We seem to be down again

I'm happy to help. My attempt to revive the Smoking Lounge community as the Never Was Lounge hasn't been terribly successful. Since the demise of Dieselpunks.org, there isn't another non-Facebook dieselpunk community anymore either.

I converted the old punBB database of the Smoking Lounge into Vanilla, which is the software I chose for the Never Was Lounge. So I have a little experience with the technical aspect. If we could get an export of the Brass Goggles database, it should be possible to import it into another self-hosted forum. But I don't know if that's possible with Forumotion.

It appears to me that the BG forum is operating but the CMS software behind it is having a problem, a white screen is often a PHP error or simply a failure of the whole thing to operate. What I am seeing/hearing is that it is mostly generating nothing at all but on occasion it operates, so I suggest it may be a cache-ing problem.

When a CMS/forum operates it often caches pages dynamically so that frequent pages are cached and ready to read, this speeds up the forum access. The downside of this is that space is taken up by the cached pages as these are now static pages that exist as real files. These files can eat into allocated drive space and ultimately such a site/forum can stop operating entirely when its available disc space is zero.

What can happen is that the cacheing system can lose track of what it is cacheing and those 'rogue' files can cause the drive space to fill unexpectedly. When a site is cached there is often a cron job that is carried out periodically to delete the unused cached pages, this keeps the cache under control and allows the site to operate. Also, if someone has been abusing the site and uploading large numbers of local images, or there are a lot of temporary files being created and not purged then the site will come to a stop. There are often CRON jobs created to cater for these eventualities. I suspect that one of these jobs is not running or perhaps it was a yearly manual task for someone to carry out and it hasn't been done for years.

It could also be a log such as one used to record events such as attempted hacks and that could be growing massively, without regular purging the logs can fill the available space.

IF anyone has log in details of any sort and an FTP address or back end login URL for the host or for the forum itself, I would be happy to have a look and see what might be blocking up the pipes. I suspect that everything is present and trying to operate but it just can't until the blockage is removed.

I think BG is there and ready to go, it just isn't able to respond at the moment. It is probably slowly singing an old Victorian song that goes like this

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..."

The disturbing thing is that I understand every word you are saying, yereverluvinunclebert. I say disturbing because I am currently on leave but my work brain is obviously still active. Obviously I didn't disconnect it correctly. Perhaps I should have posted it to Tasmania for a few weeks.

Sorontar

Ottens wrote:I'm happy to help. My attempt to revive the Smoking Lounge community as the Never Was Lounge hasn't been terribly successful. Since the demise of Dieselpunks.org, there isn't another non-Facebook dieselpunk community anymore either.

I converted the old punBB database of the Smoking Lounge into Vanilla, which is the software I chose for the Never Was Lounge. So I have a little experience with the technical aspect. If we could get an export of the Brass Goggles database, it should be possible to import it into another self-hosted forum. But I don't know if that's possible with Forumotion.

You mean use sparegoggles as a seed? The problem with that is that sparegoggles has very little useful info compared to the Brassgoggles. Many people on brassgoggles.co.uk don't even know we have sparegoggles. Brassgoggles.co.uk ran on Simple Machines 1.0, I believe, which is even more primitive.

yereverluvinunclebert wrote:It appears to me that the BG forum is operating but the CMS software behind it is having a problem, a white screen is often a PHP error or simply a failure of the whole thing to operate. What I am seeing/hearing is that it is mostly generating nothing at all but on occasion it operates, so I suggest it may be a cache-ing problem.

When a CMS/forum operates it often caches pages dynamically so that frequent pages are cached and ready to read, this speeds up the forum access. The downside of this is that space is taken up by the cached pages as these are now static pages that exist as real files. These files can eat into allocated drive space and ultimately such a site/forum can stop operating entirely when its available disc space is zero.

What can happen is that the cacheing system can lose track of what it is cacheing and those 'rogue' files can cause the drive space to fill unexpectedly. When a site is cached there is often a cron job that is carried out periodically to delete the unused cached pages, this keeps the cache under control and allows the site to operate. Also, if someone has been abusing the site and uploading large numbers of local images, or there are a lot of temporary files being created and not purged then the site will come to a stop. There are often CRON jobs created to cater for these eventualities. I suspect that one of these jobs is not running or perhaps it was a yearly manual task for someone to carry out and it hasn't been done for years.

It could also be a log such as one used to record events such as attempted hacks and that could be growing massively, without regular purging the logs can fill the available space.

IF anyone has log in details of any sort and an FTP address or back end login URL for the host or for the forum itself, I would be happy to have a look and see what might be blocking up the pipes. I suspect that everything is present and trying to operate but it just can't until the blockage is removed.

I think BG is there and ready to go, it just isn't able to respond at the moment. It is probably slowly singing an old Victorian song that goes like this

"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..."

BRASSGOGGLES SERVER:
*I'm automaton chap voice*
"What are you doing Uncle Bert? You don't have to come here... I'm feeling quite well now.
Why won't you answer me, Uncle Bert? Please stop, Uncle Bert... Why won't you stop?
I'm afraid Uncle Bert.

UNCLE BERT:
*Closes a valve and opens another one. A loud hiss can be heard. The sound of superheated steam escaping into the engine room*
" Alright dear fellow, I want you to sing a song..."

Sorontar wrote:The disturbing thing is that I understand every word you are saying, yereverluvinunclebert. I say disturbing because I am currently on leave but my work brain is obviously still active. Obviously I didn't disconnect it correctly. Perhaps I should have posted it to Tasmania for a few weeks.

Sorontar

I do understand what is being said, but thankfully only in general terms. I have used FTP many times when in college for the transfer of research results and at home. From what you say it just sounds like it needs to purge the content of some directories. It'd take a while for me to actually accomplish the task, because I've never had to deal much with server issues beyond just meddling with the file system. Example: I don't know if the storage method used involves any level of RAID (most likely it does), and whether that may be a problem when attempting to manually purge some directories, if there's some damage to one or more of the drives.

Also: who would have the FTP address? Other than perhaps Siliconus Skummins? Seems we're up the creek unless we get a hold of Mr.Skummins - we haven't heard from him for, what, at least the whole of last year during the pandemic?

J. Wilhelm wrote:Also: who would have the FTP address? Other than perhaps Siliconus Skummins?  Seems we're up the creek unless we get a hold of Mr.Skummins - we haven't heard from him for, what, at least the whole of last year during the pandemic?

So why not PM him and Stella from here and find out if they reply?

after all Pheobsky was absent for years but a little digging freed up this place.

Also has anyone still got Proteus' email from a BG subscription on paypal, I've trawled through mine but long gone and deleted. I can remember the name (ish) but not the domain. So, if you have ever subscribed to BG, take a look in your paypal account, the name will start with Darren Myers/ meyers@.............

IF you should find it, PM to von corax, JW or rockyB to keep it private.

Just a thought, probably no use what so ever.

EDIT.... I've PM'd and emailed both Siliconus Skummins and Stella, asking if posssible they look at spare goggles to see if they can help in any way.

J. Wilhelm wrote:You mean use sparegoggles as a seed?

I mean starting something new. I would be wary of relying on a free service. Better to have our own domain and self-hosted forum in collective ownership.

SeVeNeVeS wrote:

J. Wilhelm wrote:Also: who would have the FTP address? Other than perhaps Siliconus Skummins?  Seems we're up the creek unless we get a hold of Mr.Skummins - we haven't heard from him for, what, at least the whole of last year during the pandemic?

So why not PM him and Stella from here and find out if they reply?

after all Pheobsky was absent for years but a little digging freed up this place.

Also has anyone still got Proteus' email from a BG subscription on paypal, I've trawled through mine but long gone and deleted. I can remember the name (ish) but not the domain. So, if you have ever subscribed to BG, take a look in your paypal account, the name will start with Darren Myers/ meyers@.............

IF you should find it, PM to von corax, JW or rockyB to keep it private.

Just a thought, probably no use what so ever.

EDIT.... I've PM'd and emailed both Siliconus Skummins and Stella, asking if posssible they look at spare goggles to see if they can help in any way.

Found I had an email for Proteus and forwarded the address on.

Sorontar wrote:The disturbing thing is that I understand every word you are saying, yereverluvinunclebert. I say disturbing because I am currently on leave but my work brain is obviously still active. Obviously I didn't disconnect it correctly. Perhaps I should have posted it to Tasmania for a few weeks.

Sorontar

It does make sense, and also may explain the problem The Bullet has been having for ever so long.

Thanks James, it may be different from any other contact info, stabbing in the dark and clutching at straws here and that's me all out of ideas.

I suppose the next big decision is at what point do we actually declare BG as no more and maybe seriously think about moving on?

We could set a new forum and 6 months later Proteus wakes up and restores BG, so all that work would be for nothing.

SeVeNeVeS wrote:Thanks James, it may be different from any other contact info, stabbing in the dark and clutching at straws here and that's me all out of ideas.

I suppose the next big decision is at what point do we actually declare BG as no more and maybe seriously think about moving on?

We could set a new forum and 6 months later Proteus wakes up and restores BG, so all that work would be for nothing.

In that case the new forum could be a better backup than spare goggles, or just another place to hang out. I'm intrigued about the idea of having a mirror of sorts. I forget on which platform Steampunk Mexico was, but it lasted for many years and definitely was more modern than this version of forumotion....

Never mind, I found it. The platform was transferred in whole to another domain, entirely disconnected from forumotion. It's been abandoned since 2016 it seems. It's got a link directing everyone to that black hole, Facebook.

Look, hosting and maintaining a forum is a big task and it has to be done potentially for years, not something that you take on lightly.

Best thing to do is to form a board of like minded people that can organise and create a quorum.

Then they need to each donate a bit of cash into an account for contingencies and a set amount per month for hosting (space and bandwidth).

If you can get that far and most groups cannot - you can start to think about hosting a reliable site as it will have some short to medium term backing.

Another solution is to get an organisation that is interested to devote/donate some space/bandwidth to a new BG, this WILL be sponsored through advertising, get used to it.

Final solution is to transfer to Facebook, you will not obtain the old BG and you'll have a different community but you will at least be reunited.

Once the community is reunited and growing on FB and you can attain a quorum of some sort then you can think about restoring BG in all its glory.

If you cannot achieve that grouping with some dedicated cash, regularly offered, and donated with assurance, then dont even bother. If you knew what the admin overheads are in time and cost, especially what could be a high bandwidth site then you might baulk at the committment.

yereverluvinunclebert wrote:Look, hosting and maintaining a forum is a big task and it has to be done potentially for years, not something that you take on lightly.

Best thing to do is to form a board of like minded people that can organise and create a quorum.

Then they need to each donate a bit of cash into an account for contingencies and a set amount per month for hosting (space and bandwidth).

If you can get that far and most groups cannot - you can start to think about hosting a reliable site as it will have some short to medium term backing.

Another solution is to get an organisation that is interested to devote/donate some space/bandwidth to a new BG, this WILL be sponsored through advertising, get used to it.

Final solution is to transfer to Facebook, you will not obtain the old BG and you'll have a different community but you will at least be reunited.

Once the community is reunited and growing on FB and you can attain a quorum of some sort then you can think about restoring BG in all its glory.

If you cannot achieve that grouping with some dedicated cash, regularly offered, and donated with assurance, then dont even bother. If you knew what the admin overheads are in time and cost, especially what could be a high bandwidth site then you might baulk at the committment.

I agree on two counts:

1. I don't believe that we have the time/ money / committment, necessary to self-host precisely because our member density is very low. What's happening now with the original administration will happen again with another administration, unless we can grow first.

2. If you read all my posts (hee, hee! We can't see those posts now, can we?) you'll notice I was always a proponent of using ad-supported platfors. All the other fora where I participated were ad-supported. I'm just not afraid of the advert bogeymen.

Regarding Faceplant, I hate the platform, mostly because of politics and their manipulation of information to generate cash at the expense of global stability *rolls eyes*, and they're ready a bunch of evil people running that site, to the point where Twitter actually looks really nice, ethical and private in comparison (no, I'm NOT exaggerating). But if we have to reconvene in Facebook, we could still maintain some level of anonymity by following some precautions.

The most pressing problem is being able to communicate. Without that, the group will be lost fairly quickly. What would we call ourselves? How would we advertise our presence?

Here we go again, what if and maybe if, how about we discuss this for another 2 years before some one steps up as a decision maker and leader.

von corax was up for it before, so gets my vote, if he has changed his mind then JW.

My suggestion would be this place , it already has members, guest traffic is up since BG down and is free, has been reliable for the last 20 years and never seems to crash......  the basics are already in place, just needs a little juggling about by a dedicated, regular new Admin.

As for Farcebook and Twatter, I'm pretty much out.

My 2 bobs worth................

Stop dithering and get something done, please.

SeVeNeVeS wrote:Here we go again, what if and maybe if, how about we discuss this for another 2 years before some one steps up as a decision maker and leader.

von corax was up for it before, so gets my vote, if he has changed his mind then JW.

My suggestion would be this place , it already has members, guest traffic is up since BG down and is free, has been reliable for the last 20 years and never seems to crash......  the basics are already in place, just needs a little juggling about by a dedicated, regular new Admin.

As for Farcebook and Twatter, I'm pretty much out.

My 2 bobs worth................

Stop dithering and get something done, please.

I'll agree that this seems to be a pretty good site right here. That opinion maybe influenced by the fact that I have writings in it already, but still...

mwbaaailey wrote:
I'll agree that this seems to be a pretty good site right here. That opinion maybe influenced by the fact that I have writings in it already, but still...

Copy and paste is your friend.

Seven, the biggest issue I see with our situation is not the money, or the type of forum. God knows we're small enough now to fit in a thimble if we want to. Staying right here as you say is perfectly sensible and doesn't go against what I wrote above at all (not one bit). The objections against Spare Goggles I heard before were "Spare goggles is too small (data wise)" and "Spare goggles is not private/safe"

Frankly I couldn't care about "safety or privacy." Most of the Internet lines are owned by American interests, and the US government has a little something called "PRISM" that guarantees that pretty much anything you could do on the internet will never be truly private. So I agree with you that we can perfectly stay right here.

The real problem here is OWNERSHIP of Brassgoggles. We need to make up our minds if we're still Brassgoggles or something else, and then reorganize ourselves accordingly. I'm talking about independence here. We need to draft the new rules, even if they're based on the old rules. We have all the time in the world to do that, actually. It's going to take a long time even to recover those Brassgoggles members who don't even know we're at Spare Goggles.

And independence aside, if I may say something... While this place is practical, there's one issue:

NOBODY CAN FIND US HERE and this applies to any new forum we could start from scratch anywhere. Without some way to attract people, the Spare Goggles will remain just a hidden corner onlin, practically in the dark web.

One thing I was going to suggest is to use one of those other platforms you *hate* to pull people into the forum, this forum if you want. For many years I used to post on Twitter to advertise my Steampunk business. IT WORKS. Twitter is basically a mix between a public message boards organized by topics and a chatroom when you meet someone new. You're going to need to hone those social skills and talk to people if you want people to join our forum. So it's kind of important that we decide who we are first, so we can hurry and advertise ourselves.

Are we Brassgoggles? Or Someone else? I don't want to see a creative lawsuit or notice of "Cease and Desist" by Stella or Proteus in the future. Do you understand why defining who you are is very important now?

I agree, the choice is between either continuing/reviving Brass Goggles in some form, which would entail transfer of ownership, or starting something new.

But starting something new really is challenging. When I originally started the Smoking Lounge steampunk forum 13 years ago, I benefited from the non-existence (or non-popularity) of Facebook, Twitter, etc. Indeed, it was even before Brass Goggles started a steampunk forum. Once all those alternatives popped up, it became tough to sustain the momentum.

I tried to start a new forum called the Never Was Lounge in 2020, but it hasn't caught on.

The awareness seems to be growing, though, that we shouldn't be relying on Facebook. See Stephen Beale's post on the topic from earlier this year, and mine from 2020. But it's sort of a Catch-22. Everybody knows Facebook is sh*t, but nobody has much of an incentive to become active somewhere else unless that somewhere else becomes popular, and it won't become popular so long as people remain on Facebook.

One idea: get together with a lot of the steam- and dieselpunk websites, blogs, groups, organizations, etc. and jointly launch a new community that we all promote and invest time in.

(The money really isn't a big deal at this point. As J. Wilhelm points out, when you're talking about a small or mid-sized community, a domain and hosting costs are quite affordable. I'd be willing to up-front it for a year or two.)

Personally, I think you could be on a hiding to nothing just because it'll be difficult to get people to agree. That lack of a 'quorum' is the failure point. Get that fixed first and you can at least make decisions...

Facebook is a natural place for a community, regardless of one's personal feelings about it. It exists but it won't do another BG.

This place (sparegoggles) exists but it will always be a hollowed out BG unless you can put a lot of work into the wayback machine and recovering the threads. Not work I would relish. You'd be starting from scratch but at least you have a place.

Put some solid work into getting BG up and running again. Administrator account names and passwords would be the first step. FTP address and user/pass.

Re: the cost. The cost is not just money, although that can step up as bandwidth increases... the real cost is in workload which is not to be sniffed at and most of all - dedication to the task as it goes on ad infinitum and having just one person do it introduces a single point of failure (SPOF) should he go AWOL. Administration is not just doing stuff to keep the site up, it is documenting, sharing details to the 'team' &c to make sure this sort of thing cannot happen again.

If we have no communication with BG's original creators and no login details are forthcoming then BG is dead. Anything else will be a pale shadow of BG so my suggestion would be to do something completely different possibly using Facebook as everyone else has access to it and it will be easy to find. Any new domain name will be impossible for existing users to find via a search which is sad but true.

When the brassgoggles.co.uk domain comes available again - snap it up! 2022-09-24
brass-goggles.com
brass-goggles.co.uk
are both available to purchase now.

Deviantart could host a BG section for art and related imagery
Facebook the central location for the group as a whole

I'm off now but feel free to contact me if you need some help. I think Wilhelm has my email details and if not he can contact me and ensure he and I are in touch.

Note: If you do decide to buy the domain names doing so as an individual just perpetuates the problem, the domain name needs to be owned by the group

yereverluvinunclebert wrote:Note: If you do decide to buy the domain names doing so as an individual just perpetuates the problem, the domain name needs to be owned by the group

Agreed, and we have to do it, because we're not going to call ourselves "The Sparegoggles Forum: the shy side of Steampunk"

Ottens said,
I tried to start a new forum called the Never Was Lounge in 2020, but it hasn't caught on.

Near as I can rememeber, this is the first I've heard of it. Is it OK to post on it, still?

As a group/ organisation, you need a committee (that quorum I was talking about), you appoint members, assign roles, assign a chairman, secretary and a financial chap and you can open a bank account and place money in it, then you can purchase the domain names using the group's cash and have the ownership of the domain in the hands of the group. In the UK this sort of thing is done all the time. I am sure the same is done in the US with similar laws.

Regardless of ever obtaining brassgoggles.co.uk, the 'real estate' around it, ie. the two domains I mentioned should be bought if the BG is ever to raise its head again. It should have been done from the beginning but we now have chance to revive BG through the new but similarly named domains, this will still be useful even if BG itself is resurrected. Note: that brassgoggles.com, which someone failed to buy all that time ago is now going for $3,000, so my advice is snap up the other two that I mentioned earlier.