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Major announcement re Geocaching forums…. you may be already aware. Just in case, here it is.
Recent Forum IssuesAs most of you have undoubtedly noticed, the performance of the forums has degraded significantly in the last several weeks.
On October 22, our vendor Infopop told us that the current issues are due to the increase in usage and that we’ve physically outgrown the dedicated server we purchased less than a year ago. We’ve been working with them to come up with a solution, but its going to take some time to work out all the details. The cost of the new hosting solution is far more than we expected, so we’re looking for an alternative forum solution we can host in-house. The biggest issue will be trying to move tens of thousands of posts to the new forums (not to mention finding a solution that can keep up with our members!)
Believe us, we’re just as frustrated with the situation as you are, but unfortunately we were caught off guard by our vendor, who did not warn us of the server issues. As a result we are scrambling to figure out how to solve this problem. Please be patient.
I have tried and gave up on accessing the geocaching.com forums more than once.
I have always been curious- From a technical standpoint, can someone tell us where the wi-geocaching.com website is hosted from and who actually performs all the design & maintenance? Does the board discuss every detail concerning the final appearance of the WGA site?
How, if at all, may this web forum be effected, seeing it is also “powered by” InfoPop?
quote:
Originally posted by Cathunter:
I have always been curious- From a technical standpoint, can someone tell us where the wi-geocaching.com website is hosted from and who actually performs all the design & maintenance?A quick whois reveals:
Alan Fiebig
P.O. Box 44
Darien, Wisconsin 53114
USDomain Name: WI-GEOCACHING.COM
Administrative Contact
Arlene Fiebig: [email protected]
State Long Distance Telephone
P.O. Box 230 (216 W. Walworth Street)
Elkhorn, Wisconsin 53121
US
Phone 262-741-1151
Fax 262-723-1500
Technical Contact
Alan Fiebig: [email protected]
State Long Distance Telephone
P.O. Box 230
Elkhorn, WI 53121
US
Phone 262-723-1638
Fax 262-723-1500Record updated date: 2003-01-03 12:05:52
Record created date: 2002-02-08
Record expires on date: 2004-02-08
Database last updated on: 2003-11-10 23:00:32 ESTDomain servers in listed order:
DNS1.ELKNET.NET 64.83.160.45
DNS2.ELKNET.NET 216.114.28.3Our webmasters are Alan and Arn (Team CacheCows) and Jeremy (jvechinski). Jeremy also serves on the WGA board. Alan donates the server space to the WGA from his company’s location in Elkhorn, WI, so we’re very fortunate to have him do so, and fortunate to have such capable computer gurus as our webmasters. The geocaching.com forum issue doesn’t affect the WGA forums because we operate on completely different computers.
[This message has been edited by kbraband (edited 11-11-2003).]
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…
Well OK, for those that are interested, the WGA website runs on a dedicated web server housed at ElkNet. (Everyone should post a reply here thanking Alan for providing the websever and webhosting to the WGA for free! ) After a server meltdown in July of this year, the website was moved to a new rack based server. (Alan, feel free to correct any of this info…)
As for the possibility these forums will start slowing down, it is unlikely in the short term.
First, we are running a different version of UBB (UBB.classic) on our own web server. Even though it is “old school”, this version has the advantage of only serving up simple HTML files when people are reading the forums. Geocaching.com (Groundspeak) is running UBB.x (database based), and letting InfoPop take care of hosting the forums. I think InfoPop is screwing geocaching.com over by not providing a webserver that is sufficiently powerful enough to handle peak loads and/or there is some bandwidth limitation at InfoPop.
Second, the number of hits per day, members, and posts we have is significantly less than the Groundspeak forums. Last month, there were about 136,000 “hits” for the forums part of the website (4,500 per day or one every 20 seconds). These hits were about 47% of the total hits we got that month, making the forums by far the most used area of the website.
I’m betting geocaching.com will move back to hosting their forums themselves. This way they’ll have control over the hardware (webserver) and bandwidth used. After having a bad experience with InfoPop, they’ll probably go with some other vendor, possibly using a free solution like phpBB.
When I noticed our site was down, I went to GC.com to post a message in the midwest forums. That’s when I realized that GC.com has taken their forums out of service. Talk about a total blackout.
We should designate a failsafe site to post emergency messages if this were to arise again. Perhaps Vechinski.com ???
Just a comment regarding the above whois posted by TeamLotsacache. WHile that whois shows that Arlene and I ‘own’ the WGA domain registration, that is only because we did the registration, and we take care of the renewals and the paperwork etc. Should the WGA Board ever want to move the domain away from us, we would immediatly release the domain to them.
On a side note… I recently saw the computer that the WGA server should reside on. It was the winner of a recent case-mod contest. A case-mod is where people build and greatly customize their computer cases. The winner had built his computer into an ammo-box! This particular box I had even used myself for our Tales from the Crypt cache until it was stolen. Just click on the picture below to see more info on this computer.
[This message has been edited by CacheCows (edited 11-14-2003).]
Of course, the other alternative is using a standard ammo-box:
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