As you are no doubt aware we have been having issues with the site going down.
This is due to massive amounts of traffic on snuffhouse. Within seconds of a fix being done over 40,000 connections were being opened up - clearly we don’t have that many active members. As far as we can ascertain it is bots scraping the site, most likely for email adresses and the like.We were experiencing the equivalent of a DoS attack, though we don’t believe it was being done malisciously.
The other issue is that mrsnuff.com is on the same server. Anytime snuffhouse took down the server, mrsnuff was also offline.
We are in the process of migrating snuffhouse onto AWS (Amazon Web Services), and during the process we will be reducing the liklihood of this happening in the future with better protocols in place. AWS also automatically scales so even if bots do open tons of connections nothing shuold be taken down (we will just be billed more).
Here’s the important bit:
During the migration there will some disruption as the site propogates around the world. You can help speed this up by persevering, even if pages are half loading or taking longer than normal as the pages are cached.
Thank you for your patience with this, and of course your continued support.
Shout out to the moderators also - they all work for free for the benefit of us all.
Dave
PS: we are considering a re-write to get us onto a more modern robust forum with more bells and whistles. Does anybody care? Or is this good enough? Any suggestions of what you consider to be a great forum (not content, but look and functionality)? All suggestions welcomed.
The only thing that bothers me about the current format is that some forms of punctuation cause the rest of the post to be deleted. It is can be frustrating to spend five minutes writing out a post just to realize it cut you off in the first sentence and you have to go back and rewrite it. I think this may only be a problem from people posting from certain cell phones, so its not that big of a deal. Everything else is great and I really appreciate all that you and the moderators do to keep this running, its a nice friendly corner of the internet and its great to keep up with the world of snuff.
I agree about the punctuation especially. The search function- can that get any better than Googling Snuffhouse xyz? @Dave and the moderators have my gratitude for helping fund and maintain this unique forum. It is all about the snuff and much more intimate than a social media group could be. There is a body of knowledge and experience and appreciation in this forum that is really special when you think about it.
Change is hard and I’ll take it That said, this board has some great strengths. Anonymous likes & no dislikes. Simple chronological list view. Every forum I visit other than here I can’t stand the mobile version, but this one works well. When I click on a topic it takes me to the first post that I haven’t read, Not the last post, first post Or just the newest post in the topic since the last time I was on the board. That whatever the forum software is has regular security patches etc from the vendor/developer (and that those are regularly applied) would be my request
I got used to this format and - to some extent - even to that annoying bug, mentioned by @boiledonions above. It affects desktop users as well. Although I can use the apostrophe, currencies and diacritics trigger the guillotine. My one and only suggestion is to fix this issue.
The issue has not gone away, it has merely been mitigated by moving to AWS and allocating a ton of resources to it. Not looking forward to next months bill, but its better than mrsnuffbeing constantly taken down.
We will be discussing on Monday what to do about this. I am leaning towards a total rewrite which means we may lose a lot of the history of the site which would be a damn shame, not to mention the possible hassle of having to re-register, but things cant continue as is.