IMPORTANT: Future of the site, and what will happen going forward

So as those of us left know, there's been some problems with the site lately. The site has always had problems but the issues are compounding due to lack of maintenance.

- Russian bot attacks that we can't stop (due to inability to update and upgrade the site)
- Nobody to maintain, develop and to upgrade the site.
- Due to locking down registration, inability to recruit new members and for existing members to make new accounts
- etc etc...

The site went down a few weeks ago due to a botched attempt at installing captcha to the site (in order to stem the russian bots). I was unsuccessfully, attempted a rollback, then left the country and the site went kaput almost immediately. Toawa was able to bring it back up, but had to figure out that it was the botched captcha library causing problems. This serves to highlight the fact that without proper support/knowledge/effort, it is not possible to half-ass install/upgrade danbooru without things going tits up. This site is so delicate that any changes done can potentially bring it down. If Toawa didn't fix the server, it would still be down.

This bring me to my point: Unfortunately, neither of us really have the time anymore to maintain the website. (using "maintain" lightly since we barely touch the server as is) Toawa has mentioned that he will be stepping down as admin and IT, and this leaves a gaping hole in the maintainability of our site. Without him, this site would've been dead a decade ago, so @Toawa thanks for putting up with us for this long!

As for myself: I just don't have the time anymore. The site is not expensive to maintain, but it does consume one thing I don't have anymore: time.

So it's a difficult but straight forward decision, but I'm officially putting OYP up for adoption. For anybody that wants to run it. This also means you will be taking over the whole domain, including paying for hosting and domain registration costs.

You get access to the db, all of our pictures and whatever shitty version of Danbooru we have, and the domain. This site, with thousands of translations and stories and more pictures. I wish it could stay up forever, but alas.

You can attempt to upgrade it if you wish, and do whatever Toawa and I weren't able to do with the site: which is upgrade the damn thing without shit breaking. If you have concerns with privacy, please voice them here and I will attempt to answer them to the best of my knowledge.

If nobody steps up, I will officially shutter the site at the end of the year, if it stays up for that long without breaking.

Thank you all for your contribution, but alas, my time with yukkuris is ending.

Just to clarify: This site is accessible from two domains, yukkuri.shii.org and oyp.yunyah.com. Poweryoga controls yukkuri.shii.org, and I control oyp.yunyah.com. Poweryoga would be handing over yukkuri.shii.org. Yunyah.com is my own personal domain which I use for other things, and just had a subdomain pointing to OYP. I'm happy to keep it pointing to the site if it stays up, but I will not be handing it over if we do find someone to take over the site.

And I'd like to say that it's been a great time, though to be honest I all but checked out a year ago, and I'd like to apologize for not giving the site the attention it deserved over the last year. But after it went down for two weeks, and I didn't even notice, I knew it was time that I made my leaving official.

...

O, Sanaeaki, where art thou? ;)

Thank you for your work these past years.
Words cannot really express it, so all I'm going to say is: ゆっくりしていってね!

----

Getting down to the business of keeping this place alive, how expensive is it really? An estimate is fine if the cost fluctuates.
If we know the value it'd probably be easier for people to figure out if they can maintain it economically.

As for me, I can definitely help at least with the more technical side (i.e. dealing with the software.)

By the way, what will happen to the google group?

Again, thank you and ゆっくりしていってね!

This site helped me through the darkest period of my life. You've no idea how grateful I am and I'll be.
@Poweryoga and Toawa, thank you for everything.
Between the old merging, the stories, the art chat, dealing with trolls etc. you've both done way more than any of us could ever do.

Giving some pictures are available only here, do you have a sort of megafolder to download them all or must it be done manually?

Until December please don't run away...

The fanfic site (google groups) will stay up indefinitely. Up until whenever google decides to randomly kill it with little advanced notice.

Wait WHAT.

Well shit.

Big thank you to @poweryoga, @Toawa and everyone else (shii?) who's worked on this site behind the scenes for the seven years I've been here. It's been a good run. I'll have to go backup my DMs and hope someone throws a backup of the non-private stuff somewhere I can grab it.

I really, really really wish I could help, but while I do know my way around Linux, I'm strictly a user, and the only developer-person I could drag to the table doesn't do web stuff (can code, but not admin, and never even used Ruby or SQL before). I could contribute to a Patreon or shove shit off my schedule to do janitor/moderator stuff for a few hours a week if that's what was in demand, but any old nineball could do that.

poweryoga said:

The fanfic site (google groups) will stay up indefinitely. Up until whenever google decides to randomly kill it with little advanced notice.

I was referring to how posts there require to be approved before they are visible.
Even though it definitely requires less time to handle it than the main site (it's not really that active...), I was wondering if you were to hand that over too or if you were to keep managing it.

Ow noo!! This site is the reason why I draw yugyaku stuffs. I really wish i could help but i don't know squat about running a website.

I can spare some money if we need it for hosting, maybe we can do a crowdfunding on that?

EasyV said:

I was referring to how posts there require to be approved before they are visible.
Even though it definitely requires less time to handle it than the main site (it's not really that active...), I was wondering if you were to hand that over too or if you were to keep managing it.

That'll still be there since otherwise spam bots post shit all over the place. Is there an issue with posts not showing up? (like it expires or something and your post disappears into the nethers) From what I can see, it all shows up sooner or later despite me not manually going in and approving stuff.

Ieneko-Sasha said:

Ow noo!! This site is the reason why I draw yugyaku stuffs. I really wish i could help but i don't know squat about running a website.

I can spare some money if we need it for hosting, maybe we can do a crowdfunding on that?

The problem with the site is not the money: It's not actually that expensive to run. A quick glance at the invoice tells me the site is around $30-50 on a monthly basis. (even with the russian bot attacks which ate up a bit of bandwidth) This can be paid for by bringing my own lunch to work instead of eating out for a week.

The problem with OYP is the maintainability. If the site goes down, you need to SSH in, figure out what's wrong, and restart the server or fix the problem. None of this is actually a problem: I jump in when the site hiccups occasionally and Toawa fixed the hard stuff. The most difficult part is maintaining and upgrading the site.

Here's a few of the problems we have:

1) Site is still running in test mode. This disables a lot of features and logs a ton of messages in the logs so it's slow and eats up storage space.
2) PSQL has some problems with the indexes. (needs a restart every so often). This is why you see account timeouts when you try to look at your profile.
3) The load balancer on the site is manually configured and actually was broken back when we were on Dreamhost: Toawa setup all this black magic. I have no idea how any of it works and I just pray the script he wrote functions when I try to restart stuff.
4) The VM is running on an old version of centOS (I think) and hasn't been upgraded in a long while. This means security issues, incompatibility, etc.
5) Can't upgrade due to all of the above.
6) Don't know ruby, don't have any intention to learn it. The whole entire web frontend is built on it, and while I can update a few small things (ruby is easy to read), writing and fixing modules is beyond something I care about.
7) Danbooru is kind of a crap repo. It's difficult to upgrade and has zero documentation. Major revisions usually breaks a lot of stuff. This is why most people don't use danbooru, and use something better.
8) etc

All of this means that you need a dedicated resource for whom this is either your day to day job (so you're good at it), or that you have time and want to learn web front end, ruby, sql, linux server admin stuff (writing cron jobs, managing apache, figure out web + server logs, upgrade linux and fix incompatible components, etc). And ideally you'd have 1 person that has enough time to do all this, or multiple people who can all do parts of this.

I can do a good majority of this: and I'm technical enough that given enough time I can even become competent at it. But it's not something I care about career wise nor something I wish to pursue as a hobby.

Which leaves us to our current situation. I no longer have time to maintain and update this website in a responsible manner. The decision was a long time coming but the recent downtime really illustrated how little I can actually do in case something fucks up. The site's a ticking timebomb and it won't be fair for anybody if OYP goes down with no advanced notice.

Crowfunding wont work because it will depend on the charity or willingness of people, and sadly Yukkuris as a fan-thingie is all but a thing of past times. In fact, i think im one of the few from the old guard still around.

However, Im grateful on the manjuus because i got to met a lot of wonderful people and had a blast in the years i was active.

I would be interested into mantaining this site, but just as an archive, however i would like to know the traffic stats and that sorta thing to see how to use my budget.

danogoat said:

Crowfunding wont work because it will depend on the charity or willingness of people, and sadly Yukkuris as a fan-thingie is all but a thing of past times. In fact, i think im one of the few from the old guard still around.

However, Im grateful on the manjuus because i got to met a lot of wonderful people and had a blast in the years i was active.

I would be interested into mantaining this site, but just as an archive, however i would like to know the traffic stats and that sorta thing to see how to use my budget.

Jeeee dosu is too fast...

poweryoga said:

All of this means that you need a dedicated resource for whom this is either your day to day job (so you're good at it), or that you have time and want to learn web front end, ruby, sql, linux server admin stuff (writing cron jobs, managing apache, figure out web + server logs, upgrade linux and fix incompatible components, etc). And ideally you'd have 1 person that has enough time to do all this, or multiple people who can all do parts of this.

I'd love to learn how to run a web server, but I wouldn't even know where to start. And I'm probably not clever enough for it. Certainly not clever enough to figure it out in three months...

danogoat said:

However, Im grateful on the manjuus because i got to met a lot of wonderful people and had a blast in the years i was active.

^ what he said. I'm still boggled at the awesome community that formed around this crazy niche, and sad to see it go.

Still here, after easily more than a decade. I just want to say.. thank you, everyone.I shall be here until the end, and beyond, if need be.

Yunyahhhh!

I wonder if our japanese friends know about the news. Should we make an image post to update them?

We should.

Just done it with mspaint LOL.
Sorry for being so skilled!

Btw is there any alternative abyuse site where we can share yugyaku works?
Maybe we should make a pixiv group so we can keep in touch after this site is closed?

Sad :^(

Ive only been around for a year or so but I'm gonna miss this site if it goes.

Ieneko-Sasha said:

Maybe we should make a pixiv group so we can keep in touch after this site is closed?

We have a Discord channel.

Also, Poweryoga, I'll take up the financial burden, but I have no idea how to actually operate this site. xD