Il futuro di Racesim Central e di rFCentral...

September 21, 2006

fonte rFactor Central http://www.rfactorcentral.com/

rFactorCentral has been a wild ride, but with regard to downloads from its three file servers it grown way beyond the point of being sustainable. Over the coming days the bulk of the rCentral download links will not be available as the way forward is considered. I'd hoped for an 11th hour solution but after a number of calls to the USA tonight nothing promising eventuated - downloads/bandwidth-wise the site is already well into the red for the month of October.

(Just to clarify - this site www.rfactorcentral.com will continue to operate - it's the three rcentral file servers that are out of action for now)

Over August/September well over 1TB of data PER DAY was served from the three file servers - that's over 70TB for the 2 months combined. In September there were over 2 000 000 page views of the main site. Over 16 000 users are registered, most visiting the site at least once each day.

Less than 0.5% of people who use the site have made a donation towards the cost of providing the service. My thanks go to the relative few that did donate. They've help pay for downloads.

Unfortunately I can't afford to continue to pay the running costs and risk huge bandwidth charges. Due the extreme demands re bandwidth of the community and the complexity that surrounds rFactor mods regarding legality I haven't been successful in finding anyone prepared to sponsor the site. If someone can help ASAP that could be a solution.

Where to go? I don't know. Torrents are the ideal solution for a community like rFactor, where people donate their bandwidth and share the load of distributing the files we all want. Free services like Rapidshare are another option. Or would people be prepared to pay a low monthly/yearly fee to access downloads on rCentral? I wouldn't expect so.

Sorry guys for the bad news. It's something we've got to work out as a community - one person can't pay for bandwidth used by everyone else. It has to be a load that is shared by the community, especially as it continues to grow and the size of mod releases balloon out to +100mb, +200mb etc.

I'll post updates to the home page as they're available. Just to clarify - this site www.rfactorcentral.com will continue to operate as it does now - it's the three rcentral file servers that are out of action for now. Thanks for your support.

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fonte Racesim Central: http://forum.rscnet.org/showthread.php?p=3203039#post3203039

Regarding the current server:

Back in December 2004 our previous host (Boomtown.net) cancelled our hosting due to something that happened on one of our subsites. The exact reason is private between us and Boomtown and won't be discussed publicly. Because of this we incurred a downtime of about 6 weeks (IIRC). During this time a number of people and companies contacted us with offers for hosting. One of these offers was made by a very generous person who only had one condition: total anonymity. At the time this was the best out of all the offers : a decent server (back then), plenty of bandwidth, and ensured hosting for well into the future. The reason why we stay very tight-lipped about our server is very simple: total anonymity for the person paying for the server is the reason RSC actually still exists. It's the condition we operate under.

We realize this doesn't really put an end to the rumors, and there have been plenty more of those, but you will have to live with that. We know that whoever pays for our hosting simply has nothing to do with the way the forum is run and we think that is the most important thing. You can either trust ua on that or not. If you don't that's unfortunate but it'll just have to be because this is all we are going to say on the subject.

We do, however, think it's fair to get into the future plans for RSC. We are trying to get to a solution where there won't be any need for secrecy regarding the server anymore. This means buying our own servers. More on that later.

First some other things.

What is RSC about?

We'd like to get into what RSC is about to us admins for a bit. One thing people should understand is that RSC is not a commercial entity. We are not in it to make money and we think it's important to realize that. We don't do this for personal gain. We do this as a hobby. Sometimes we feel people are taking RSC more seriously than the we ourselves do. For us this is just a fun thing to do. We often see people talking about our 'competitors' and our 'customers' and in our opinion that's just silly. We don't have customers and we have no competitors because there is nothing to compete for. Don't read this as an arrogant statement because it's not meant as such. There are plenty of other sites and forums dealing with sim-related issues and we wish them all the best. Of course, we would be sad to see all our members go to another site not to return, but not because we would lose 'market share' or anything like that. We would be sad because it would mean we weren't doing a good enough job. We don't view our 'work' here as a competition. We do it for fun and the satisfaction we get from people enjoying our 'work'.

Also, we are not the 'evil empire'. We have no hidden agenda of any kind. We just want to run a forum in a way so that we and as many people as possible can enjoy it. We do not always get things right and you might not agree with everything we do but you have to realise that, although we want as many people in here as possible, we still see this as our place, kind of like a home, and we will run it the way we think is best.

We don't mind you respectfully disagreeing with us. We will always try to answer your questions when you do. You might not always get the answer you wanted but when all you do is insult us we're not likely to bother with you and we'll probably show you the door. Just as you would when someone insulted you in your own home.

Regarding staff getting paid:

Not a single staff member gets paid. We have recently paid for some of one forum member's travel expenses for a race report he did for us but he's not on the staff. We have also used some of our funds to sponsor one of our former admins, Norbs, in his charity events. Apart from that not a single private person has ever received any money from RSC for anything for as far back as we can remember.

Where does 'all the money' go then?

A logical question to ask.

Any money we get from voluntary donations and the bit of money we make from the banners goes into our paypal account and stays there until we need it or have enough to actually do something with it. So far there isn't a whole lot of money. We have saved up a couple thousand dollars and that's it. We primarily use it to pay for license and domain registration fees which amounts to about $250 a year. The rest of the money we've been (slowly) saving up to eventually be able to buy our own servers and finally be totally independent from any charity for the first time in a looooong time. When that happens we will probably use any money left over after hosting costs to set up competitions for the members.

We do not intend to ever pay ourselves from any money RSC receives. That might change of course if advertisers start throwing wads of money at us but that doesn't seem likely. If that actually did happen we hope to either pay back anyone who has donated to us or count up all the money that has been donated and give that amount to charity. Paying ourselves is the last thing we will do. Believe it or not.

So what does the future hold?

This is something we have been discussing for a long time but no real decisions have been made. We think it's time to share some of our considerations with you though because you guys might come up with some good ideas as well.

There are plenty of problems we admins have to figure out but the main problem is the performance of the forum. RSC has simply outgrown its size and needs new and better servers badly. Contrary to popular belief, our problems can't be fixed by different software settings or upgrades. It's hardware, hardware, and nothing but hardware. Just to illustrate: our biggest database table is over 1 GB in size. MySQL + PHP + vBulletin's software simply doesn't work well with that and the only real solutions are loads and loads of memory and processing power. All the vBulletin experts agree that for a forum this big you need at least four times the power we have now.

So, we need new servers and we want to own those servers ourselves because we want to finally be independent and not have to rely on anyone's charity. We used to get our server from Boomtown for free and now we get it for free from someone else as well. We are and always will be very grateful to both Boomtown and the person paying now but eventually we want to own our own servers. That is the only way to ensure RSC's existence for the decades to come.

Apart from improving the performance of the forum, here's what would we like to do with the new servers:

- Enable full searching with no time limit.

- Enable listings for "who's browsing this forum", "similar threads", "who's online", "birthdays", etc.

- Launch a new frontend site with many interesting features. (I'd like to go into detail on the features but that will have to wait for now.)

- Anything else we (and you) can come up with.

Now the tricky bit: the kind of hardware we need costs a lot of money. We estimate that for two good servers (approximately quad Xeon's, 8 GB of memory, a lot of SCSI hard drives with redundancy, gigabit LAN cards with redundancy, etc. - one for the database and one for the software and site) we need about

Edited October 4, 2006 by VELOCIPEDE

September 21, 2006

Gestire un sito come RSC come hobby deve essere veramente MOLTO impegnativo.. Se poi si contano costi (che sono sempre esorbitanti), inconveniente, problemi, utenti... passa proprio la voglia di fare.

Io ammiro queste persone per la passione che ci mettono (e non solo!!) nel portare avanti queste comunit

Edited September 21, 2006 by pelice

September 25, 2006

RSC e' vittima delle sue scelte, fossero rimasti a parlare di Sim automobilistici e basta, oggi avrebbero meno utenti e meno problemi. Invece, pure li', manca solo il sottoforum su Britney Spears e hanno fatto il pieno ( o forse c'e' gia' e non me ne sono accorto ).

Cosi' invece, RSC non va' avanti e il livello dei loro forum dedicati alle simulazioni e' andato sotto alle scarpe.

Per me questo e' il punto su cui sarebbe il caso di meditare.

September 26, 2006

Invece, pure li', manca solo il sottoforum su Britney Spears e hanno fatto il pieno ( o forse c'e' gia' e non me ne sono accorto ).

:asd: quotazzo!!!

Cmq questo

September 26, 2006

Ora non

September 28, 2006

Ma quindi la situazione ora come

October 4, 2006