Tasks / What's Going On With SFZero?
Not making this a news item, since there isn't much "news" and it's not particularly exciting. But it's well past time to offer some idea of what's up.
Like lots of players, S, S, and I hit a "need an SF0 break" patch, and unfortunately hit it all at once.
Things are moving forward again, though, however gradually. The Continuing Economic Crisis has made it difficult to keep paying for the server, so we sketched out a plan to move to some cheaper hosting. This means making a few changes to the site: video may have to be youtube (or vimeo, etc) -only for a while, and the upload-by-email feature may have to disappear. We think we may have to stop confirming email addresses, too (it's actually quite difficult setting up an email server to be trustworthy in the eyes of some webmail services, particularly Hotmail).
But we still need to keep the spammers out, so I added a captcha to the signup form. And we want to make uploading proof relatively painless, so we figured we'd finally add a flash uploader (which would let you upload more than one file at a time).
SFZero's been around for a while, though, and through that time we've been piling feature on top of feature, fix on top of fix, and kludge on top of shim — and the submit proof page is one of the most complicated pieces of code jenga in the site. It's gotten to the point where everyone acknowledges that updating the site with significant new features or forms of bureaucracy would be unpleasant. Revolutionaries that we are, we thought it should be torn down to be built back up. Over the last year or so, we've started two or three complete rewrites of Our Glorious Website Future, each with a different vision of The Longer Term Plan behind it.
For lots of reasons technical and otherwise, none of these were completed. Coding a site this large from scratch is hard, and planning the future of SFZero has become more daunting as it's become more widely known and played. Trying to do both at the same time was impossible.
So here's what's happening: I'm re-structuring the code; moving bits and pieces into a more organized framework and fixing little issues here and there as I come across them. The bad news is that there won't be much new when we switch to this tidier engine; the good news is that it's moving along quickly and will make it much easier to make SFZero-the-website better in the future on a "work outside of work" schedule.
Right now, that's my focus. A new Era would seem to be in order, and on that front there's been somewhat less progress. With each new era, we've tried to make interesting changes to How The Game Works, How The Website Works, and to What Animates The Game. The first two are obviously waiting on the cleaner foundation upon which to build. The third is tricky. Summoning the kind of driving energy or guiding philosophy of a new era can be tough to do on demand, and happens by happy accident less often as one hits one's later twenties and the pluripotency of life seems to fade. But this is, at least, a Problem to be Addressed; ideally by a new era, as soon as we can.
1 to 100 players
0 points
Level 0
In the zone of: EquivalenZ
0 completed :: 0 in progress
Interested in collaborating on this: (no one yet!)
this task is pretired
Comments
I know it's a very un-SFØ idea, but I'd be happy to donate a little scratch to the hosting costs if you felt it was dire enough, as I'm sure plenty of others would as well.
Don't be scared to beg ;)
If you need money to pay for the server, say so. If you think it would be better to cut some features and spend less, the do so, but don't assume there's no money available. Just put up a donation drive request, saying "we need $X to keep the site running, we have $Y, please donate!" or some such.
Also, it's at least worth considering asking for some amount of salary for your work on the site. If a little bit of cash made the difference between you having time to work on the site or not, I suspect you might find people are willing to donate.
You've built a community here. It needs you. It's ok for you to need it, too.
There is a "donate" link, it's just not often publicized...
Yeah, let's not ask SSI to beg from us, okay guys?
(LP, the donation drive has been going for literally years. The boys have been saying so- exactly what you suggest is on the site and updated every month on the donate page.) They've got the facts about the server right there in front of us, but with numbers like they are- only 83 out of 239 raised so far this month and a mere 68 last month- the situation seems pretty dire to me. I would move the server too.
I've said it before, if everyone who's an active player pitched just a dollar/month towards the server, it'd be paid. It's easy and painless- you can set up automatic payments so you don't even have to think about it- try it, you'll like it.
Most sites doing donation drives post more than one word about it on the front page. I think sf0 should do the same.
Also, $239/mo seems really high. How much storage / bw does sf0 actually use, anyway? Am I just way off base with my estimation?
Thanks so much, everyone, for being helping and encouraging! To keep up the unusual amount of secret info slipping out of the SFZero underground compound:
Server:
Well, eons ago I was a Sys Admin, making what – for an unattached 20-something who'd never been much of a spender anyway – was a bunch o' money. In those days, Serious webhosts weren't cheap, and we wanted full control over the box so we could do Neat Stuff (some that we did, like setting up a mailserver and video encoding, and some that we didn't, like setting up a WAP proxy). A little later we got a really nice server to use, too! We've got 4gb of RAM so the DB's nice and fast, and we don't worry about holding everyone's proof stuff (about 64gb worth at the moment). The site currently gets around 40k unique visitors per month (~60k pageviews), chewing up around 100gb of bandwidth. At the time, our colo slot covered all of that for $200/mo, and I could cover whatever the balance of that was while still being able to keep myself housed and full of nicotine and burritos.
Meanwhile virtual hosting has gotten a lot better and our colo price went up. When we can find the time/inclination we can use something like S3 to continue not worrying about storage, and one of a few services out there that convert video properly for things like iPhones and HTML5, in addition to flash. And though we'll probably end up with less memory to throw at the database, we're pretty confident we can spend less money somewhere else without the site getting slow.
Money, etc:
We just want SFZero to be sustainable, both from a game perspective and from a money perspective. And not only are times tough, but (as far as I can tell, at least) lots of SFZero players seem to be students, people scraping by trying to do their dream work, and people who work jobs to stay alive rather than to be able to throw cash around.
We also hate asking for money because, while everyone's donations are greatly appreciated, if we got to a point where SFZero went from being a fun "passion project" to being an obligation, we'd probably stop doing it. It's one thing to check out for bit and feel lousy about it, but it's another thing entirely to do that when people are paying for it. Personally, at least, I think there's something about SFZero — in terms of ethos, if not game mechanics — that's fundamentally incompatible with it being a paid service. We all, I believe, also shy away from the game feeling much about us (which is why radical openness like this rarely shows up, and why this is an unscored task to keep it "in the family"). Which is contradictory, because at the same time as we'd rather just pull the occasional lever in the background and see what happens, the game needs more than just technical stewardship, and the limited day-to-day content control we exercise (over tasks) is important (at least, in my opinion) to maintaining the character of the site. And while updating code just takes time, the more creative administrative stuff (making new eras or new game wrinkles like duels) takes both time and being "moved by the spirit". My suspicion is that trying automate / crowdsource things like that would have less good results, but at the same time we have to be wary of the "perfect vs. good" trap that's been stalking around the underground lair lately.
So, the TL;DR version is: "Thank you so much for rallying around helping us pay for hosting! Since we don't want server cost issues to be chronic or a threat to the continuing existence of the site, we're moving to a cheaper server. Also, running SFZero breaks one's brain in addition to bank, so unscheduled absences of temperamental creators may continue. Anyone read any good books lately?"
I have the same feeling about this site that you do re: money.
I'm part of a theater company that is completely free. No member has to spend a dollar to be involved in any way (unlike most theater companies in the world). And SFØ runs in a similar manner. The thing is, those of us who are deep into the running and sustaining of the theater give to it freely. Which is an important distinction. If we were forced to pay anything I wouldn't do it, but because it's completely free, some of us choose to give. I think we all have the same thing here.
All we needed to know (or be reminded of) is that this place costs money to run, and if we don't pay for it voluntarily, then you have to.
SSI - you have struck a great balance between the crowdsourcing part (like coming up with task ideas) and maintaining a vision and character through central control. I think your creative input and content control has been important---thanks!
I agree with rongo. A community-only approach to picking tasks wouldn't have the vision of SF0 as it is. The three of you keep it varied enough to have room for all our voices, but unified enough to be a coherent whole, and that's why it succeeds.
I actually really loved the thing of having different people each approve a week's tasks. That worked beautifully, but only because the people you picked to do it were good choices. I also suspect it reduced your workload a little, so if that's a part of the goal I would encourage you to bring it back in some semi-permanent fashion - maybe designate certain people (like Darkaardvark, or at least I think it was him - whoever did the The Hunt week, which was inspired) as sub-admins who can queue up a limited number of tasks for approval or something.
Random question: will the new era bring on a ninth group?
Any news on this lately? Or is there some other super secret clubhouse I need to find? :)
Glad to hear things are looking up for the coming era and that you're emerging from the big everyone-misplaced-their-drive-at-once lull.