Future of DT

[photekq]

With permission I am sharing (anonymously) feedback that someone sent me. I don't know much about the technical stuff mentioned here. I say it's better to slightly overpower hosting to anticipate an increase in users!

"I might have some information that might be of use to you if you end up buying the forum. In the post, you mentioned that the hosting of the forum needs a dedicated server with 64GB RAM, which imo is an overkill for a forum with such low posting activity. I used to run and host multiple forums in the past, and such hardware requirements are a sign of a lack of proper configuration. I just did a quick google search, and as expected, they seem to be running the website on an apache server, probably LAMP or WAMP setup. I remember such popular setups taking significantly more resources than they should have, and switching to an nginx + fastcgi setup would greatly reduce the hardware resources needed. A VPS with 2G RAM should be more than enough to host this. On hetzner, such setup costs about 12 euros per month, but other options might be cheaper. Nginx+fastcgi should be able to run the same software - phpbb without requiring a change of the software running the board."

That’s great to hear! So your monthly cost of upkeep will be under 1/4 of what you predicted. Will this impact (read: increase) your maximum contribution?

[soyuz]

With permission I am sharing (anonymously) feedback that someone sent me. I don't know much about the technical stuff mentioned here. I say it's better to slightly overpower hosting to anticipate an increase in users!

"I might have some information that might be of use to you if you end up buying the forum. In the post, you mentioned that the hosting of the forum needs a dedicated server with 64GB RAM, which imo is an overkill for a forum with such low posting activity. I used to run and host multiple forums in the past, and such hardware requirements are a sign of a lack of proper configuration. I just did a quick google search, and as expected, they seem to be running the website on an apache server, probably LAMP or WAMP setup. I remember such popular setups taking significantly more resources than they should have, and switching to an nginx + fastcgi setup would greatly reduce the hardware resources needed. A VPS with 2G RAM should be more than enough to host this. On hetzner, such setup costs about 12 euros per month, but other options might be cheaper. Nginx+fastcgi should be able to run the same software - phpbb without requiring a change of the software running the board."

If you don't know much about the technical stuff involved in running a forum, why do you think you're the best person to run it? Would you just get someone to do technical work for free for you, like you get people to do your technical support? Like you try to get people (apparently) to acquire assets for you? Jog on.

[mcmaxmcmc]

switching to an nginx + fastcgi setup would greatly reduce the hardware resources needed

guess that was simply my internet being a real nuisance then when the server went down

I couldn't have possibly imagine what the issue could be... I sure hope switching to nginx would solve the issue !!!

[wobbled]

With permission I am sharing (anonymously) feedback that someone sent me. I don't know much about the technical stuff mentioned here. I say it's better to slightly overpower hosting to anticipate an increase in users!

"I might have some information that might be of use to you if you end up buying the forum. In the post, you mentioned that the hosting of the forum needs a dedicated server with 64GB RAM, which imo is an overkill for a forum with such low posting activity. I used to run and host multiple forums in the past, and such hardware requirements are a sign of a lack of proper configuration. I just did a quick google search, and as expected, they seem to be running the website on an apache server, probably LAMP or WAMP setup. I remember such popular setups taking significantly more resources than they should have, and switching to an nginx + fastcgi setup would greatly reduce the hardware resources needed. A VPS with 2G RAM should be more than enough to host this. On hetzner, such setup costs about 12 euros per month, but other options might be cheaper. Nginx+fastcgi should be able to run the same software - phpbb without requiring a change of the software running the board."

Overpowering servers was something we did decades ago, they invented something called scalability but it seems you haven't heard of that. Clearly you're the man to run this forum though, fully funded by your plebs of course with you as the sole owner and any profits going in to your pockets alone! Can't wait.

[an_achronism]

Thanks for your support thefarside. My interest check for this is because the current ownership is expected to end quite soon according to their own statements and outside of someone outright buying it or gathering funds, the next owners are not obliged to keep the site running in its current form, which is something I and many other folks want. After the site is sold again, members would have no say in what is changed. We have been extremely fortunate that the current owners have kept the look and feel of the site as it is.

I definitely agree that without the community supporting the development and spread of projects such as xwhatsit's controllers and the new Model F project, these projects may not even exist today and/or far fewer folks would be aware of them. A strong mechanical keyboard community helps all of those who may want to create and share their own group buys now and in the future. And that is why my hope is to keep the community together, especially since there is so much expertise here around great old keyboards. Many folks active here are not active on other keyboard forums.

Another buyer may not have the same intentions to keep things the way they are. The more folks wait, the price may go down and other buyers who may want to change things may be able to enter the bidding process. Who would want to be required by a future large company to receive email ads as a condition of membership on the site and also see banner ads and blog post review articles with with affiliate links, which would likely reduce active engagement? For a company or a single person to spend the full acquisition amount themselves (instead of a community-led group buy), that is exactly what they would need to do to recover something viewed as an investment instead of a group buy whose purpose is to keep the site alive and not commercialize the site itself. I remember a number of years ago signing up for Windows 10 insider (or some other beta) and being required to receive update emails as a condition of being an insider member.

It was mentioned that Deskthority usage has declined in recent years, though activity on other mechanical keyboard forums has increased, another reason it might not make sense for another business to purchase and commercialize the site even at half the current asking price. Are there any ideas on why this has happened? What do they have that we don't have here! Any recommendations to reverse this decline for Deskthority going forward? geekhack and reddit MK are also great resources for conducting interest checks and starting group buys, but my impression is that these sites have significantly grown in the number of group buys and discussions of buys that many great projects may be buried lower down on the topic lists. I would say that given the increased discussions and various projects it may make sense for them to offer several group buy discussion sub-boards with different categorizations, such as for non-MX switch custom keyboards / old style technologies, MX switch custom boards, custom MX key sets, other custom key sets, individual artisan keys, accessories, etc. rather than everything in one list.

Regarding ownership, as I mentioned before legally it would be difficult and costly in terms of funds and time to set up a nonprofit or other multi-owner structure with voting shares as well as for ongoing regulatory compliance, which is why I am wary of equity crowdfunding in this case for a relatively small amount. Regarding ongoing costs, yes I would expect to cover anything that members would not offer to cover. Even the full amount of $600 to $700 in additional server costs each year would not be a problem.

Wow, that’s a lot of words! I recall a time in the recent past when somebody (I wish I could remember who) indicated that a person who wrote big long forum posts that they expected somebody else to read was to be considered an “energy vampire”. A vampire-owned forum sounds like a very cool concept to me, so I think we should all get behind this chap.

[BuGless]

Clearly you're the man to run this forum though, fully funded by your plebs of course with you as the sole owner and any profits going in to your pockets alone!

There are no profits to be had when one runs this forum. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling (kind of like when peeing in your pants), but that is just about what it amounts to.

[soyuz]

Clearly you're the man to run this forum though, fully funded by your plebs of course with you as the sole owner and any profits going in to your pockets alone!

There are no profits to be had when one runs this forum. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling (kind of like when peeing in your pants), but that is just about what it amounts to.

Your diet alright? How many calories are there in ellipse's manmeat?

[Muirium]

Clearly you're the man to run this forum though, fully funded by your plebs of course with you as the sole owner and any profits going in to your pockets alone!

There are no profits to be had when one runs this forum. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling (kind of like when peeing in your pants), but that is just about what it amounts to.

Does it make you smelly, as well?

[VR20X6]

Clearly you're the man to run this forum though, fully funded by your plebs of course with you as the sole owner and any profits going in to your pockets alone!

There are no profits to be had when one runs this forum. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling (kind of like when peeing in your pants), but that is just about what it amounts to.

Surely ellipse strangling that beamspring reproduction project in the crib by spamming his own beamspring project on its thread was not profit motivated. It must have been purely for the sake of being an asshole for the fun of it.

[wobbled]

Clearly you're the man to run this forum though, fully funded by your plebs of course with you as the sole owner and any profits going in to your pockets alone!

There are no profits to be had when one runs this forum. It might give you a warm and fuzzy feeling (kind of like when peeing in your pants), but that is just about what it amounts to.

Tell that to webwit who made massive profits when selling this place to the highest bidder. There is certainly money to be made, or at least saved for someone like Ellipse who is too cheap to provide support for his own products instead relying on the expertise of the few people that still use this forum, especially when he's having other people buy the forum for him, he's quids in.

[Muirium]

OneCommerce overpaid badly. And as many have said: DT’s value has only gotten worse on their watch. At least they’re willing to take the hit, though. Much better to let it go than languish.

[lhutton]

I'm not rally up to date on the drama surrounding ellipse, are they related to the Model F Reproduction project? I kind of took a break when that was getting going.

I run my entire operation in containers/VMs (mail, web, Nextcloud, gitea, etc) and don't need 64GB of RAM. The idea that this board needing that kind of hardware is ludicrous. That's more than our Jira and Confluence instance at work uses for a 20,000+ student university and those things are pigs.

[lhutton]

OneCommerce overpaid badly. And as many have said: DT’s value has only gotten worse on their watch. At least they’re willing to take the hit, though. Much better to let it go than languish.

One of my other things is photography and photo forums that are much busier than this place have been dropping like flies the last two years or so. Some due to lack of profitability vs the cost of running the place and some due to cost cutting and communities dying off. It would be nice to see some parts of the old world cling on as I don't really do Discord or Facebook and find most Reddit users and communities be insufferable. But a tumbleweed forum is pretty sad.

[NathanA]

I'd somehow managed to gloss over the comment about the monthly costs of an adequate server equipped with "64GB" of RAM and a "2023 ... processor". For sure DT doesn't need anything that heavy specs-wise; good grief. Talk about overkill. It has been many moons since I've shopped around for one so could be way out of touch with current pricing, but I have to believe that you should be able to easily get away with running something like phpBB on, like, a $10-20/mo VPS.

I am not sure whether this was all meant to imply that DT was currently provisioned on a server with comparable specs *right now*, and that dollar figure is what anybody taking over this site should expect to see on invoices when the bills start coming to them. Or perhaps with most everybody here being familiar with the recent instability, some people may be tempted to conclude that the current server is under-spec'd. But the owners have already said that there's some kind of technical problem with the existing software installation which is causing a runaway memory leak. Not that the existing server is inadequate. Throwing more RAM at that doesn't make such a problem go away; it just prolongs the inevitable.

I recall a time in the recent past when somebody (I wish I could remember who) indicated that a person who wrote big long forum posts that they expected somebody else to read was to be considered an “energy vampire”.

*goes back and reviews his own posting history on here*

*slowly backs away*

[soyuz]

I offered this to Pablo in Discord but I will fix DT if OneCommerce pay me in actual money and not guacamole.

[NathanA]

I offered this to Pablo in Discord but I will fix DT if OneCommerce pay me in actual money and not guacamole.

Perhaps this makes me a sucker (though that's my own problem, and not anybody else's to concern themselves with), but I offered to look at it for free. They didn't take me up on my offer, either / ghosted me after that. So I'm honestly not sure that the money is the issue.

[tactica]

Hey, maybe they're expecting money in return for letting someone fix it.

It's sad that right now one can't even edit the wiki properly. Almost everything throws an error.

[wobbled]

I offered this to Pablo in Discord but I will fix DT if OneCommerce pay me in actual money and not guacamole.

Perhaps this makes me a sucker (though that's my own problem, and not anybody else's to concern themselves with), but I offered to look at it for free. They didn't take me up on my offer, either / ghosted me after that. So I'm honestly not sure that the money is the issue.

Not surprising, don’t you support ellipses products free of charge?

[BuGless]

There are no profits to be had when one runs this forum.

Tell that to webwit who made massive profits when selling this place to the highest bidder.

Case in point. There *was* money to be made when selling this place. Nobody will make that mistake again. The current owner discovered that *running* the forum is a net loss. It is unlikely to be different for any future owner.

[NathanA]

Not surprising, don’t you support ellipses products free of charge?

What exactly is the point of your post?

[NathanA]

The current owner discovered that *running* the forum is a net loss. It is unlikely to be different for any future owner.

I suspect you are correct, at least if by running the forum you mean to imply "at least without making any changes to it".

I of course have nothing to back this up (nor do I have skin in the game) so it's not a hill I'd die on, but I get the sense that perhaps the current owner had some kind of plans when they bought the place, and they simply didn't pan out. I don't even know what those plans could possibly have been, especially as it's apparent zero changes were made post-sale, both to many people's delight as well as confusion no doubt. Almost as if they got distracted with other things & spread out too thin with other ventures?

[boingball]

Hello all,

I’ve been a lurker here and a fan of the wiki and forums as a bit of a computer geek and keyboard aficionado. The forum was very helpful in my process of restoring an Amiga 2000 keyboard with space invaders and getting it up and running with a converter box. The Amiga 2000 was my first computer, and probably changed the course of my life, so it was important for me to have something of it my fingers could touch.

To me, this site is part of keeping the history of computers alive. Keyboards are the human interface, they are the tangible and tactile tool for interacting with computers, and they bear the history of our interactions with them. They have been the tool that has created this Information age.

It would be sad indeed for not only the community, but for computer history to lose this site and all the information it contains.

Obviously I have not been active much on this site; but I am curious as to what the community would think of an individual such as myself purchasing the site and continuing to run it.

I’ve been a software developer by trade and have run a number of businesses before. I know my way around technology, so fixing some of the glaring issues should be a snap (basic issues like DNS email problems). Outside of fixing major problems, I wouldn’t want to make changes without getting community feedback first.

My goal would not be profit; it would be to simply foster the forum as a thriving community and a source of invaluable computing history.

The users of this site, are this site. I believe any future owner needs to understand the value here is the users who have contributed to it; the people who are passionate about keyboards.

So before considering contacting the owner, I’d like to get feedback.

Does the community feel that this site is worth saving? Are there enough passionate users who could help someone like me make decisions about what needs to be done?

[kbdfr]

[…] Obviously I have not been active much on this site

In fact you first registered with DT about half an hour before posting.

but I am curious as to what the community would think of an individual such as myself purchasing the site and continuing to run it. […]

I think it would be a good idea for any "individual such as [your]self" to first somehow show they're not just another spammer trying to sound legit by using AI-generated text.
As a first step, how about providing more info in your DT profile?

[Wodan]

I think it would be a good idea for any "individual such as [your]self" to first somehow show they're not just another spammer trying to sound legit by using AI-generated text.
As a first step, how about providing more info in your DT profile?

Another way of saying "Post keyboard pics"

[boingball]

[…] Obviously I have not been active much on this site

In fact you first registered with DT about half an hour before posting.

but I am curious as to what the community would think of an individual such as myself purchasing the site and continuing to run it. […]

I think it would be a good idea for any "individual such as [your]self" to first somehow show they're not just another spammer trying to sound legit by using AI-generated text.
As a first step, how about providing more info in your DT profile?

Is AI spam a problem on here?

BTW, part of the reason I just made an account; is because the email on here is broken, and I only use Gmail. So I had to get a new email address to even sign up. I’m sure I’m not the only user to try and sign up and give up. It’s horribly sad for something that should be a 10 minute fix

Here’s my Amiga 2000 board

RenderedImage.jpeg (3.36 MiB) Viewed 687 times

RenderedImage.jpeg (3.69 MiB) Viewed 687 times

[tactica]

If you're for real and have a few grand to spare then I'd say go for it, I don't think things can't get any worse short of the site being shut down by the current owners.

Oh and yes, of course this site is worth saving, Together with sharktastica's database and possibly Daniel's and very few others, it's the go-to reference for mech keyboards and related devices.