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Spellhold Studios Forum down?

Salk

By Salk
in Noobermeet

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skellytz

skellytz

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From Australia 😛 But in all seriousness, it's probably a matter of getting new HDDs and getting the support team to send a technician to replace them. If you're a busy managing director on a tight schedule, the last thing you want to do late in the evening, when you know you still need to do dozens of little annoying tasks like that, is open yet another control panel, check stuff, write even more emails, look for and order things, try to schedule an appointment with a technician, etc. All that for something that currently isn't even part of your career focus.

One of my first goals as a new staff member was trying to convince the others that transferring mods to GitHub is something we can easily do together. This would greatly reduce the storage and bandwidth requirements, allow us to migrate to cloud hosting, maybe make things more affordable, so that one day the ownership could be passed to somebody who'd be willing to pay the reduced bills, but also have the time to manage everything. Well, it's not that easy. Many modders need individual encouragement and reassurance to even consider GitHub as a mod hosting option. We're working on it, though!

 

 

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Salk

Salk

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Thanks for trying to advocate a much needed change there, skellytz.

What you wrote sounds to me like the only viable path, actually. A very sensible take of action for a situation that has needed remedy for many years. I guess we can all agree that, considering the circumstances, SHS was sitting on a ticking bomb. Now it went off but it's hardly surprising.

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jastey

jastey

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SHS has two problems I don't see an easy solution for. It is crammed with "wild" uploaded mods, mod resurrections, mirrors for dead Spanish forums noone feels responsible for and noone has the time to sort and update. And second, almost all older mods have lost their authors. Some are at least still reachable via Email, but the majority doesn't even respond any more. A bunch of a few people is giving (or, in case of Gwendolyne and me gave) their best to update mods and sort the mess of the freely uploaded mods, but the manpower is not nearly enough to really tame the chaos, and in the end the question remains what to do with the mods that do not qualify to be hosted officially by SHS.

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skellytz

skellytz

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Perhaps we should go back to this discussion on SHS once it's online, redefine server->GitHub transfers versus mod maintenance, and start a community poll to determine whether cherry-picking free-uploaded mods for official hosting and moving them to GH without the authors' replies is considered appropriate. I can make the progress spreadsheet with all the mods listed publicly available read-only, so that it's clear who's already volunteered to be responsible for transferring what mods (most officially-hosted mods are already covered). We can also discuss recruiting several more members to get involved in the transfer.

 For now let's remain patient and wait for SHS to be back online to take the next steps.

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InKal

InKal

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They are busy making their own game. Ambitious project like some kind of visual novel but also a musical. It looks like to put it bluntly they bite off a little more than can chew with that "musical" part. But the game is really interesting (for me it looks like a mix of classic Hair with American Gods) and I wish them all the best, I hope they will finally manage to realese the game.

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Endarire

Endarire

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With GitHub being so readily available, should the policy change regarding hosting mods?  There were various SHS-hosted mods that someone backed up elsewhere and I was very glad they did because archive.org didn't let me download them!  (Likely they were too big.)

SHS is like a museum:  It may be interesting to see certain old relics, but they're old and generally forgotten because they're also generally impractical to use.  Just because my grandma loved her rotary telephone doesn't mean I want to use it, even though it has or had historical or/and personal significance.  On the other hand, someone had to make all the mods that went onto SHS and love their work enough to release it as they did.

Maybe others noticed this as well, but SHS seemed to be the weakest link of the Infinity Engine modding sites in recent times:  Yes, there was a lot of stuff hosted there but the site was not mobile-friendly, and the servers were down often enough to make many generally avoid the place.

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Salk

Salk

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I have no real understanding/direct experience whatsoever about the costs and the required time/effort for maintaining a Forum but I think SHS bandwidth problems would be enormously alleviated by migrating all of its downloads off of its server and find an alternate solution to the current hosting. Practically what skellytz suggested.

If the bandwidth is confined to a certain amount, wouldn't it be possible to get a different host at the same cost that would not risk a complete shutdown of the SHS Forum for what is going to soon be two months?

The SHS Forum wasn't just the place where you could find links to download hosted mods. There was still activity there in form of feedback, collaborations, questions, and much more. I just hope that once it's online again, we won't have lost the interest/participation of important contributors.

 

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