On Securing NesDev's Forum/Wiki Future...

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InZa
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Joined: Tue May 31, 2022 6:02 am

On Securing NesDev's Forum/Wiki Future...

Post by InZa »

Hi all,
I'm a Python programmer and one of my programming dreams is to some day create a console emulator. I have an interest in NES emulation but the entry-barrier seems impenetrable. So maybe one day...

I was recently having a discussion with a friend of mine and he was telling me that one of his biggest fears was if something happened to "NesDev". He told me there is a 10+ years wealth of knowledge on the forums, not to mention the wiki...

So on to the topic of this thread:

Have the NesDev website Admins backed up the forum/wiki? If so, how large is the forum backup? Could it be made available for download? This site is so valuable to the community that I hope there isn't a single point of failure....

===========================================
Basically, this website needs distributed hosting:
https://ipfs.io
https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
===========================================

If a disaster were to happen in the area of the NesDev server that damaged the server then this would be traggic.

Secure NesDev's future!
JRoatch
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Re: On Securing NesDev's Forum/Wiki Future...

Post by JRoatch »

Note: I'm not a part of the forum staff

Well we did recently go through year long scare for losing the forum outright. Scrapes, Backups, Sever and Admin team changes, all did occur. You might still see the scraping part of that whole affair at https://archive.nes.science/

But as someone who dabbled in both PhpBB fourm maintenance and IPFS, I would say that it isn't the best solution for safekeeping forums. Because like BitTorrent there must be users online using the IPFS software to keep the data set alive. There's also hurdle of converting the SQL database to a plain filesystem (and visa versa) without also disclosing sensitive details like user account information.
Fiskbit
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Re: On Securing NesDev's Forum/Wiki Future...

Post by Fiskbit »

Indeed, we had a six month period last year where the forums started randomly deleting users, so the old admin disabled the forums and didn't fix them. We put a lot of work into scraping posts using moderator accounts that could still access them, though we eventually got access to the server and were able to use the database and some backups (which were few and far between) to restore things as best we could.

The site's under new management now and we have regular backups, so this sort of problem should be a thing of the past. I'm certainly interested in offline versions of these resources and there used to be an offline version of the wiki available for download, but that's always been a manual process done occasionally. We've talked about bringing this back, but it's not been high on our list of priorities. (Top item right now: getting registration back for the wiki with sufficient spam mitigations. Spam has been a major problem on both the forums and wiki for years. We've solved it on the forums from a user's perspective, though I'm still deleting spam accounts and blocking spam posts more than I'd like.)

Since the site moved to nesdev.org, brizzo's been handling the tech stuff and has gotten us into a pretty good spot!
InZa
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue May 31, 2022 6:02 am

Re: On Securing NesDev's Forum/Wiki Future...

Post by InZa »

How odd...I wasn't even aware that the site had recently been down. Glad everything is kosher again! 8-)
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Dwedit
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Re: On Securing NesDev's Forum/Wiki Future...

Post by Dwedit »

Here come the fortune cookies! Here come the fortune cookies! They're wearing paper hats!
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