The true cost is the development time, not the hard drive.

@Meep

As Draug points out, there is much more space needed than just storing past games. Also, you can't neglect the PNGs, each of which is around 60kB.

Or skip Starbucks twice a month ... Seriously, $5 for a coffee?

Sorry celticfox ;-)

Is that 60k per game or 60k per turn?

60k per PNG with one per phase. (5 phases per year and 10 years average per game so So 3meg per game times 40k is 120gig just for images).

40k games is...

A 400$ cheapy laptop already has a 500 Gig hard drive. Would it be a big LoL that our whole server can be hosted from one laptop?

@Philcore, I agree. $5 for a coffee...that's just too much for me. I drank some instant coffee and it's decent, but only cost me 30 cents for a small cup or 60 cents for a double-cup.

The hard drive you put in a server is a bit more expensive than the one you put in a desktop. Especially if you're running the entire server off of it (rather than using it for ancillary storage).

Alright, so double, triple the price of the hard drive from 150$ to 500 bucks? The engineering cost to develop and maintain this site is way more. One thing for sure, we can help the developers to do test for free so that they can write more codes. If we submit a bug report, we should have a group to screen out, and/or rewrite the bug report to save the developers time.

Not enough memory or processor.power on a laptop to handle hundreds of requests per minute while processimg turns on a timed basis. No, it takes a blade type server class machime with a minimum quad core (hex core is better especially with multie.processors to get dozens of cores running). And the hard drive needs to be a raid array (not a simple $100 drive) and forbthe data transfer speed and reliability. Trust me, a web and database server combined in one is *not* cheap and a raid array is very expensive. Oh and you wojld.probably want at least 32 gig of memory.

@Meep

The main cost is for the CPU time and the bandwidth. The storage space was more of an oversight than anything else. It's really under control.

Developers already do work for free, so there's no cost saving there. If you want to set up a server for debugging, though, by all means you should. Any bug fixes or updates you submit will be considered.

You do know the devs on this site are volunteers and mostly one or two people (Kestas and sleepcap for the most part). This isn't a professional paid site with ads or subscription fees.

First thing we can do is to have the non-developers to screen out redundant reports, noises and stuff. Summary only the top important issues to forward to the developers.

Again - volunteer devs who take marching orders as far as priority from Kestas, the aite owner.

We use one sticky thread to organize such reports. And a few persons in charge of the threads to summary and do a weekly accumulation of issues. At the end of the week, the Developers can only need to read the summary, thus save a lot of time.

@Meep

Do you have any experience running a site or developing software?

@Abge you really don't suffer fools, do you?

It was a genuine question. He seems to have a lot to say and I want to know if it's from experience or he's just making things up.

Okay, but you're not exactly giving him a lot of room to do anything other than get annoyed at you for implying ("Do you have any experience..." "I want to know...if he's just making things up") that he has no idea what he's talking about.

If you're genuine in your curiosity, a better question might be "interesting thoughts. What kind of background do you have in I.T. (web hosting, software development, that kind of thing)?

I'm not saying you have to be nice about it, just that if you're going for honestly curious, it's a better way to get him to answer the question.

I see no reason for him to be offended, nor for you to be offended for him, by my question.

He is making rather involved suggestions on how to improve this site. It is not surprising that he should back those suggestions up with real experience.

If he has no experience, I will happily explain to him why his ideas are problematic.

It is also blindingly obvious from his thoughts on the hardware required to operate a high bandwidth website that any experience he might have isn't in high bandwidth websites.

I'm offended because nobody said that Nescafe is the best instant coffee.

If I implied that I was offended, I apologize, it was not my intention (and is actually a bit ironic given what I said). I was simply pointing out a better way to ask the question if your goal was to get him to answer it.

I would think as a mod (or simply as someone with a grad degree in a technical field) you'd be accustomed to people who aren't technical making technical suggestions. I'll grant you it's irritating but, I guess, having grown up out here where it's a common occurrence, I'm used to just brushing it off.

I can't even imagine the number of times you must have had similar conversations on here already with similar individuals. If I tried to correct every person who gave me technical suggestions i'd probably go insane.

Best instant coffee. Don't you mean least bad?

Seriously, dear, this is the best s#%t coffee you've made for me ever!

@data

Meep appears to be enthusiastic about making improvements to the site. I encourage that and have encouraged it for years. My goal was to engage him in an actual conversation, but to do that, I need to know his background so that I can speak to him properly.

I do not beat around the bush. I asked him what his technical background was because I'm interested in his technical background. If he is not interested in answering, that is fine, we just won't have this conversation.

I do not brush off members of the site. I take their suggestions as sincere, if not sometimes misguided. I do not talk to people in the hopes that I can trick them into looking stupid; people on this Forum do that enough without my help.

Make themselves look stupid or others (or both)? hehehe

I wasn't suggesting that was what you should do. Just that it was how I usually handle the person unless I have a vested interest in listening to them. You clearly have a higher tolerance for that sort of thing than I do, in which case all I was saying is that there was probably a better way to ask the question so that you'd get the kind of answer you were looking for.

I wasn't suggesting anything more than that.