New Host and Possible Forum Upgrades

[Space Goat]

This is to let you guys know that sometime later this month (not exactly sure on the date yet), my host is going to be moving this site to a new server and datacenter. Over the past couple years, many of you have probably noticed some degradation in site load times and overall performance. I noticed around the same time this began that my host had stopped selling shared hosting plans (which we are currently on) and began specializing solely in managed VPS and dedicated server solutions. It has been my gut feeling for quite a while now that they have been overcrowding all their remaining shared hosting customers until they could decide what to do with us, seeing as we didn't really fit into their business model any longer. Fortunately, it appears the situation is finally getting ready to improve, because as part of the move, they are also creating a new brand that focuses solely on shared hosting services. I am hopeful we will see an immediate improvement in site performance when this migration is completed.

At the same time all this is going on, I am now strongly considering moving the site off shared hosting and onto a VPS. So serious in fact, that I bought a VPS yesterday and already have a clone of the forums up and running on it. For those who do not know what any of this means, a VPS (Virtual Private Server) is essentially a virtual machine that runs on a shared physical server, but emulates a dedicated one. Each VPS has its own operating system, usually a linux flavor of the customer's choice, and specific portions of RAM & CPU are allocated to each VPS instance separately. Consequently, other customer accounts on the same physical server as us are severely limited in their ability to affect the load times of our site, and overall performance should be much more consistent. The only downside is that with an unmanaged VPS (like I am considering), all of the server setup and maintenance (including the installation of required services like Apache, PHP & MySQL) are my responsibility. Initial setup of the VPS I bought yesterday was a piece of cake, but I have only moderate experience with linux and am unfamiliar with the best practices that admins should perform to adequately secure a web server. This is my only concern at the moment. Over the next several weeks I intend to do a lot of testing to gauge whether or not I am up to the challenge of maintaining a server like this for the foreseeable future.

Now here is where things get a little more interesting. All this change has got me thinking about the long-term security of the site, and I've begun considering changing the forum software we are running as well. The problem? The version of vBulletin we are running is ancient and riddled with security vulnerabilities that I have admittedly fallen way behind on patching. I looked at upgrading, but unfortunately my vBulletin.com account expired years ago, and even if I still had access to upgrades, the vBulletin product has been so horribly ruined over the past several years--first by a parent company change, and then by subsequent mismanagement--that it's not even a viable option anymore. So with no upgrade path, and the ever increasing risk of exploits, I've been looking at alternatives. The one that I fancy at the moment is xenForo, which is actually lead by the same developers responsible for the version of vBulletin that we are running now. It will be a huge challenge though to not just import all the user accounts and threads, but also redesign the layout (which is overdue for a refresh anyway) and rewrite all the custom 3DMM integration I've done.

So the question I raise to you guys is, how does all of this sound to you? What kind of forum features do you think I should consider adding? What type of changes do you want in a new layout, if any? And lastly, is there anyone who can offer me advice for administering a VPS running linux?

[Eukos]

I myself think that sounds really exciting. I myself am primarily on Linux (I do everything on it, don't even dual boot) but the only networking experience I have is working with git, subversion and SSH - that being quite basic really.

A forum software switch is another quite awesome thing I imagine. I love the current design a lot and I will miss it a lot personally and considering stuff used to look a lot like this makes me look forward to redesigns a lot.

xenforo looks interesting and quite functional, but the layout isn't as comfortable as ours in my opinion. Also the assets obviously would need to be changed to fit the spirit but you know that.

The only feature I had thought about is adding support for movies/mods being supported as attachments (obviously a file size limit should be set in place) that upload to maybe 3dmmfiles.com so that Phil doesn't have to do so much work? idk.

[Trooper]

Yeah, I always thought it must be a bit of a bother for mods that everything ends up in 3dmmfiles but we have to upload somewhere else first. If it was possible to upload there from the start, that would be cool. But yeah, you wouldn't want people just using it for hosting anything, so it would be smart to limit it to vmms, 3dms and vxps.

Also, the search function here isn't great. The minimum word length can make it really difficult to find certain things. Not sure if it currently supports the operators you can use in Google like "putting phrases in quotes" [or in square brackets] or using a -minus to miss out certain -words. I always find that stuff useful.

[Space Goat]

Yes, excellent points about attachments. That is something that I will definitely change, probably opting to host all movies and mods directly on the forum. The approach I am taking now for hosting those things is from a totally different era.

Originally Posted by Eukos

xenforo looks interesting and quite functional, but the layout isn't as comfortable as ours in my opinion. Also the assets obviously would need to be changed to fit the spirit but you know that.

I had a similar reaction, but the default skin of vBulletin felt awkward to me too. I ended up stripping out a lot of its functionality because I didn't think it would be used and just added noise to the design. My goal would be to skin xenForo without deviating too much from 3dmm.com's current design. I think that is possible. Most importantly, I just want a base layout that was written with CSS3 in mind.

[Phil Williamson]

You rule & I love you

As far as improvements go, I agree with Trooper that a better search function would also be nice. Aside from allowing shorter words and more complex operators, it'd also be nice if it generated a permanently linkable (and preferably transparent to the user) URL rather than searchid=343982 that expires after a short amount of time.

Personally I'm not too concerned about security vulnerabilities (as long as our passwords aren't stored in plaintext or anything like that) because it's just 3dmm.com and Brix isn't even around any more so I wouldn't necessarily go to a ton of effort and/or expense to migrate the whole forum out of concern for that, unless it's just something you feel like doing anyway.

And yeah, giving everyone access to 3dmmfiles uploading (or maybe a manually selected group of "trusted frequent uploaders" including Jack Deakin, Dustin Guest, etc who also would get their mods activated automatically?) would be helpful to me

[Space Goat]

Unfortunately, having a modest search engine ranking for several years and not bothering to hide the fact that this is a vBulletin powered forum led to the site making several hacker and spammer lists who still probe it multiple times a day with automated scripts testing for vulnerabilities. There have been a few close calls over the years that have really woken me up. I don't think anyone is targeting 3dmm.com specifically, just vBulletin 3.x.x forums in general.

Just so you know though, your passwords are not stored in plain text. They are hashed using MD5 + random salts.

[Eukos]

The ability for the thread poster to edit polls would be nice I guess.
Maybe redo the way movies are displayed? It's not very movie-centered... maybe making it similar to how IMDB (or something similar) displays a movie, with a poster if available (or just a screencap)

Just to display movies in a nicer way. That would be really neat to have and would add a lot of charme to classic films.

[Space Goat]

I'm not sure I can do much with movie posters. I need artwork in uniform aspect ratios, and the only thing I can consistently expect like that is a screenshot. I'll think about how I can improve that though. I know there are some pretty creative UI solutions done by applications like XBMC and iTunes.

Also, not many people know this, but there is a alphabetical display mode for movies: http://www.3dmm.com/movies.php?&mode=alphabits

[Eukos]

I remember there being many "big" movies having been released with tons of extras, such as posters, trailers and so on. I mean yeah sure, most movies don't have posters, but if our Movies section supported such a feature I'm sure many people would use it if they cared enough. It's all about being creative. Maybe have the ability to choose between multiple poster styles? Standard (which is at some fixed resolution), Wide (Which could hold a screenshot if no poster is made) or just None.
The title, rating stars and a summary would be diplayed next to it etc. and it would pretty I think.

[Pizza The Hut]

hate to be a cynic but should we even do anything about 3dmm side? Unless we work on past archived movies, the low amount of quality movies coming out lately is really not worth the hassle of making a full submission system etc.

[Eukos]

Well I don't really see what else you could improve on the thread/posting side?
We got all the embedding and formatting options we need I think.
The only thing I see worth improving would be on the 3dmm site and that could encourage people put more heart into their submission, maybe. I'm not into psychology and stuff. At least it could honor some older masterpieces. I think going over old titles is overdue anyway considering most movies published on this site are archived here

[Phil Williamson]

Originally Posted by Pizza The Hut

hate to be a cynic but should we even do anything about 3dmm side? Unless we work on past archived movies, the low amount of quality movies coming out lately is really not worth the hassle of making a full submission system etc.

that may change when 3dmm 2 is finished!

(not a post from 2002)

[Eukos]

Me and Compy are working on 3dmm2 stuff and will definitely see a pre-release sometime this year.
If I had a subforum for 3dmm2 that'd be rad I guess. But it's up to Goat if he sees potential in it

[Pirate Balloon]

so uh



most importantly



















will the bullet list work on chrome on the new site

[Space Goat]

Absolutely.

[Brimz]

I think this is a step in the right direction based on what you've described.

I haven't done much beyond using some personal VPS to install and configure basic applications. I wouldn't read too much into the administration aspect of it though. As long as you cover your main bases of not exposing anything publicly by setting incorrect permissions, leaving private ports open, etc. I would expect everything to be fairly straightforward. Your VPS host should also help you in the event that something did happen (like a DDoS), which are often out of your control regardless. In terms of updating applications, you can probably do most of this through crontab or something, which would keep Apache, PHP and MySQL updated regularly.

For forum software, that's too bad about vBulletin. I think we could function well on any software that you prefer, it's just too bad that you'll have to recreate some of the functionality that has already been added here. Have you checked out how easy it is to migrate the vBulletin database to xenForo, or would we be basically restarting the entire forum?

I think a new layout could freshen the board up a bit. Maybe there is an opportunity here to get some of our community talent involved to generate new concepts that you can work into a layout.

The other option of course is to migrate to another host that does still provide adequate resources, and to try to apply any critical vBulletin updates, but I can understand that it would probably feel safer going the route of a VPS/new forum software.

Anyway, I am (as I'm sure many others are) willing to help wherever possible to make this less painful of a process for you. You obviously dedicate a lot of free time and resources into making this forum possible, and our appreciation is probably often less than it should be. I don't know exactly what I can contribute, but I do have a fairly strong background in web design/development (mostly Photoshop, html/css/sql, some php) and I'm familiar with some aspects of running a web server on a VPS.

[Bjorny]

yeah goat I can help too, just let us know what u need

[Broken Pencil]

http://web.archive.org/web/200812201.../www.3dmm.com/
This looked like a really cool layout, and quite simpler to find things. I don't see as to why these forums and sub forums (other then the BM2 one) had to be removed. I guess it was to make the Front page more compact? I don't even know.

Also, I think you should add more posting options like a simpler quoting system (with a pop up menu for selecting a post), or being able to customize your title (italics, bold, underline, color, ect.)

[Phil Williamson]

we got rid of all those extra forums because they had almost zero activity any more. even our two current 3dmm forums don't get all that much any more so we definitely don't need to re-add more.

[Cubert]

not very tech-savvy so i dont know if it'd be a ball ache but a currently active users livechat thing would be cool!

[Bjorny]

lol a 3dmm chat room

[Broken Pencil]

that actually sounds like a pretty cool idea for people who don't want to post threads separately.

[Old Rivers]

bad idea. no one would post anymore.

[Pizza The Hut]

eh so what, we'd still be communicating

[Rabid Dinosaur]

Clinton toggle