Possible Omnimaga forum dissolving

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Sat 23 Apr, 2005 5:16 pm

Source: http://omnimaga.earthforge.com

Most of you who visit this website regulary probably noticed that the forums are down often. It's mainly due to the fact that the server seems to need lot of memory to run them so there is a lot of SQL errors. Also Earthforge is a server which receive a lot of hits per days. Because I want Omnimaga visitors to enjoy their visits on the websites and the forums as well, I am currently thinking about moving to a new forum. As for now I am waiting an awnser from my web hoster to know if I have PHPBB2 support or if the problems will be fixed soon and if not I will have to find a new host for the forum. Calcwebzine is very slow so it will most likely not be hosted here, same thing for proboards, not to mention that they have horrible skins. There would be invisonfree or forumer but they have ads, so the remaining one would be calcgames. The main website, however, will remain on Earthforge.

By doing this this mean that Omnimaga will have an independent forum and there is some possibility that I'll allow users to have a section for their RPG projects.

Basically it should take a few days before I come back with news about this so stay tuned for updates. The only thing I hope is that I will have more visitors than on the old yAronet forum, but with PHPBBbeing easier to use I might get more visitors

VahnRPG · Post by **VahnRPG** » Sat 23 Apr, 2005 6:00 pm

oooh, psychedelic Kevin avie

lloydkirk1989 · Post by **lloydkirk1989** » Sat 23 Apr, 2005 6:53 pm

I could host it at z80 revelation if you want....

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Sat 23 Apr, 2005 10:16 pm

yeah that might be an idea, but z80 revelation is only for z80 calcs, while Omnimaga is also for Casio adn HP calcs. What I liked with EPS forum is that it's for all brands of calcs and I thought that letting Omnimaga merged with the EPS forum would be a good idea, however the situation is just getting worse so unless CrimsonCasio fix all the bugs I am willing to move to an independent forum.

lloydkirk1989 · Post by **lloydkirk1989** » Sun 24 Apr, 2005 2:41 am

you could have whatever discussion you want on your forum. So, it wouldn't just have to be z80 stuff. If you do chose to "move to an independent forum", what type of forum would you like?

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Sun 24 Apr, 2005 12:55 pm

Something like this:
http://s10.invisionfree.com/omnimaga
but with an Omnimaga themed skin. If I use PHPBB it would be like the Maxcoderz skin but with blue background and all the sand like color would be gray and the post areas would be white. I need to mess around with the CSS (which is confusing considering the incredible amount of stuff in the CSS) to change the color. I am thinking about staying with invisionfree if I choose IPB because it's quite fast and there isnt lot of ads

EDIT: I alerady have a quite good smiley selection so that's not a problem anymore

Post by **kv83** » Sun 24 Apr, 2005 1:53 pm

imho there are to many forums. take my advice, don't set up a forum for a site like omnimaga... just as I won't set up a forum for calcwebzine.com... there isn't a demand for it, seeing that there are already enough forums...

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Sun 24 Apr, 2005 2:49 pm

Yeah I know, it's a big problem since there is way too many forums. That's why I decided to merge it with Epic Programming Studios back in early september because it was a pretty good idea and it fitted very well with my site when I started adding Casio (and HP) stuff. However I cannot stand the EPS forum anymore, they are buggy, it doesnt auto login, they are pretty slow, there is SQL errors almost every tuesday or friday, they have an uptime of 40% (yes trust me) and most of the time when you click somewhere it doesnt respond at all and you get to a 404 error, which is annoying when you post because you have to rewrite all your post from scratch and CrimsonCasio (the admin) refuses to fix all the bugs so that's why I decided to separate once again, until the problems are fixed, which might take a while. It will mostly be a support forum for the files in the archives though and maybe there will be a project section, but I dont know yet.

the_unknown_one · Post by **the_unknown_one** » Sun 24 Apr, 2005 5:12 pm

Personally i think ur overreacting, i never had so much trouble with it (yes, sometimes its down/slow but not THAT much). Well, of course i dont know about the Omnimaga forum, i'm talking about the EPS forum atm.

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Sun 24 Apr, 2005 8:44 pm

I am not overreacting, especially when the forum goes down during 4 hours per day and when it takes 20 minutes to load. UnitedTI got the same problem and they lost A LOT of visitors because of that. Have you noticed the recent traffic decrease at EPS?

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Mon 25 Apr, 2005 2:35 pm

Small update: CrimsonCasio replyed to my post on the Casiocalc forum and said that the forums slow down were due to SQL problems with the servere, so I will most likely not set up a new forum or a webportal on the earthforge server because the Omnimaga website would go down along with the EPS forum during slowdowns. So far he doesnt know why it happens, I hope this will be fixed soon. Also Earthforge server receive an average of 300000 hit per months so that might be a problem, even though the server have 3 MB of DDR RAM. Right now I will continue using the EPS forum and hope problems will not restart over next weekend

Now I got a few idea in head, but not about the forum. I though it would probably be neat if users (even though there isnt a lot of traffic) would be able to post comments on news articles. Unfortunately I suck at website coding so that pose me a big problem

1) Let everything as they are now, same website with no commenting system
2) Try to find a free webhoster with ad-free that support PWSPHP or mambo (no PHPNuke!) , set up the website here but let all the 30 MB of files/pictures as well as the old versions of the website on the earthforge server since it's pretty fast and I have lot of space here and set an automatic redirection index.html page on earthforge so the URL would still be http://omnimaga.earthforge.com .
3) Use Invisionfree forum as a website. I was thinking about this because the ads are pretty small and there is no pop-ups/under and I can easily set up all sections of my current website in a forum. If I do that all the zip and pic files as wel as the old website versions would stay on earthforge and I would still set up an html page. The only downside is that all the old news articles would be lost and only viewable in the old archived versions of the website

DJ_O · Post by **DJ_O** » Thu 28 Apr, 2005 4:59 pm

As many ppl might have noticed the whole earthforge websites were down since yesterday. However you could access them with the IP address, I dont know why but I felt like it was good upcoming news. In fact now at least one pb seems to be fixed, the IP address!

http://speedy.dnsprotect.com/~earthfor/ ... ion/forum/

hey guys, if your here you are at the wrong board, we moved servers and ive fixed the IP thing, just go to http://dysfunction.earthforge.com/forum and post like normal

this message (and the old board) will be gone in 3 days.

I dunno what else have changed though, hopefully the SQL database will be on a new server and the forum will run as fast as the Omnimaga website

EDIT: everything seems to work fine right now. I havent tested the auto login yet, also I am waiting friday (during very high traffic period) to see if the forums are stable

EDIT: dawn the whole server is down again