Rubberslug Issues

[blueheaven]

Hey, it got you to at least provide a coherent reply.

[blueheaven]

Sounds like you have great ideas. Once again, make them a reality. Don't ask someone to hand you over their hard work because you don't like how their FREE website is being run. Create your own forum/gallery from scratch. That is innovation. It's at least more productive than starting a complaint thread. Jason has lost money keeping that page up. He doesn't owe you or anyone else a thing. No matter how much you DONATED.

[sensei]

It's certainly true that RS has become stagnant over the past years, I think less because of Jason's neglect than 1) there are fewer actively collecting, chattering enthusiasts these days, and 2) as noted in another thread, this kind of website is being seen as old-fashioned and not interactive enough. The declining rate of new art being added, and the quietness that has fallen over the blog options and forum sites, make that clear.

It probably is time for a new approach to displaying/commenting on anime art. I'd love to have something more like DeviantArt, where people could react to individual items and comment on them, or move to a social-media platform and chat with the curator. But, as blueheaven points out, that would take a webmaster who has had the devotion to the hobby that Jason had, and the time to devote to setting it up and dealing with the inevitable bugs and crashes.

Meantime, with the help of a lot of hacks and tricks, I've made the present RS work for me. I don't know if it would be feasible for me to move over everything I've got to a new hosting site. But I'd be happy to play with one if it's made feasible for me to set up shop there, much as I've learned (and continue to learn) volumes about web presentation and strategy with the old one.

[Rekka Alexiel]

Don't get me wrong guys, I have also complained about the set up of Rubberslug over the years, as you probably know. When was it? Maybe a year or so ago it annoyed me to the point where I finally constructed a gallery on my own site to display my items the way I wanted--the first time in probably over 10 years (I started out displaying my gallery on my own pages before moving solely to RS). I was also a paying contributor but that was also a long time ago when the site worked pretty well.

I understand the feeling of not getting what you paid for, but half of me also feels that making contributions is not a method by which to demand changes be made or to even ask for it back. It's unfortunate that Jason has left the site to rot, as it was so eloquently stated before (perfect word for this case), but really I don't think any of us are in the position to demand anything. You can ask, certainly, but there's never a guarantee that you'll get it. I'd imagine that a good majority of money received from contributors when to paying the host to keep the site online more than helping to improving and developing the site further. Again, I do understand your feeling and sympathise with you, but I also think a donation is a donation, a free gift without any strings attached.

Now, if he's ignoring you even though you've sent him multiple messages, I don't agree with that. The worst way to treat someone with a problem is by ignoring it. I know Jason is awfully busy in the real world outside our wonderful hobby, but he should at least reply to something. Does anyone know him or has been in contact with him lately? If he's suddenly disappeared completely from the Internet I would be worried. Are you sure nothing has happened to him...???

Anyway, I don't think you're starting a flame war. You have genuine problems that need resolving. There's nothing wrong with voicing your opinion and how you feel about it.

I hope this will be resolved for you soon and that perhaps you can get some of your money back. In the meantime, perhaps go shopping for a Web host!! Just FYI, I have been using ipower for a good 10+ years and have been very happy with their service. They're a little bit of a pain dealing with customer service, but still they get the job done! Good luck!!

[Rekka Alexiel]

Woops, meant to edit the above post and ended up quoting myself. lol

[noisywalruforgothislogin]

Sweet! My account is still here. So here's the straight dope of assorted facts/observations. This is for everyone so maybe this should go in a FAQ somewhere for "why doesn't x work on RS?"

- It's 3 AM here. Work and life are busy, but I always say that. You deserve a response! I know that you wouldn't be so passionate about this if you didn't really love it. For that, my eternal thanks. I wouldn't be responding at 3 AM if I also didn't really love it.

- I'm a bad person for not responding to stuff faster or at all. So here's the thing with taking on new mods or new whatevers: The admin tools that are partially built allow people (potentially) great power... like delete-the-website power. I've historically only given that power to people that I've met in person. It's been a few years since I've flown out to meet people so I'm kinda antsy about that. So. I don't really know what to say here.

- The core of the site was written in 2000. Nearly 14 years ago! The first Spiderman move with Tobey Maguire just came out! There was a significant rewrite perhaps in 2008 or so. 6 years ago! Can you name anything that you use today besides e-mail that was written and mostly unchanged since that time? I can't. It's the Battlestar Galactica at this point.... still cooking up Cylons but obviously been battered by quite a bit of stress over the years.

- There's so many files on the server that it's tough figuring out how I'd ever *move* the damn thing. To give you some idea, it would take several days of just *waiting on bandwidth* to move over everything. Just retrieving the *directory listing* of files on the machine takes several minutes. I've wanted to put this all onto a "cloud" server (this may make sense to some of you) but there's so many intertwined bits that it would be a major engineering project for several talented people to accomplish.... and it would probably still suck in lots of ways. Anyways, Rubberslug lives in a cold little room somewhere in Houston. I live in Austin. I pay the bills (the least I could do) but I barely ever see the thing because my primary environment now are these "cloud" servers like Rackspace or Amazon. Rubberslug is the sole piece of still-functioning code still stuck in the data center. I'm pretty good at this stuff -- it's my job -- and I can't see a clean way to modernize this. Anything to bring it up to the standard people are now accustomed to with Facebook, Tumblr would require an outsized resource and time investment. Those products were built with millions of dollars and hundreds of people. This was built in free time of one guy and some helpful mods. That's reality.

- Doesn't Paypal automatically refund if that person wants to? Donations are more or less non-existant. I could screencap Paypal and brag about my awesome profit of ~$20/mo (there are literally like 4 monthly donors... love you guys!) but it just kinda sits there. I think I used the balance to buy a 6-pack of air filters for my home A/C unit recently. Granted, they were nice air filters, but that money doesn't pay for the server. Real-life work pays for the servers. I'd estimate monthly is probably ~$200-300... but it's not billed like that. We own the whole rack in the data center and RS sits on one of the machines there. Anyways, if Paypal didn't reimburse that month, I'll try to figure out how to do that or I'll send you a $5 Starbucks gift card or something (probably easier).

- For now (and for most of the entire history) there have been no ads and I haven't taken a dime from the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of transactions that have occurred on the site. That's gotta account for something, right? I kinda intended to at one point but there were always bigger problems. I finally vanquished -- I think -- the odd stream of journeyman hackers that once in a while figure out how to bypass 14-year-old security protocols a few years ago. You're right, that probably broke some stuff but the alternative is the longshot possibility that the site would be vaporized. For the last few years, my development time on RS has been to address existential threats only. Dodge the meteors, weather the storms.

- Should it be shut down? I dunno. I kinda hoped I'd always return to it. If you can find a billionaire investor to buy out one of my ventures, I'd love to spend full-time on this. I built Rubberslug when I was 20. I'm 34 now. Priorities change and shift but some things always hold sentimental value.

I don't know what else to say. I hope my zero-spin honesty is taken at face value. Sorry that people and websites age, I guess. I grateful to all of you for all the love you've shown over the years for this little project. I don't have any plans to shut it down. I hope no one feels "tricked" in some way. It never made positive money and I'm prouder of this than almost every other thing I've made... with the regret that I don't have the resources to do more.

Anywaysies, 3:45 now and I'm nodding off while typing this. I will end with a joke for those of you who made it to the end of this post: Q. What's brown and sticky? A. A stick.

[ginga123]

Thank you. I don't feel sorry and I am really not out a lot from it. Donation is a donation. I will be fine.

Time to find a new host....perhaps with social interface?