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[Nokao]

How about adding the files as well to as Magnet torrents.

This is of course a solution,
and also a way to demonstrate that torrent is also for legal stuff 

But it's complicated and it's not "DF community habit".

I don't know what to say ...
... this forum have probably already all what is needed to upload and host files,
but it's clearly mantained by Toady One that don't want to increase his website usage for "useless files".

I guess that, maybe, this is the moment to take care of this "useless files",
because it's part of the community,
born for him around his game.

In case this don't happens,
we'll find another solution toghether.

[expwnent]

This really sucks. I don't have any good solutions, but posting to watch.

[Bloax]

I won't actually support DFFD.  It hosts some child porn / rape fantasies (modded adventure mode stuff) that were removed from the forums for good reason, and I can't give monetary support to a service that condones that in any way.

Rats making a home out of your basement is not condoning rat infestment.
Hosting whatever files someone may upload (which may or may not be morally bankrupt) is not condoning uploading morally bankrupt content.

The fact that rats have made a home of your basement (or someone has uploaded questionable content to your hosting service) doesn't automatically mean that you condone rat infestation - in fact it would be foolish to assume an automatic correlation between the two - it merely means that you have a rat infestation and that you should probably call a pest control (or get a moderation system where files can be reported as inappropriate (if it can't go on the forums why can it go on DFFD?) and consequently be taken down if it is found to be so. o_O).

[puke]

There is nothing questionable about child rape/murder fantasies.  This is not a moral grey area or topic of debate.  There are no questions here.

DFFD is not an anonymous black box, and the content has been on there for years.  It isn't a mystery or an unknown to anyone.  People turn a blind eye to all sorts of things and justify all kinds of morally questionable behavior.

This isnt like that.  You can't claim ignorance about it.  You cant claim that it couldn't be removed with just a microscopic amount of effort.  And you cant justify it.  And you can't know it is there and still support the service without tacitly endorsing it.

Furthermore, you can't attempt to argue in favor of it without making it on my ignore list.  Goodbye.

As a public service, here is a link to your own.  If you think this sort of thing is okay, Go ahead and put me on it:  http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?action=profile;area=lists;sa=ignore

[Janus]

Here, check this out:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#r=IAD&s=EC2&key=calc-2A3FB73C-6F01-47AE-912F-90C1BBB886F5
$20 per month. Less for the first year, if you are not an existing customer and can take advantage of the "Free  Tier".

If I add 1TB of output, it jumps up to $100, but that is still 2/3 of your previous estimate:
http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#r=IAD&s=EC2&key=calc-88DE48D6-BF67-46D0-BA8C-D407A439712D
and while you may have peaked at a couple TB, it is probably high for a monthly average.

I think you're definitely underestimating the bandwidth there. And that's where Amazon cloud servers get expensive, as those calculations indicate. That also can be a problem as the price for hosting can drastically fluctuate from one month to the next based on bandwidth usage.

Hi everyone.

I am a DF fan and a small hosting provider,
I re-sell to my customers services by https://www.cloudsigma.com
I have 3 servers in Zurich (Swizerland) and this same hosting company have also servers in Las Vegas (USA).

I was searching for so long for a way to donate something to this community ... and I had the luck to see this topic.
I would be very happy to host your files for free, covering all expenses, as long as it works under php environment and the total expense is < 1000 $ every year.

• Can you provide me more info about how many Gigabytes of data you need ?
• Do you have some idea of the traffic (download) that they generate ? (I ask this because I also pay $ 0.0715 / GB (output traffic).

Thanks for the offer, that sounds promising. The site currently is using just shy of 150 GB storage right now. Of course, as more files are uploaded that will grow. As an indication of bandwidth, when Toady released 0.40.01, the site was saturating the 100 Mbit uplink the current VPS is on basically by itself. That's with the relatively low speed people were downloading from the site at that point. I had to put in some further speed limiting at the time to keep that bandwidth usage in check, which is still in place. I'm not sure what the bandwidth usage is currently at, but that should be some indication of how high it can potentially go. Of course, bandwidth usage isn't constantly going to be that high, mainly just around major releases.

The $169/month dedicated server plan I was looking at has a dedicated unmetered gigabit uplink and 1 TB mirrored (RAID 1) storage space, for reference.

Hm, terms of service are hard to understand sometimes, but for example in Linode's TOS I don't see anything about file hosting services. And it's only $80/month for 192GB storage 8TB transfer. And we could also host something else useful (like several webfort servers )  there because we'll get a lot of RAM/CPU.

Hmm, sounds like a decent value as such services go. I checked and it looks like double the bandwidth (16 TB) just directly costs twice as much at $160, which is a reasonable increase. However, it looks like if you use more bandwidth in a month beyond your plan's allocation (whether on an 8 TB plan, 16 TB plan, or whatever), the additional bandwidth runs at $0.10/GB, which is pretty steep (~$100 per TB). A really high bandwidth month could end up being extremely expensive if it caught you by surprise. Though I doubt the site would go over 16 TB in a month, I don't know for sure, and it's worth considering. Their highest cost plans are also all capped at 20 TB bandwidth.

DFFD is not an anonymous black box, and the content has been on there for years. It isn't a mystery or an unknown to anyone.  People turn a blind eye to all sorts of things and justify all kinds of morally questionable behavior.

Well, it's been unknown to me. Nobody has bothered to report the files on the site itself, and I only glance over new file uploads as they go up to see if there's anything obviously problematic. I also only rarely visit these forums, only keeping track of progress through Toady's posts on the main DF page, so if there were drama here about files I wouldn't have seen it.
That being said, I see that I have indicated on the site that only copyright infringement isn't allowed; that might need to be amended.

EDIT:
I should also mention that they've moved the deadline back another week to the 15th, so there's still time to get things sorted out. I've also managed to download a backup of all of the files, though it will of course need to be refreshed with new and updated files.

[mifki]

Hmm, sounds like a decent value as such services go. I checked and it looks like double the bandwidth (16 TB) just directly costs twice as much at $160, which is a reasonable increase. However, it looks like if you use more bandwidth in a month beyond your plan's allocation (whether on an 8 TB plan, 16 TB plan, or whatever), the additional bandwidth runs at $0.10/GB, which is pretty steep (~$100 per TB). A really high bandwidth month could end up being extremely expensive if it caught you by surprise. Though I doubt the site would go over 16 TB in a month, I don't know for sure, and it's worth considering. Their highest cost plans are also all capped at 20 TB bandwidth.

Well, you wrote "highest it reached long ago while I was actually checking was somewhere in the range of several TB", now you're saying that 8TB won't be enough. That's a different story then, and (while I don't know what he told you, so just my guess), probably, for Toady as well.

Can't you turn on logging at least for a week until 15th so that we have at least some estimate? Or maybe your current hosting provider can give some information?

[Bloax]

Furthermore, you can't attempt to argue in favor of it without making it on my ignore list.  Goodbye.

:^)

[Nokao]

DFFD is not an anonymous black box, and the content has been on there for years.  It isn't a mystery or an unknown to anyone.  People turn a blind eye to all sorts of things and justify all kinds of morally questionable behavior.

This isnt like that.  You can't claim ignorance about it.  You cant claim that it couldn't be removed with just a microscopic amount of effort.  And you cant justify it.  And you can't know it is there and still support the service without tacitly endorsing it.

I agree, when I offer services to someone, I don't question what's in the box,
but I ask how many resources (GB hard drive, memory, bandwith) it needs.

If they host pornography, the price is higher just because I need to unban-unlist my customer from certain blacklists every month, and this takes time.

In this case:

• I'm offering to pay for the service myself (there is no fee to increase)
• I really don't think that DFFD host something illegal, and IF DFFD was used for filesharing of material different or non concerning DF (like copywrited movies or illegal material), this is an internal violation of it's main purpose (host files related to DF game), and I would ask for a moderator to delete the content. This must be done file-by-file (using PHCDownload  the DMS) and not like "in a movie collection that you just attached to your notebook"

As I already wrote, if I help with this, I'll have a moderator account myself,
but I don't have the time / will to use it, it's just for updates/safety purposes.

So I ask also to Janus:

• who'se managing things right now ?
• how old is the installation of this file-sharing software (PHCDownload - Download Management System) ?
• was it never updated in this years ?

A big problem is that the software with wich DFFD was made seems dead: http://www.phpcredo.com

So if it gets really outdated, or buggy, and creates security issues to my other customers ...
... my choice in this case is block the site, then try to update the software. But if I can't update ?

[Nokao]

Do you want my 2cents ?

This should be the occasion to re-do DFFD using something different (because actual software is obsolete and going to die very soon),
and I proposte this mediawiki extension: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FileList

SOLUTION 1:
Who'se managing the domain http://dwarffortresswiki.org ? Is it Toady One owned+mantained ?

Everything DF-related have "an echo" inside http://dwarffortresswiki.org
So why not attaching files directly there ? It's easy, we could restrict big file upload for Mod-Creators and certain kind of users.

If it's owned+mantained by Toady One, I could offer my help to him as a web developer to make this transformation,
and make a yearly donation to him (paying the hosting) to support his increase of expenses because he'll upload many new files.

SOLUTION 2:
We use instead "Simple Forums" internal software, so we use file-related plugins in this current website: http://www.bay12forums.com/
This is for sure Toady One owned+mantained website, and my help proposal up here is still valid.

SOLUTION 3:
We could try to find a new software or an "evolution" of the dead "PHCDownload - Download Management System",
but I'm not finding anything right now and it could be a really big headache.

[Janus]

Well, you wrote "highest it reached long ago while I was actually checking was somewhere in the range of several TB", now you're saying that 8TB won't be enough. That's a different story then, and (while I don't know what he told you, so just my guess), probably, for Toady as well.

Can't you turn on logging at least for a week until 15th so that we have at least some estimate? Or maybe your current hosting provider can give some information?

When I was checking long ago it was in the range of several TB, yes, and the popularity and spread of DF has also since increased.

I'll go ahead and enable logging for the site to see what sort of bandwidth that indicates.

So I ask also to Janus:

• who'se managing things right now ?
• how old is the installation of this file-sharing software (PHCDownload - Download Management System) ?
• was it never updated in this years ?

A big problem is that the software with wich DFFD was made seems dead: http://www.phpcredo.com

So if it gets really outdated, or buggy, and creates security issues to my other customers ...
... my choice in this case is block the site, then try to update the software. But if I can't update ?

I'm managing things myself. I have very heavily modified the core PHCDownload software, including a full security pass for XSS and SQL injection vulnerabilities not long after getting it set up and starting to modify it many years ago, which did uncover a few vulnerabilities; those were fixed. I further ran Acunetix Web Vulnerability Scanner on the site a year or two ago, with no vulnerabilities found. Finally, with the core software dead, it's not as likely to be a target for further attempts by people to find vulnerabilities, is it?

As for various other options for handling uploads in other software like SMF or MediaWiki, they're generally not set up properly to handle large uploads without a great deal of stress to the server. That requires proper support in the webserver software, which is why I use a custom build of Nginx with an added module for efficiently handling large uploads. That of course needs to be configured properly, as well as custom scripted (or at least adjusted from example code) within the core site script for handling uploads, which took me quite a while for the DFFD site. I don't have the time or desire to do that again for another system, so somebody else would need to. I also certainly don't have the time or desire to write a converter for the database info from the DFFD to whatever other system might be chosen, so that would definitely mean a fresh start.

[Nokao]

Ok, so situation is not that bad.

If the software is dead but you patched it, it's probably not under big risk because it's vulnerabilities are not "famous" and are probably fixed.
I also use Nginx in the same sever where I would have uploaded DFFD (because on that server I use http://owncloud.org/), so also this is not a big problem (but yes it must be properly configurated).

Last problem is about bandwidth, I wait for your feedback on that because my hosting make me pay a lot for it

[Sizik]

SOLUTION 1:
Who'se managing the domain http://dwarffortresswiki.org ? Is it Toady One owned+mantained ?

Everything DF-related have "an echo" inside http://dwarffortresswiki.org
So why not attaching files directly there ? It's easy, we could restrict big file upload for Mod-Creators and certain kind of users.

If it's owned+mantained by Toady One, I could offer my help to him as a web developer to make this transformation,
and make a yearly donation to him (paying the hosting) to support his increase of expenses because he'll upload many new files.

The wiki's maintained by lethosor, I believe.

The only sites owned/maintained by Toady are www.bay12games.com and www.bay12forums.com.

[Nokao]

It's funny to discover this things now

I got addicted to DF in 2012, with no precise idea of what's around this community,
but using everything of it (forum, DFFD, wiki, etc).

I made a long rehabit pause in 2014, and I'm back now to see what's new, and I find this topic

[Reelya]

Here's a fall back plan that is cheap: create torrents for all the files, make a search engine for that. DFFD lite. Seeding the torrents is something that doesn't need a huge amount of bandwidth, and is something other people can easily commit to helping with without paying $169/month. It's an idea that scales better with high usage too.

An idea used by some torrent sites, i.e, anime/manga torrent site bakabt, is giving bonus points for seeding rare/high demand material, They allow anonymous downloads, but if you register, there's a bonus points system for seeding the uncommon stuff.

Another nice idea would be an RSS feed. With that, people can subscribe to particular projects and when updated files are released they automatically start torrenting. The anime site shanaproject.com has a nice interface for that sort of thing.

[Nokao]

This is a better idea,
and as I wrote before it would also show that torrent is not only "pirated software".

I will do some research on torrent search engines, and for a free software to do that.

If we do that, I will still offer my servers as seeding server, but I will not be the only one, we will all contribute to the community by seeding files.