gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
Because this town gets kinda calm at certain times of day / days of the week.
I have a solution to propose, though...
We need a DH sequel. And I volunteer my time to contribute to this particular endeavor ON THE CONDITION THAT others are not only on board, but some might even help in this regard.
I've been sitting here kinda just contemplating what it might take to accomplish this goal, and have arrived at some condensed nuggets of information that kinda summarize the general issues at play here...
1) Totse absolutely thrived during certain periods, and so it offers us an example we can emulate. 1A) As a result of the relative obscurity of the forum, combined with the fact that it has been shut down for years as of today, due to the natural aging process, many of the original posters have simply lost interest / moved on / died / gone to jail / started cults on a Caribbean island (lol not actually, but almost believable for Totse alumni). 1BI) We need to attract a younger cohort. 1BII) We also might need to consider hosting text files (the logistics can be worked out in this thread or elsewhere, or completely ignored, but it ultimately was how I personally found Totse, and a few people I've met in real life who have mentioned Totse knew about the text files (just not about the forums)).
2) ...
Ah, forget about this whole numbering scheme. I'm losing track of the nested back and forth.
But yeah, who else is with me?
Let's start by approaching the initial things mentioned above.
Should we start compiling an information resource much like Totse was? Note that it does not necessarily need to be hosted on the same servers, or on the same domain even, etc, etc... The logistics can be handled in many different ways.
Any other suggestions?
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gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
Also, for that matter, how many here even care? I mean, maybe I'm just stuck living in the past, but I miss the glory days of Totse at it's prime, and even Zoklet for that matter (albeit to a lesser extent).
There was a time when having topical subforums was totally necessary, because SG alone would get a front page full of new threads every few minutes or so.
Maybe other people don't care about having such a degree of diversity? (And I don't mean "diversity" in the cliche political sense, but rather in the sense of sheer diversity of minds).
Rizzo in a box
African Astronaut
[the rapidly lightproof ovariectomy]
what exactly are you trying to do and why? attract a bunch of retarded zoomers? you can't recreate the wild west of the internet. all we can do is huddle in our hobbit holes and try to escape saurons eye.
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gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
I'm thinking of maybe recreating the Totse text file archive from that archived dump floating around on the Internet somewhere (I have a copy somewhere), and then hosting it on AWS since I already host all kinds of stuff on there anyway, it wouldn't be much work.
It's now on my TODO board.
I can then link to the forums here from the text file repository. We'll see if we get any fresh blood.
Originally posted by gadzooks
I'm thinking of maybe recreating the Totse text file archive from that archived dump floating around on the Internet somewhere (I have a copy somewhere), and then hosting it on AWS since I already host all kinds of stuff on there anyway, it wouldn't be much work.
It's now on my TODO board.
I can then link to the forums here from the text file repository. We'll see if we get any fresh blood.
gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
Originally posted by MORALLY SUPERIOR BEING V: A Cat-Girl/Boy Under Every Bed
Do you need to make a CMS or something?
Kinda. It should be a pretty straightforward CMS since articles don't have the option for commenting on them (although I hadn't even considered if that might be a desirable feature until I started this sentence...).
That might be overkill though. So for now I'm just going to recreate the old Totse text file hosting pattern as best I can and post a working iteration that can be modified if needed and/or desired.
gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
Originally posted by Bologna Nacho
What's DH got to do with this?
Oh, I was about to actually list some other potential methods we could use to increase our numbers, such as finding other, similar communities, and dropping hints or something, I dunno. This is the brainstorming phase of this project.
But I figured that I'd stop at hosting a text file repository for now, just to keep things simple.
I like this suggestion because I hadn't even considered gaining traffic from already established sites with high already-existing user bases, and encyclopedia dramatica can definitely accomplish that.
gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
Holy fuck, cloud storage is SO CHEAP and affordable. WTF? I've never actually looked into it before, but for a STATIC repository it would be literally pennies per month if I'm reading this right (the Totse article archive I have here is under 3 GB).
But then there are some things to take into consideration: 1. I'm still not 100% sure on the logistics of having a CMS on, say, (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk, then hosting the raw data (article title, author, content, etc) on (AWS) S3... It's a technical question that I just have to research because this is somewhat new to me (at least, hosting anything on AWS bigger than a few megabytes). 2. Do we want it to be STATIC? Or should I allow for a new submissions process? That would, however, necessitate some kind of review process (I guess...? I assume somebody reviewed things in some capacity? Even if just to check for spam and straight up illegal content? - which actually kinda makes me want to forgo the whole new submissions functionality, especially right now. That's a lot of responsibility and I have lots on my plate at the moment).
Originally posted by gadzooks
1. I'm still not 100% sure on the logistics of having a CMS on, say, (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk, then hosting the raw data (article title, author, content, etc) on (AWS) S3…
gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
Originally posted by MORALLY SUPERIOR BEING V: A Cat-Girl/Boy Under Every Bed
Why would you use S3?
Admittedly, I haven't put too much thought into the decision yet, but S3 seems like (at least, when it comes to AWS) the ideal way to host something like an archive of data.
Now, that being said, there is always the option of just hosting the data on an EC2 Instance (or, with Elastic Beanstalk - essentially a variable number of EC2 Instances, I guess).
That way, the files being hosted would be on the same (virtual) machine as the web server hosting them via the CMS, so it does make sense for the sake of simplicity/parsimony.
So, I dunno, I just have to look into this a bit more and maybe see how others typically handle the same scenario.
gadzooks
Dark Matter
[keratinize my mild-tasting blossoming]
I think maybe the bias impacting me is that I'm STARTING with gigabytes of existing content, so I'm thinking in terms of a static data store... BUT, I might want to, maybe even just potentially down the line, incorporate dynamic storage (i.e. allowing new submissions). At that point, I would maybe want to use a plain old database.
Actually, shit, I didn't even think of a regular old (relational) database... AWS has RDS.
Damn, see this is good... Just discussing the project gets me thinking in different directions.
I think I might go with RDS (with an EC2/ELB server to host the CMS).
