activity a bit. Although to be fair, they got rid of karma on PWOT a couple of years before it was deleted, and it didn't make me any braver in calling them all a bunch of Kool-Aid SJW cultists whenever they disagreed with me. So I might be wrong about it increasing the post rate.
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby cmsellers » Sun Feb 14, 2021 6:35 pm

First off: sorry, I mean we'd have to upgrade to php 7. With both the MySQL and php versions being 5.6 and having a jump to the supported version, it's easy to get mixed up.

A new rep system could handle the old scores. However the way that the scores are stored on this add-on vs modern rep add-ons make it a deceptively difficult task to achieve. I can't say why avi deemed it not worth pursuing, and I looked into right when I was first made a backend admin way back in I think in 2016. (It was one of the reasons Tess made me a backend admin.) However I do recall that for me, the fact that I don't really have a lot of web admin experience, that the way karma was stored in mySQL was not what I expected, and that php is an absolute bitch of a language to work in all played a role.

From what you're saying about your job, I assume you understand the difference between platform-as-a-service (PAAS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IAAS)? Right now, we're using GoDaddy as PAAS, and they do offer backwards compatibility for a surprisingly long time, but eventually, you reach the point where you have so few customers who rely on a tech that it doesn't make sense to continue supporting as PAAS, especially when it means your tech support people need to understand those old versions.

Moving to an IAAS model where GoDaddy gives us a VM and we run whatever antiquated techs we want is technically an option, but it would require a fair amount of work to get up-and-running, work which, frankly, I'm not willing to put in for a site that has under a dozen active users, especially when it's only to save a part of the site that isn't even being updated anymore. It would also make us completely responsible for maintaining the site, and right now Tess is actually the one who fixes most site issues, by calling GoDaddy, which she wouldn't be able to do if we moved to IAAS.

Personally, negative karma tends to make me much less willing to post, especially if my net karma goes negative early on, as happened pretty much immediately on PWOT with two different accounts, but positive karma makes me more likely to post. It can be disheartening to write a post and get no response, but with karma, you know people have read and liked it. Given the large number of subreddits that have tried to disable downvoting (you can't actually do that, just remove the button with custom CSS users can easily get rid of), the fact that Facebook has resisted calls for a dislike button since it was founded, and the way that downvotes on YouTube comments work the same way as the "door close button on an elevator" (they have no impact, but they give you something to press), I think it's clear that most people probably react to karma the way I do.
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby Krashlia » Sun Feb 14, 2021 8:28 pm

...So what you're saying is... that this site is on borrowed time, due to being in the planned route of an Intergalactic super-highway?
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby NathanLoiselle » Mon Feb 15, 2021 2:03 pm

There's a planned route of an Intergalactic Super-highway? How come no one told me???
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby CarrieVS » Mon Feb 15, 2021 9:26 pm

NathanLoiselle wrote:There's a planned route of an Intergalactic Super-highway? How come no one told me???


We assumed you knew. The plans have been on display in the local planning department of Alpha Centauri for fifty years.
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby iMURDAu » Tue Feb 16, 2021 1:04 pm

So from what I'm understanding....

This is at some point is to become an....

Eminent Domain.

:lol:

I'm not worried about the rep system, losing the site would suck but at least there's still discord, all in all I'm just glad to have had a place to hang out for the past 7-ish years with cool people.
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby cmsellers » Tue Feb 16, 2021 4:09 pm

To be clear: we should be able to keep the forums running indefinitely by upgrading the software. No guarantees, but I don't see any reason it should take more than a couple hours if we're not trying to preserve the rep system.

The website proper, with the articles, is likely to break once GoDaddy stops supporting php 5.6, since it would require either a manual port to php 7, a transition of all of TCS to IAAS, or a script to convert the whole website from dynamically to statically generated webpages, all of which look to be fairly time and knowledge intensive.
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Re: On the recent outage and the future of TCS

Postby CarrieVS » Tue Feb 16, 2021 6:59 pm

Maybe it's just me but I tend to forget that TCS has a content site attached to the forums, and even when I remember it I have difficulty thinking of it as the "main" part of the site, even though it is the homepage.
That may be where the confusion has come from.
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