MozillaZine Forums Temporarily OfflineSaturday April 26th, 2003Due to a large increase in traffic in recent weeks, MozillaZine's bandwidth usage has risen dramatically. We're currently working with our excellent hosts, American Data Technology, Inc., to find a new hosting solution that can accommodate MozillaZine's growing popularity. In the meantime, we've disabled the MozillaZine Forums, which accounted for much of the site's data transfer. This should reduce our bandwidth usage and also eliminate the MySQL errors that many of you have experienced recently. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause and we will endeavour to get the forums up and running again as soon as possible. Thanks to all our readers for your continued support. Should we ask Slashdot.org to not link to us anymore and redirect everything to Mozilla.org? Send the extra bandwidth bill to IBPhoenix ;) It should probably be sent to Slashdot, which probably sent a great deal more traffic--although less of the variety that even contributed as much as the trolls, and more of the variety that just looked around, said, "Huh," and left again. I don't understand how there could be a bandwidth issue when American Data Technology, Inc. advertises in their hosting packages "unlimited hits". http://localweb.com/adti/virtual_hosting.htm The Forums have become my main ressource for Mozilla related info and discussions. Now I have to go back to the newsgroups. I hope there will be enough donations to get them going again really soon! Thanks for your work guys! please donate. Perhaps MZ should look into a CSS redesign. Looking at the code I see a few tables (not many though) but alot of presentational tags like b, i, u, center, and font. I don't doubt that quite a bit of bandwidth could be saved by cutting this out into an external CSS file. The forums could even be streamlined alot with CSS. I've worked on it with phpbb2 in the past but never finished it. It definetly can be done even though it is a little challenging. There are alot of talented web developers who visit MZ who I'm sure would love to help if the MZ admins aren't up to the task. I know that a previous redesign of MozillaZine was done in order to accomplish this task. However if I remember right, a lot of people running browsers other then Mozilla were having problems with the site rendering correctly so some tables had to be used. However, seeing what Netscape did with DevEdge and Wired did with their site to make it work on IE, Mozilla, and even Opera, I think MozillaZine can do it here and save a lot of bandwidth. Great idea! Encourage standards compliant techniques that do things efficiently. If some other browser cannot view it, they'll know where to get one that does. "If some other browser cannot view it, they'll know where to get one that does." Well they might not be getting it from Mozilla.org if they can't read all the people praising it on one of Mozilla's biggest advocacy sites! Mozillazine needs to be readable in other browsers so that we can convert their users over to the light side of the net. Hehe they could always pull a Microsoft and throw a "This site complies with web standards that are not adequately supported by other browsers. You may need Mozilla, Firebird, or another Gecko based browser to view it correctly." and then throw them at a plaintext version of the site or something ^_^. Aaahhh, sweet revenge... You only need a script to disable CSS in non standards browser. All the contents will still be displayed, although un-structured. We are always working on this. Our frontpage is actually really light now. I'm working on fixing these pages first, then we'll see what we can do about the forums. I'm hoping phpbb's next version comes out sooner than later, as it promises support for a more css based layout. jason Okay, I really want to forums to be back. I think we are willing to sacrefice all the images. I did a bit of CSS hacking today - but only because I accidentally overwrote the standard stylesheet... Alex Sourceforge provides free hosting for open source free software, including space for discussion forums. Why not use it? Sourceforge sounds like a good choice. Anybody paying the retail price that American Data Technology is advertising on their website needs a wake up call. There are much better deals out there, just run a search on google to find them. For instance I just moved my domain, to a host in California, that provides up-to-date versions of mysql w/myadmin, php, perl, 300 email accounts, control panel with lots of options, 30 gigs of transfer bandwidth a month, 500 mbs of storage, Red Hat, and they charge $7.95 per month for all that. Compare that to American Data Technology: $49 per month 100 mbs, and 30 email accounts. It's small change for the depravity of certain people at mozilla.org. http://mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3115&message=28#28 Damn! Wish they could at least have left the forum READABLE so we could get back to some or our links, postings... =( O'well. that wouldn't change much in terms of bandwith usage, would it? Actually it would. Why, because people arn't going to re-read the same post more than once (usually), and once you've been there and seen you reply's, you would know there would be no more. Without the forum, I'm guessing bandwidth usage is next to nil. This really sucks. I'll talk to my financial advisor (wife) about a contribution. It would be sad to lose MozillaZine. And why has the bandwidth increased so much? ...because of the naming controversy or because of all the new people who are now interested in Mozilla. The timing would suggest the naming controversy is the cause. Why has the reaction been to shut down the forums? ...to allow the whole thing to cool down a bit by disallowing one more place where people can express their views about the naming controversy. It seems to me this whole thing was perhaps self-induced by this naming issue. I've heard the Firebird and Thunderbird names so much now that they are burned into my brain cells as being synonymous with a browser and mail client. I used to think of the car, but not anymore... now I think about a browser and a whole bunch of squabbling. <sigh> the forums were quite slow and buggy (php/mysql error messages) in the last days, so it most likely was shut down because of bandwidth issues, and nothing else... complex forum scripts such as phpBB need tons of resources, compared to most other scripts... and anyway, the name topic didnt cause much trouble, it cooled down pretty much in the last days, and this was certainly not the reason to shut down the entire board... And why has the bandwidth increased so much? ...because of the naming controversy or because of all the new people who are now interested in Mozilla. The timing would suggest the naming controversy is the cause. Why has the reaction been to shut down the forums? ...to allow the whole thing to cool down a bit by disallowing one more place where people can express their views about the naming controversy. It seems to me this whole thing was perhaps self-induced by this naming issue. I've heard the Firebird and Thunderbird names so much now that they are burned into my brain cells as being synonymous with a browser and mail client. I used to think of the car, but not anymore... now I think about a browser and a whole bunch of squabbling. <sigh> "because of the naming controversy or because of all the new people who are now interested in Mozilla" I'd say the former. "Why has the reaction been to shut down the forums?" Because this is what they've done in the past when they require more money. Except the last time they said that they had more money than they actually needed for 1 year of bandwidth. I wonder how much extra bandwidth those database whiners wasted. I am wondering if there is any hit rate studies on mozillazine.org? If it is due to the usage of forum, a redesign on the web might help a lot. If it turned out due to the popularity of mozilla and lots of programs being downloading, I think it is better to conduct a users survry to study how frequent we download; which version(s) we are downloading most etc., Any offical mirror sites so that the download traffic would be redirected to other sites. what do you download from mozillazine.org? isn't it mozilla.org you are referring to? guess they don't have any bandwith troubles. The bandwidth on mozillazine is being used up by inefficient forums. Mozilla.org has dedicated servers to host the mozilla releases, nightlies, and source codes. Also there are already mirrors of mozilla.org that can be used. It would be best in the future to have slashdot or other articles refer to mozilla.org so that people can read up on it. Also it would help if Mozilla.org had a more informative introduction on its site. Not only just the css option, but updating phpbb, mysql, and php. Hey, now that the forums are down, does anyone want to help QA a bug? Do you ever try to click on a link, but the screen jumps (either up or down), and then Mozilla doesn't even follow the link? Well, c'mon down to bug 189474. http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=189474 We're trying to figure out what's going on there. I'll not consider donating unless you guys promise to completely shut out any database related posts.. nuke 'em, block 'em, dont even leave them readable in the locked posts forum. I come here to learn more about the beloved browser, not to listen to morons whining over a name.. and to think of funding their whining... hello! Obviously you don't agree with the “I may hate what you say, but I’ll die defending your right to say it.” policy. That is not relevant. You have the right to say what you want to, whether or not I agree with what you say. But do it at an appropriate place. Contact mozilla.org privately or Publish your views at your own webserver publicily, I dont care. What I do care about is the fact that the forums were shut down due to excessive traffic, and a major part of that had to do with the naming debate, and these forums were IMO not the place for that debate. the MZ-forum is to be considered the main place to discuss any Moz related issue, mozilla.org lacking such a place. keeping protests private only helps the ones you protest against. as someone noted elswhere, lots of traffic was likely to be caused by slashdot users who only read the forums, which themselves generate useless traffic by all the images etc. Why did they have to completely shut down the forums to save bandwidth? Couldn't they just restrict the number of users that could be logged on to the forums at any given time? As it is, seeing the " The forums are currently down due to bandwidth issues. They will return soon hopefully." message doesn't exactly inspire confidence, if you know what I mean. I would imagine people don't want to feel like they're donating money to something that will be gone in a month, regardles. Not that *I* think that way, mind you. The explanation was rather terse and could do with some elaboration. My perception right now is that of a bunch of negativity around the Mozilla project. The unfortunate part of this is that one's perception often becomes their reality. However, this is nothing that a little more effective communications from the "powers that be" could dissolve. I'm still a fan of Mozilla and whatever name it takes in the future... I'm just not a fan of the current situation. If bandwidth is the issue, and there is many FREE bandwidth for forum, such as groups.yahoo.com, it is possible to redirect all the new messages to these FREE bandwidth until a better solution is found later. The total shutdown is very bad image to the community. In a word... no. The forum software simply isn't designed to work that way. It's either on or off. Since the user only has a connection to the forum when they are submitting a form or receiving a page, the server wouldn't even have a way to determine how many are "online," because the majority of the time would be spent without an active connection to the server. "The forum is down due to bandwidth issues" is a rather common message to see if you browse enough message boards. It also inspires a lot more confidence than "the forum is down because the website has been hacked" or something along those lines. The forums will return. We're trying to avoid swamping our hosts, so we voluntarily pulled them down. We're also doing some hacking on them to remove stuff we don't think matters. They will return soon hopefully. jason The latest Win32 nightly (4/29) is almost 26MB?! The actual executable is over 60MB. What happened? Noticed that too. This has gotta be some kind of misprint. Anyone dl'd it and tried it? I started downloading it, and it was certainly 26MB or so. I then stopped the download, realising that something was wrong. I returned later, and it had been pulled back to the 28th April build as the latest build. However, I just went back and now it's 42.9MB! Oh well, I'll wait for tomorrow's build. They're working on enabling talkback in Firebird. The build machine config was incorrect, so it coughed out some debug info along with the build. They're working on it. jason Looks like there is a new Mozilla Thunderbird build, dated 4/28. http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/nightly/ You should visit the project page more often: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/ >>reduce our bandwidth usage and also eliminate the MySQL errors that many of you have experienced recently Maybe it will work better .PhpBB is working on FireBirdSQL and already a lot's of FirebirdSQL gurus read this site and could help you :) Here is the link with PhpBB http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=88651&highlight=firebird Maybe we can help you with Firebirdsql hosting too ... will they be available again? any estimate? |