As TAT2.0 has reached 1 month of being on-line, I wanted to update people on a few technical things.
Since the start of the forum, the hosting platform has not been down once. It is a small sample as it has been only one month, but I thought there would be more glitches in such a low-cost host. So far, none have happened, so I guess we can say that the reliability is acceptable. We will need a full year to be able to see how robust the host is, but it is not as if it running on Windows 98/Millennium. So far, there has been no downtime, with the exception of one mistake made by me that supplanted the original phpBB site with an experiment for Blogs. I will try that to not happen again.
Another issue that I had in mind was the problem with size. We rented a 20GB space, which I thought would be limiting. phpBB comes with a handy pruning system to keep forums small, but it seems that with our size, we will not be in need of it. Our current usage stands as this:
mysql.png
The structure of the DB takes about 54MB; the rest is data. Sure, it has been a slow month because we were both setting up the system AND there was very little tennis to talk about, but with just 67MB of space used, I believe the site will be able to handle us. If we grow to 500 people, then we may have some issues. That does not seem to be in our future. We seem to remain exclusive.
Another issue that I thought about was the number of visits to the site. Here are the numbers:
stats.jpg
Again, because of the slow month, we can see that we are way below our maximum of 25,000 visits/month. But due to the events in Wednesday, we sort of torture tested the site, and nothing really broke down. One thing of importance: phpBB's function of telling you that news posts have been posted in a topic if you are composing one yourself, BEFORE you submit yours. It caused me to lose two posts, because somebody else had done that and I clicked SUBMIT and dashed off. I actually think it is a good function, but will be or relevance when SP times come, and people are posting their pick at the last minute.
One thing that the forum is getting is great human support, and I would like to take credit for the managerial skills needed to recruit such fine personnel. But, alas, I cannot. I have inherited some of the best from TAT1.0, so the recruitment was both easy and an inheritance from that site. Ti-amie remains committed to keep us from ignorance and the contest staff has already started working and running our first AMitS. They have been, as you can tell, great. However, I will take credit for recruiting Tog as an admin; in our initial conversations, he mentioned that he would try to be of help as he did not know the software and perhaps would be useless. Well, it had been a long time since I last heard such misleading words. Tog has developed a great grasp on phpBB and has been of super-help this last month. A lot of the extensions that we have added were found by him, making the site a better one. He truly was a managerial success from my side!
I will detour for a moment. phpBB is also an online community. In the same vein that we can talk about the difference between Stefan Edberg's slice vs Ken Rosewall's, these people there talk code as fluently as it can be done. ALL the extensions added come from there and although I am learning php (and html) to see if we can create our own, the reality is that learning php or any coding language is the same as learning a different language. Sure, learning French is easy... if you are born French. it will take a while. However, these codies can help us design new extensions, if we want to pay for them. I am contacting one to see if he would be willing to do so. Some of them can be paid via PayPal, so the thing would be for us to decide if we want to go that way, or we decide that what we have is fine. Food for thought.
There are two people I want to point out at the moment. One is Deuce; to say that he was enthusiastic about the new site would be an understatement. Deuce was very keen on getting something that was not based on social media platforms and, as he was the third person that joined the forum, he started playing with it early on. He poked and tinkered with it and sort of tortured tested it, but his requests and recommendations made us (95% Tog) find extensions to get the features going. I thank him a lot for that.
The second person is Kirkus. You see, he lies when he says that he only had a little role to play in this site. Yes, he has not tinkered with it (he is not an admin... yet) but while we were debating about reddit and everything in TAT1.0, I contacted him for some info. Eventually, as I waited for YOU PEOPLE to answer if you wanted a new forum (yes, I do have the right to YOU PEOPLE you, YOU PEOPLE
), Kirkus gave me the needed advice. Cue to Kevin Costner in FIELD OF DREAMS: he told me to build it and then see if you would come. So although quantitatively his contribution was small, qualitatively it was priceless. It was the final push needed to get this up and running.
And with that, please go to this post for a bit of an announcement:
https://talkabouttennis2.com/viewtopic. ... t=94#p1299You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
Translation
Re: How are we doing?
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