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Originally Posted by John
Oh, yeah, for sure. I've spent countless hours behind the scenes. Far too many to count, thousands.
I could leave things go and GC would continue to eke on for probably a long time. Then it would just be a matter of putting out fires from time to time (like the datacenter problems in 2018, what a mess that was). But the end result eventually would be something similar to all the others that closed down.
Over the years I built servers primarily for hosting GC because to rent a similar server was so expensive monthly, $500 or so per month. The servers cost a lot to build and took a while to sort out, but it enabled me to get the current monthly hosting cost under $100. Last server I built for GC was in 2013 and the site is still running on it. That server saved a ton of expenses over the past decade, but it's really been struggling lately.
Nowadays I have much better hosting options available as computer hardware, networks & etc have improved so much while at the same time prices have come down significantly for similar server hardware (at least with budget providers). So have been looking more into that.
One issue GC has been facing for a while now, and I'm sure most GCers have noticed, is terribly slow page loading at times. That's the sort of thing which basically chokes out a website. Something like 50% of site visitors abandon sites if they don't load within a few seconds. I've seen GC on a regular basis in the past year take 2x-4x that time to load. So a bit of a problem there to sort out. Sometimes GC is blazing fast and other times, far too often, it slows to a crawl.
The easiest solution for me with GC site speed issues would probably be one that everyone dislikes: making GC members only & shutting down new account registrations in order to quickly block all the bot traffic that has been hammering the site. And maybe add on to that anti-bot checks throughout the site. But... that would take most GC pages out of the search engines, would make the site less usable/convenient (= more visitors leaving) & just add to the overall general slow decline.
Well, hopefully I'm successful at turning the challenging stuff around and at least stabilize things better. On the other side of this, things might even turn out much better. I'm actually quite optimistic, but we shall see soon enough.
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Wow! You’ve really put a lot of hours and money into this site. I know nothing about computers, although I wish I did, so I’d be able to understand how it all works easier.
So, I was gone from like 2016 to around 2021/22, so I didn’t know about the issues from 2018. I popped in periodically back then, but I didn’t notice anything wrong. When I came back, most of the regular members were gone or had stopped posting. That’d be nice for things to be like they once were, although I know it’s way easier said than done. I still think it’s fun with the few regular members still posting, though. Just much “quieter”, lol.
I’m asking dumb questions here, because I don’t know a lot about computers/servers, etc. but with the bot traffic, can you still have the anti-bot checks, while keeping GC in the search engine at the same time? Kind of like to verify it’s a real person? It just seems like somewhat of a gamble or trial and error kind of thing. It’s like it won’t allow you to have one thing without the other.
Do you find it more time consuming and expensive when it’s a lot of people that are posting? Or is it the same, even with the amount of people posting now? I’ve noticed that sometimes the site is slow, sometimes it’s fast.
Well, I’m happy to know you can see the light at the end of the tunnel and are really positive about GC’s future. That’s a plus.
Like you, I think great things are to come for GC. Plus, we’re all here in support of you, John.
Quote:
Originally Posted by John
We had a real-time java based chat server on GC for years. And it was also used by many actual ethnic Greeks. There was one chat room on the chat server that was used primarily by the ethnic Greeks and most of the time there were more ethnic Greeks in the entire chat server compared to GCers. I shut the chat server down quite a long time ago.
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lol
What? When was that? That must have been before I became a member here. So, I remember when the Greek Chat site I used to post on because of my ethnicity, when that site shut down, when I tried searching for it, this site showed up. But when I’d lurk here, I kept seeing ethnic Greeks being told by mods that they were on the wrong site. That’s hilarious that many of us were using the server, more than GC members were using it. Wow!
