Most game communities are actually fairly small.  The actual files themselves have only gotten bigger fairly recently in gaming history terms.  Remember that the Sims franchise is pretty much one of the best selling in history.  So initially the main factor was probably purely popularity and more expensive bandwidth and hosting costs. 

Most free sites are usually fairly small and can be done with pocket money.  Most medium sites have a voluntary donation scheme.  And anything larger than that needs either a really good ad deal or a hell of a lot of donations.

While I can certainly understand why this happened, obviously there are some large sites that *are* free and don't charge anything, thus proving that it can be done on a larger scale.

Sorry but the Sims is not the only game that has fan created mods that people pay for.  Flight Sim communities have been doing it for just as long if not longer. (An example is here: http://www.realairsimulations.com/list_box.php?page=spit08_buynow )

Extremely rare? Yes.  The only single game community ever that it happens in? No.

Apologies if it's confusing, but Pescado doesn't have the vBulletin knowledge that I do. I'm guessing originally he wanted people to not actually slurp *files* from the site, but it snowballed from there into "nobody visit!!".

I realise that I could have said something before but I was also under the impression that it was people deliberately backing up files from particular sections that were to be avoided - indeed, thats evidenced further back in this thread.  It's only when people jumped on an insim staff member for simply visiting that I realised that some crossed wires had happened somewhere along the line, and posted to correct that fact.

As I have said, a few people visiting and reading really wont slow things down much at all.  Yeah maybe it'll cut backup times by a few seconds but it's taking long enough anyway that I think the actual staff going and reading thier own staff forum really isn't that big a deal.

Simple: They are only acting on what people *here* are saying.  Lots of people said "STAY AWAY!!!" so they did, and a lot of people didn't really think why.

As we all know, back only a few days ago, when the whole Walt thing hit, there where hundreds of people on the site without hardly any server busy messages.  It's only since all the file slurping has started happening that the server has basically melted.  So, we know that (as I have mentioned), lots of people simply *reading* can easily be handled by the server.  Additionally, lots of people reading plus a few posting and downloading, thats fine too.  Where it melts down is in people slurping everything *and* lots of people wanting to visit and post. 

I'm just saying that a few people actually reading the site and giving the people here the lowdown on whats happening really isn't going to affect the "backup" one way or another since that is in and of itself the most server-intensive task that it's doing right now. 

I would like to play devils advocate and point out one thing to all of you people saying "DONT GO THERE!!! OMG WTF LOL BBQ":

- Actually browsing the site and reading it is actually quite minimal in terms of server resources compared to posting
- Actually attempting to POST stuff uses more resources that just reading
- Downloading attachments takes up the MOST resources, due to the way a default vBulletin is constructed and the way it sends files.

Thus, telling people not to go there to slurp *files* is one thing.  Telling them that they can't go and read a few things is totally another.

Pescado,

If you have ssh / shell access, why not just kill apache and get things done quicker?  You'll need to kill the chkservd process first though as that will try restarting it every few mins.

Then you can tarball up the files and ftp them somewhere else.

I have absolutely no objections to the new insim being on SMF - I only offered the vBulletin option IF the consensus was "Yes, we want to keep it".  If the general consensus is "We don't care" or "Eh, use SMF" then that's fine.  It's not really a fight - it's just a difference of opinion, with mine being "Let's get everybodies opinions before removing options".

My offer still stands to hack SMF to pieces to allow better download searching and filtering and for that to be disseminated across all the various Sims 2 sites that use SMF as a downloads medium.

I most certainly ask the staff when I change stuff - they get involved in all kinds of discussions about new things we implement.  I just feel that removing things from the table without actually asking the people who are most affected here (the people who left insim) is a bad idea.

If you had to spend time chasing down porn spam then something wasn't set up right.  On both my sites we've rarely had to do that - sounds like another thing that just didn't work as it should have done on insim....

It is my opinion that removing vBulletin from the table becuase of a phone home check (that happens only in the admincp) without first asking the ex staff and members what they want to use, and at least giving them the OPTION of using it, is a bad idea.  "Spyware" or no, "Major security breach omg wtf" or no, it's something that I have no issues with given the nature of the check.  So if Pescado does not want to run that solution on one of his servers becuase of his antipathy towards anything privacy related, then I can run it on mine.

About the only interesting thing for me on the 3.7+ releases is the social groups system - and even then I wouldn't do it in the way they did it.  Profile customisations are something I had on MTS2 for longer than they had them in the base code, albeit in a different manner.

The other stuff (friends, and so on) are stuff that is important in a "social" aspect but I think most "community" sites would be just fine without it.

If we break down Insim in terms of actual features what we are left with is the following:

- A front page which looks like a standard CMS type system
- The actual forums which really aren't any different from any normal forums
- Some other "nifty" things like the groups/notifications which I daresay hardly anybody used in comparison to the total site usage

There is no specialised download view, nothing special about actually *looking* for downloads, no specialised story view like we have on S2C.  Heck, pretty much the entire site is just a standard forum with a whole mish-mash of different content and none of it is really customised or optimised to work *well* with what it's presenting.

It would be great if:

- Downloads could be sorted/filtered/showed in a paginated form across the whole site, much like MTS2 does, but keep the creator-centric forum structure for those old-skool views and the creators ego.
- Stories could be shown in a specialised story view, much like S2C, for easy story reading.
- The downloads themselves had keywords or tags and EP requirements etc that are common everywhere

All of this could be done in an SMF system and could then be used on other Sims 2 sites as well since a lot of them use SMF.

Ultimately though I guess it's up to the staff and the ex members as to what they want to see and use.

In terms of differences, SMF is much like the older 3.0.x vBulletin systems.  Insim, however, had the later 3.7/3.8 systems, which offer a lot more things like profile customisations, social networking, social groups, and much more use of ajax (which SMF also uses to a lesser degree).  It also has a much larger community for modding the system (vbulletin.org) as opposed to SMF - however, with that said, I really don't like the 3.5+ way of doing mods since it seems bloated to me.  3.0.x is much "cleaner" in that regard since you pretty much have to hack the core code to mod it, so it means that you have to have a much better understanding of how things actually work and the possible load they incur.  3.5+ allows "easier" mods to be installed, but unfortunately most of them (like a lot of the ones for 3.0.x written by people who dont run high traffic sites) aren't coded very well, hence meaning that the whole thing slows down as you add more stuff.

If all you want is basic forum-like systems, then SMF is probably the better choice becuase it's free and much "lighter" on the servers than a fully loaded out vBulletin system.  However, if you want the additional social networking, tagging, social groups, notifications and so on systems from Insim, then vBulletin would be the way to go.

(Note that even my hacks on MTS2 could not be done on 3.5/6/7/8 without hacking the core code.  I also make extensive use of memcached which makes everything very speedy.  However, the basic logic behind the systems is actually fairly simple so it could be modified to be used on other forum systems, with time.)

Tweaks? Tweaks?! I will not have my customisations labelled as mere "tweaks"! 

Seriously, they are so much more than tweaks.  The upload wizard, the download browsing pages - totally written from scratch, and the main showthread has had a ton of changes so that it's only about 50% original code.  Tweaks, indeed!

With regards to vBulletin - you don't have to get the support/maintenance thing every year.  You can just get 2 owned licenses and upgrade it for 1 year then be done with it.  Most of the "upgrades" are minor things that are easily hacked in normally anyway.

I will, however, come out and say this now:  I am prepared to purchase 2 owned licenses (1 for each site), at no cost to the community.

With that said, it might be more advantageous in the longer run to adapt some of the systems we have on MTS2 (specifically the filtering and sorting and displaying of actual downloads - to make it so that you can actually FIND stuff on InSimClone) to an SMF system.  This would benefit not just the New Insim, but also MATY and any other SMF forum that wishes to use it.  I am willing to take on that work and coding it up.

Of course, going the SMF route does mean it's free (less money) but you also get less features than compared to the existing Insim system that people might be used to.  I'd say maybe poll a vote based on the above.

I wonder if he realised that a horde of people would be googling his name and digging up all this stuff about him.  Makes me feel a little bad for him... but only a little.