Well, I'm nicely enough removed from the situation that I really don't much care when people bitch about TS2. I know most people are positive about it, and as long as that's the case, I'll keep maintaining it. I don't get anything montary or otherwise out of it - there's no banners or anything for it, but as long as people like it, I'll keep putting in the little bit of effort to keep it around. Anyone who's negative about it can go f*** themselves, I really don't much care what they think.


I've been putting out free software on the net basically my whole life, so I'm pretty used to how people want stuff on a silver platter. You have to just draw a line and say "look, this is free, I'm sorry it doesn't work for your strange system config, there's really no way I have the time or energy to track down that last 1%." I do my best, but it's just not worth it to find the last 1% when there's no major upside. =/

And, oh yeah, the box TS2 was on got compromised somehow, and was found to be sending out massive quantities of spam this weekend. We think there'd actually been something dormant on there for a while, because it had been questionable for the last couple months, but we hadn't been able to find any proof. Finally we caught an obscure process sending out massive amounts of data late at night.


My housemate is busy reformatting the box today, but we should be able to save the little bit of DB data that was on there (I'm hoping he remembers to save the data before he nukes it) and have it back up later tonight.


Sometimes I think TS2 is cursed.

Old DB data doesn't matter anyway. IMO TS2 should reflect the current state of the game, and the current users of TS2.


Was a drag to see my old old toons disappear though

 

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Thanks

Okay, I'm hoping it's now working. I put it up on our backup server here. We can now reformat the other box and then probably migrate the data back over to there with ~5 mins of downtime sometime later this week.

Just to clarify: I don't want anything on a silver platter, the TreeStats client installed and ran perfectly on my superb computer.


What I'm bitching about is the FACT that the TreeStats site has been down a very high percentage of the time over the past few years. And now we find the data's been wiped.


I don't give a hoot in hell if it's free or not, if you're going to provide a database service it is of the UTMOST importance to:


1) Secure the data.


and


2) Keep the server UP so that clients can use it.


Don't give me this violin music about it being provided for free. That's an old story. Anyone who provides a service, free or not, is still responsible for meeting the clients' expectations.


Now step off.

 

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Wish there was a way for all the current decal plugin developers, or even the decal developers themselves to ban certain morons from using their plugins or decal. Sure would shut up the 2 year olds who don't have common sense or decency to know the difference between right and wrong.

 

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Chazcon: there is NO obligation by any developer to provide anything to anyone. When hosting your own sties and information, people do the best they can, but can't guarentee anything. I've been victim to that myself on many occasions. I used to host all my stuff off my own server until the motherboard died. I was low on cash and I had a few people donate to me to get a new motherboard to replace in the server. I replaced it and ran it off my personal server again, but decided to look for some cheap hosting instead with some of the extra donations I received. I found one and used it for about a year but their service kept going down all the time. I had no control over that, just as Akilla didn't have much control over what his hosted server did. I finally found a nice stable host with minimal downtime. Akilla went back to using his own box.


This still doesn't change the facts that he owes you or anyone else anything. In my opinion, it is you and every other plugin user that owe him and the other developers something. Mainly respect for their time and effort and his pretty good service over the last 6 years to keep treestats going even though he hasn't played in at last 3 years. You want to talk about someone owing something, it is the users of plugins who owe the developers their gratitude for their plugins.

That's exactly my point.


The devs who put out freeware think the users owe them something.


The users who use the freeware think the devs owe them something.


Nobody is immune to this aspect of human nature.


Whether it's freeware or paid-for software, is beside the point.

 

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Chazcon:


What I'm referring to is your previous post...


==================================

What I'm bitching about is the FACT that the TreeStats site has been down a very high percentage of the time over the past few years. And now we find the data's been wiped.


I don't give a hoot in hell if it's free or not, if you're going to provide a database service it is of the UTMOST importance to:


1) Secure the data.


and


2) Keep the server UP so that clients can use it.


Don't give me this violin music about it being provided for free. That's an old story. Anyone who provides a service, free or not, is still responsible for meeting the clients' expectations.


Now step off.

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He's not "responsible" for meeting anyone's expectations if he doesn't want to. He doesn't have to keep the servers up if he doesn't want to. He doesn't have to secure the data if he doesn't want to. And finally, all of the stuff you've pointed out that he has to do was completely beyond his control. The host disappeared off the face of the earth. He had NO way of getting TO the data to get it secured. He had no control over the server being up or not. That's my point.