Bobadventures wrote:Kisai wrote:Spaceprincess wrote:Jesus this shit hole is dead.
Oh, should I unplug the server then?
Please don't, and I apologize for the rudeness of others. Believe me, I'm extremely grateful for everything you guys have done to keep the site running. My comic has been very important to me over the years, and ComicGenesis has made it all possible. Thank you.
Um... The fact is though, I tried to do a Regular Update almost an hour ago, and it hasn't updated. I came here to the forums to see if anyone had said anything about it, and I saw this post. Sigh.
I hope that I didn't kick over a beehive with my post shortly after the outage, asking just how serious the problems were -- but I think we are all concerned about the health of the site. Over the years, various features have gone down one by one, and these days the CG homepage has several pog circles blank. I mean absolutely no offense by asking this -- because I know maintaining the site is a huge, completely voluntary time commitment that you guys have kept to for at least the near-decade I've been here, which I applaud wholeheartedly -- but what is the current status of ComicGenesis? I would be very happy to stay here indefinitely, provided that the site is reasonably safe and secure.
Anyway, I do hope that you can get the Updater working again soon. Thank you for your efforts, and be assured that they are appreciated.
Want to know the cliffs notes version of a long story?
1. I'm afraid of breaking the site. Every time I do a round of updates on the server, I do so knowing it might ultimately break the server, because there are components like MySQL and PHP that Comicgenesis was originally written against that have depreciated features that were originally used.
2. There is largely no incentive to rewrite or fix anything on the server. I could... y'know rewrite everything, but it's so far on the backburner that I'll just never get to it short of someone giving me a few thousand dollars just to do it.
3. The backend, the part that updates the comics, works just fine, except see 1.
Unlike PHP, Perl largely hasn't changed since the server started, BUT, some things did change in the last round that I had to go back through code that was written back in like 2001 for KeenSPOT originally to find the problem.
The siteadmin still works, this despite using a few pieces of PHPBB2 which we haven't used in a long time. There is a new version of PHPBB3.1 out, and I'm afraid that if I upgrade the forums that might be the last time it ever works. This is because a few years ago PHPBB3 changed how they did the password hashes and I had to retrofit that into the phpBB2 code I was using.
I don't see a "second coming" of Comicgenesis any time soon. New things that have come out, aren't better, and certainly aren't any higher quality. People put their stuff on Tumblr, (which is owned by Yahoo, so think "geocities v2.0") and the feedback mechanism through that actually drives people away from webcomics. Other sites that "free host" comics do exist, but they're largely the same monster they were back when CG was the only place to get free comic hosting.
4. Most of the time I spend on CG tends to be taking down hijacked sites. This is what happens when peoples emails get hacked. At some point there was over a dozen in a relatively short period of time, and the countermeasure to this was to change the updating script to run a server-sided antivirus during some updates.