Friday, December 29, 2006

New stats system

Hi,

As many people have seen, we do have stats.deltaanime.net which provides channel stats for those wanting it. The down side to this, though, is the current system was being maintained by an oper that's run off to frolic in the meadows of Ohio.

Right now we have the following:

http://stats.deltaanime.net/deltaanime.html

Which is pretty cool to say the least.

Right now i'm working to write a new addon to services to provide easy access to any users wanting to use it - the down side? We won't have nearly as many things listed there.

What would go away?

  • Names attached to the last topic area
  • some things from "big numbers"
That being said, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't return at a later time. We're currently looking at options to add this functionality into services our selves, but never much cared for patches and the likes.

When would the new system be in place?

Depending how quickly I can learn (proper) C, I could have it done by within the next weekend or so. If I'm able to ring up some people to help code, even quicker.

The new system isn't complex at all, but because I don't know C really, it's taking some extra time.

All comments would be great

Thank you!

~Francisco

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Christmas upgrades - Part 1

With my new found two weeks of vacation time (kinda) from work, i've finally gotten around to upgrading daIRC. Many of the upgrades weren't really needed on a performance idea, but more to cut costs.

Money money money...money!

Like all things, daIRC requires quite a bit of cash to operate. You've noticed that on Friday (Dec 23rd) hinoto split the network in half. This move will drop our costs by about $40/mo, as well as double our servers performance.

For a full break down on cost cuts, see this table.

Server Name Old Cost New Cost
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hinoto $100/mo $60/mo
Chisa (DAT) $180/mo $0.00/mo (absorbed into the cost of the webserver)
Motoko $150/mo $40/mo (Moved UK -> Germany)
Web Chat $100/mo $70/mo (Same location as hinoto, but has 2GB RAM)

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOTALS: $530/mo $170/mo DIFF -> $360/mo savings

As you can see, the upgrades were very much well worth it.

There are talks right now to move kasumi as it keeps proving to be a pest of a box. Granted, it's only *fully* died twice in the past year we've had her, it's been randomly throwing up users. The host uses people like Cogent & Telia, which are just crappy providers all around. We get a uptime SLA and all, and for the most part they meet it, but I've already done a little window shopping and found a company in the same area with way better bandwidth (all TIER 1 bandwidth - InterNAP) for $30/mo less - Anyone got experience with InterNAP?

On top of those savings, one of the side communities DA does billing for has cut their costs by nearly 50% due to a change of hosts (layeredtech is a buncha bastards I tell ya!)

zBot, etc

As many saw, zBot was out for much of today due to some issues we found in the code last night after a crash out. Me and W1N9Zr0 (be sure to thank him!) spent the better part of today debugging it and speeding it up. We've done some quick calculations that are showing zbot now being 10x faster. No more will you have to wait a second or so for zbot to kick back results or anything of the sort - all now instant

zBot changes
------------------------

- Flood protection
- cleaning up of all user messages
- massive speed increase

Granted, the list isn't huge, the changes that were done were fairly big to impliment


Webchat & daIRC website!...wait..we have a website?

I've finally gotten time to make the new daIRC website (late beta at this point), and have put together the new webchat we'll be launching soon.

Users wishing to see/comment on either of them can visit

new website - http://beta.deltaanime.net
new webchat - http://beta.deltaanime.net/chat/

Yes, i'm aware the chat doesn't got daIRC at this time, for teh time being we're just using the test server they provide with the new client.

Happy Holidays!

~Francisco

Sunday, December 03, 2006

daIRC policy change

As many of you may have noticed, DeltaAnime has slowly been transitioning from a network
focused primarily on the anime and private server communities to one that supports a
broader spectrum of interests and content. With this has come a number of changes including
the adoption of the daIRC namesake and a revision of general administrative
practices and policies.

One policy that is up for review is the restrictions on file sharing. Under the current policy, users are limited to sharing content that is either unrestricted by North American copyright law or that which falls under the anime or Asian media categories. It has been noted that this policy is a little backwards in that licensed anime does in fact violate copyright laws in most cases even though it seems to be tolerated by those that distribute or produce it.

After some deliberation and taking into consideration the interest some users have expressed
regarding this topic, we're entertaining the idea of lifting the restrictions on content that may be distributed from one client to another. Such transfers do not involve the network in any way beyond the initial user to user communication and as a result the network would not store nor aid in the transfer of any material that may infringe on any nation's copyright laws.

The network's stance would be one that neither promotes nor condones the use of the network for such a purpose but would not punish those that chose to do so as long as the content distributed is not of a seriously objectionable nature. The user and the group they represent would be responsible for maintaining their integrity and respecting the restrictions of the law in their area.

Of course, all administration on the network will be unable to participate in any group, community or project in any context beyond a basic user while still maintaining their status on the network to prevent bias or abuse of daIRC resources. This policy is identical to current restrictions regarding participation in L2, RO and other private communities.

As with all large network changes, we wish to give the entire network community the opportunity to vote on the outcome of this proposal and voice any comments it may have. Comments have been adjusted to allow anonymous posting. When posting, please be sure to declare your vote (Yes/No/Don't care) in the first sentence, after that you may leave a detailed comment if you wish. Alternatively, one may attempt to contact a member of the administration to provide a more detailed response.

No matter the outcome of this vote, daIRC will still continue to strive to provide a stable, feature rich environment with a supportive administration where communities and projects may take root and flourish.

~Francisco & S|napse