Hello!
I wanted to make a quick community announcement letting everyone know that I’ve migrated the Socially Distant forum.
Formerly, it was hosted on Hetzner in their Germany datacenter on my (soon-to-be-decommissioned) Ash Server, a server aucion box that I’ve been hosting the entire community on. But that server is expensive and is a single point of failure for the entire community. So I’ve been slowly migrating all community services to new homes. That includes this forum!
I’ll be writing a blog on acidiclight.dev about the entire setup and why we’re doing it, but that’ll come later. The gist of it is below.
What’s changed (for nerds)
The database is now on a separate server. This forum uses Discourse, which by default has an internal PostgreSQL database to store forum data. This requires the database to be stored on the same device as the Discourse app itself, making both disk space and RAM usage a concern. With that in mind, I’ve configured Discourse to use an external database, allowing it to be replicated across the world if we ever need to. It allows me to share the PostgreSQL server across all other community services, like the online manual.
Uploads are now stored externally. Anything you paste into a post that gets uploaded as a file will now be stored in an S3 storage bucket and publically accessible via cdn.acidiclight.dev. This will make them load faster, since they can be delivered worldwide via Cloudflare and cached. It also makes the forum faster, since uploads (and people viewing them) don’t increase server load.
Authentication
I know, I know, it’s a meme. Every time I mihrate a forum, everyone has to recreate their accounts and all that crap. It’s annoying, isn’t it? Well… you don’t have to feel annoyed this time. The migration is completely transparent, you can still log in perfectly fine with your acidic light community account.