Rebuilding FSTDT

[BobRumba]

I wonder if there's a place that might be willing to host it (i.e. free), given that it's reasonably popular.

[RavynousHunter]

Dunno if Krad would be willing to host it like he does the forum.  Dunno how to reliably get a hold of him, either.

[Barbarella]

Well; We can crowd-fund to get the thing started up and then, once it's underway, perhaps have a fun FSTDTs gift shop on Patreon or some other store thingy.

[RavynousHunter]

That is an idea, aye.  Though, we'd probably need to trademark the name, lest we risk tonnes of imitators drawing away funding.  Another alternative might be Patreon, dunno if they do stuff like the mainpage, though.

[BobRumba]

Reddit has a topic about fstdt and what happened to it. I directed their discussion here.  Nice to see people care about it.

Can new people still register for this forum?

[Sigmaleph]

Reddit has a topic about fstdt and what happened to it. I directed their discussion here.  Nice to see people care about it.

Can new people still register for this forum?

Yes. Though sometimes there are issues with activation emails and new users need to be activated manually.

[BobRumba]

Yes. Though sometimes there are issues with activation emails and new users need to be activated manually.

That must be what’s happening to me with my name change.  Can someone manually activate my new name Bob Rumba?  My activation email never showed up.

[Sigmaleph]

Yes. Though sometimes there are issues with activation emails and new users need to be activated manually.

That must be what’s happening to me with my name change.  Can someone manually activate my new name Bob Rumba?  My activation email never showed up.

I did that two days ago. If you try logging in to it, it should work.

For the record, you don't need a new account to change your name, it can be modified in your account settings.

[BobRumba]

I did that two days ago. If you try logging in to it, it should work.

For the record, you don't need a new account to change your name, it can be modified in your account settings.

Oh - thanks.  I never thought to try it.
May not be necessary now, I might just modify my name instead.  I wasn't going to do that at first but now I think I probably willl.

[Tricky Fox]

With shy dragging his heels about fixing the problem (assuming he has any intention of doing so at all) and also being entirely silent on the topic, this may be the best option. Personally, I'm conflicted. If this were the finale then surely there would have been some kind of announcement of it being shut down.

Or is this just a case of "make it look like an accident" so he'll bail, then wait for the hosting to expire. I really don't know.

[BobRumba]

With shy dragging his heels about fixing the problem (assuming he has any intention of doing so at all) and also being entirely silent on the topic, this may be the best option. Personally, I'm conflicted. If this were the finale then surely there would have been some kind of announcement of it being shut down.

Or is this just a case of "make it look like an accident" so he'll bail, then wait for the hosting to expire. I really don't know.

He always ran it responsibly.  I did notice it was taking ages to get submissions approved in the weeks leading up to his disappearance.  My suspicion is something very heavy happened in his personal life.  But the length of time is now getting a little bit extensive and I'm surprised the other people high-up (those who approved submissions, etc.) haven't spoken up, pyro for instance.  He was here shortly before the board went down.  I'd have thought he'd have made his presence known.

[Tricky Fox]

With shy dragging his heels about fixing the problem (assuming he has any intention of doing so at all) and also being entirely silent on the topic, this may be the best option. Personally, I'm conflicted. If this were the finale then surely there would have been some kind of announcement of it being shut down.

Or is this just a case of "make it look like an accident" so he'll bail, then wait for the hosting to expire. I really don't know.

He always ran it responsibly.  I did notice it was taking ages to get submissions approved in the weeks leading up to his disappearance.  My suspicion is something very heavy happened in his personal life.  But the length of time is now getting a little bit extensive and I'm surprised the other people high-up (those who approved submissions, etc.) haven't spoken up, pyro for instance.  He was here shortly before the board went down.  I'd have thought he'd have made his presence known.

It could be that two very heavy and personal in nature, and also very complex and difficult as well which would explain the length of time. I could also hypothesise that shy told the other higher ups to stay shtum about it, not wanting his personal matters to be public knowledge. As others have said, it seems that the database has shat itself, but could also be proving a mf'er to fix.

[RavynousHunter]

If I had access to it, I could prolly fix it; as I've said earlier, it just looks like a connection string got fubar'd, somewheres.

As for a potential replacement, I'm doing a little work compling a list of things I, personally, would use to build such a thing:

1) DotVVM for the frontend.  There's a free version and it plugs straight into Visual Studio.  That way, I don't have to touch anything other than C#, CSS, and HTML.

2) Entity Framework for the data access layer.  Mostly so I don't have to touch SQL directly, because that is of the devil.  Also totally free and straight from Microsoft.

3) Standard C# for an API, both for general use and easier integration if/when Shy returns.

HOWEVER, there is an alternative if we can't get a Windows-based server, using Python:

1) Standard HTML/JS/CSS for the frontend.  Irritating, but I can do it.

2) Flask for the backend whatnot.

3) PostgreSQL for the database.

4) Flask-API for the API.

All are free and can be used in Python 3 easily enough.  Only downside is that I'm not quite as conversant in these technologies as I am their .Net counterparts.  However, I am aware that Linux-based servers tend to be cheaper and more prevalent, so it is an option.

[BobRumba]

Well, I don't want to seem stupid, but I'm not entirely sure why this site needs to be "coded" in the first place, can it not be updated to something a little easier?  There is probably more going on below the surface than I know about but isn't it really just a place where quotes are submitted and people discuss them?  Not much different than this forum as far as I can tell.  But again, I say this as a casual observer.  If there's a good reason for it (and I'm sure there is) I ask out of ignorance, I'm not getting in anyone's face about it.

I really just would like to see the place up and running again.  It has a good reputation (and also a bad one among conservatives, I've discovered...some people think we are all a bunch of God-hating SJWs.)

[RavynousHunter]

It does indeed need to be coded, and its broken down into 3 main categories:

1) Frontend (what the user sees).
2) Backend
3) Data Access Layer (DAL)

The first is obvious, there's parts (like breaking quotes into pages, dynamically loading quotes, etc) that can't be done in pure HTML+CSS.  That necessitates either DotVVM or JavaScript.

The second, the backend, sits between the frontend and the DAL.  It makes the data the DAL pulls useful, acting on it as we need, doing things like (potentially) parsing BBCode into HTML, making sure the data is valid, and preventing things like SQL injection attacks by sanitizing input into the system.

The third part consists partly of regular code and partly of SQL, especially in the case of PostgreSQL + Python.  The former to pull data from the database (quotes, commets, etc) and the latter providing not only the structure of the database itself, but any stored procedures that sit right on top of the database, facilitating speedier access to certain queries that would otherwise be slower in code.  Long story short, the DAL polls the database and turns what it gets into objects that are then passed to the backend, or takes data that's given by the backend and pushing it to the database.

[ETA]

The TL;DR is this: one could do it with straight HTML+CSS.  The problem is that every quote approval would require a site edit/update before it'd take effect.  That'd also mean that we'd likely have to break up the pages by day to keep them at a manageable size.  Otherwise, the pages would be hatefully enormous and take forever to load.