Poll Calguns Data Migration Round 2 - Aug 3

[ugimports]

Nah, I don’t think so. Kestryll can just go back to cloud and spin up DNS. It should take 5 minutes to do and gradually roll out. I don’t know why he hasn’t done that.

the only reason he said he was moving was the traffic was becoming cost prohibitive.. if the traffic starts dropping maybe that won't be an issue..

in the Facebook group others have offered to help, including 1 member that offered to fly folks out to help if needed...i don't think he even got an acknowledgement of "appreciate it, but we're good".

I don't know Kes personally, but it doesn't appear he wants to ask for help from members. Many (including you it seems) have offered to help for free.

 

[ikeo1]

the only reason he said he was moving was the traffic was becoming cost prohibitive.. if the traffic starts dropping maybe that won't be an issue..

in the Facebook group others have offered to help, including 1 member that offered to fly folks out to help if needed...i don't think he even got an acknowledgement of "appreciate it, but we're good".

I don't know Kes personally, but it doesn't appear he wants to ask for help from members. Many (including you it seems) have offered to help for free.

Yes, its true. He was on the enterprise plan.. He also doesn't know what he's doing. I tried to offer consulting tips countless times, on reddit & calguns in posts and DM's. When cloud came online, I let him know specifically bandwidth cost would be an issue because he raised the file size limit to 6MB x 5 images per post x # of users. That was a big problem for me in the beginning too. It's why we have multiple limits when it comes to images. The marketplace listings is what drove up the cost and will continue to do so unless he addresses the actual problem.

https://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbulletin-cloud $60/mo it doubled probably more than 1Tb so lets say $300/mo

New plan is likely the 64GB $169/mo

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If you look at this plan. It looks good on paper, he looks at it as though 55GB database + attachments which should be enough. Everything will fit in the db, but that's not the problem. The problem is the 1 Gbps unmetered bandwidth restriction. As soon as there's volume on on the line again, it won't even need to be a lot, the site will get slow because of the image sizes, lack of caching, and direct pulls from the server. He needs to be on 10 gbps and also optimize the webserver & database server to handle the number of connections. Otherwise, same problem as before.

It's not really his fault. Things have changed a lot when it comes to hosting. It's not as simple as it was back in the day and scaling a site is more technical these days.

My $0.02c

P.S. Thanks for signing up. You helped me out awhile ago during covid.

 

[lostinsd82]

Yes, its true. He was on the enterprise plan.. He also doesn't know what he's doing. I tried to offer consulting tips countless times, on reddit & calguns in posts and DM's. When cloud came online, I let him know specifically bandwidth cost would be an issue because he raised the file size limit to 6MB x 5 images per post x # of users. That was a big problem for me in the beginning too. It's why we have multiple limits when it comes to images. The marketplace listings is what drove up the cost and will continue to do so unless he addresses the actual problem.

https://www.vbulletin.com/en/vbulletin-cloud $60/mo it doubled probably more than 1Tb so lets say $300/mo

New plan is likely the 64GB $169/mo

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If you look at this plan. It looks good on paper, he looks at it as though 55GB database + attachments which should be enough. Everything will fit in the db, but that's not the problem. The problem is the 1 Gbps unmetered bandwidth restriction. As soon as there's volume on on the line again, it won't even need to be a lot, the site will get slow because of the image sizes, lack of caching, and direct pulls from the server. He needs to be on 10 gbps and also optimize the webserver & database server to handle the number of connections. Otherwise, same problem as before.

It's not really his fault. Things have changed a lot when it comes to hosting. It's not as simple as it was back in the day and scaling a site is more technical these days.

My $0.02c

P.S. Thanks for signing up. You helped me out awhile ago during covid.

its puzzling to me why he continues to do this since ultimately it just hurts the community and wastes resources - namely money, unecessarily especially when there is help out there. It's unfortunate that the largest community site for 2A in CA is being run in a silo.

 

[ikeo1]

its puzzling to me why he continues to do this since ultimately it just hurts the community and wastes resources - namely money, unecessarily especially when there is help out there. It's unfortunate that the largest community site for 2A in CA is being run in a silo.

My guess is the issue he's running into right now is the database is configured for cloud service. The cloud service has several different mapped urls for different services. When he went back to a dedicated server, the mappings are all over the place and he's not able to find the right entries to set the base urls along with the other attachments. Hence, kinda stuck and needed to show the debug info to see where everything is at. The directory structure itself looks like its configured properly, so its likely that there's some smaller settings he's not aware of that's he can't find to get certain pages to render properly. Instead it shows blank hence, he can't get out of maintenance.

You can tell because some of the images show up and others when you log in don't. From what I can tell from lookin at the site, there's a problem finding the ./core/ directory. Really though, he should go ahead and pay for the site on vbulletin. Then nuke uploading images. Then ask the community to remove images. Then again, that might also be a problem if the configuration is pointing to the wrong directories.

 

[lostinsd82]

My guess is the issue he's running into right now is the database is configured for cloud service. The cloud service has several different mapped urls for different services. When he went back to a dedicated server, the mappings are all over the place and he's not able to find the right entries to set the base urls along with the other attachments. Hence, kinda stuck and needed to show the debug info to see where everything is at. The directory structure itself looks like its configured properly, so its likely that there's some smaller settings he's not aware of that's he can't find to get certain pages to render properly. Instead it shows blank hence, he can't get out of maintenance.

You can tell because some of the images show up and others when you log in don't. From what I can tell from lookin at the site, there's a problem finding the ./core/ directory. Really though, he should go ahead and pay for the site on vbulletin. Then nuke uploading images. Then ask the community to remove images. Then again, that might also be a problem if the configuration is pointing to the wrong directories.

It might seem mildly insane, but he could just start with a fresh database, a lot of the stuff on the old site was outdated or irrelevant anyway
I agree the way bandwith costs are metered and measured can make running large sites both expensive and cumbersome. When I lost my old login to the last upgrade and itrader, I kind of stopped caring. I'll admit as a younger guy I stayed away from most of the discussion forums and spent a lot of time in the marketplace (my poor wallet).

Either way, I hope he gets something going soon even if he has to fall on the preverbial sword and ask/get help. Since I have no idea what kind of (if any) revenue the site generated from ads - it kind of just makes me think that the revenue got diverted elsewhere - much like the homeowner who doesn't save for the roof replacement they'll inevtiably need.

 

[ikeo1]

It might seem mildly insane, but he could just start with a fresh database

There's no reason to do that. If i could get my hands on the database, i'm pretty sure I could recover the data. He and the community is better off just going back to cloud until he can figure out another way.

 

[lostinsd82]

There's no reason to do that. If i could get my hands on the database, i'm pretty sure I could recover the data. He and the community is better off just going back to cloud until he can figure out another way.

the he should do the right thing and ask for the help (or take it since it seems to have been offered). If CalGuns was a real business and their website was down this long, the sheer amount of financial loss incurred would likely put them out of business. Extended downtime is helping nobody.

 

[treelogger]

... $60/mo it doubled probably ... so lets say $300/mo
... likely the 64GB $169/mo

So let's say for grins that calguns.net spends $3600 per year. And because I'm a pessimist, I'll assume your estimates are off by a factor of 3, and it really is $10K per year.

For comparison: The annual revenue of the Calguns Foundation ranges between $200K and $400K per year. The annual revenue of the FPC has grown from about $1M to about $5M per year in the last ~5 years. Matter-of-fact, the executive compensation of the FPC alone is over $200K in the most recent tax filing that is easy to find online.

So we are really arguing over several thousand $ per year to keep the Calguns forum alive? That seems silly by comparison. Or are my numbers wrong?

 

[ikeo1]

So we are really arguing over several thousand $ per year to keep the Calguns forum alive? That seems silly by comparison. Or are my numbers wrong?

If anything I’m off a little bit you should have me covered by the 3x figure and yes that sounds about right. The license for vbulletin is $179 which he’s refusing to switch to something else better. The cloud migration was ~$500-$1k.

In the past they used some funds to organize events, I think that stopped completely around Covid.

 

[treelogger]

A few years ago, a little bird told me that the total advertising revenue for the Calguns.net forum was in the low 6 digits (first digit was 1). That number seemed to make sense, as there are probably 50-100 companies advertising there, and each is happy to drop a Benjamin or two per month to get exposure. It also made sense as being comparable what other operatives in the 2A space get paid: it's much smaller than Brandon's salary, and let's not even start on the Gottliebs' or Pratts' haul. Now hearing that the expenses are a tiny fraction of that number, I'm sort of questioning whether that advertising revenue number is in the ballpark. If it is, then understanding what's happening with the software upgrade becomes difficult.

 

[H. Bowman]

You guys do know that Calguns Foundation and Calguns the website are two different things, right? The money that CGF and FPC bring in has zero to do with the website Calguns.

 

[treelogger]

Yes, I'm very aware of that. Matter-of-fact, I was a Calguns.net member when a small set of users there (for example Gene, Ben, Bill, Kevin (!), Brett, Paul ...) founded the CGF, and I was there when the FPC under Brandon split off from that. Interestingly, while kestryll was a board member of the CGF since inception, he used to complain that he has not been invited to a board meeting in many years, so the split between CGF and CGN seems to run deep. I just used the financial "sizes" of FPC and CGF as a comparison to the Calguns discussion forum. By the way, the CGF or Calguns Foundation has in the meantime changed its name again (I think it is California Gun Rights Foundation).

 

[ikeo1]

You guys do know that Calguns Foundation and Calguns the website are two different things, right?

Yes. I can say that there was significant advertising on Calguns and also a significant amount of $ contributors both annual/semi-annual and lifetime.

So there was a good amount of revenue with a user base that large. My question from when I started this was where did all that monthly revenue go? The website hasn’t updated since 2013, vbulletin 3.8.11 We’re in 2024. The software license is again $179, that they paid for in 2019. The dedicated server they were on I saw last time was $99/mo which was why it was a crappy experience from the 2021 migration when Geovar closed and they went to a discount service provider prior to cloud service. As much as everyone cares about calguns the owner doesn’t hold its user base to the same level. If he did, we’d all get regular updates.

By the way, the CGF or Calguns Foundation has in the meantime changed its name again (I think it is California Gun Rights Foundation).

I was wondering why that group seemed to disappear with activities.

 

[H. Bowman]

I don't know why the number sticks out in my head, but I think that annual vendor memberships/ads were only $600/year, and I have no idea how many there were but if there were a hundred, that's significantly less than the numbers being talked about above.

It still should be enough to run and manage a website, and it's unfortunate that updates and improvements were not made along the way. Kestryll has a full time job also, the website is not his main source of income, and I image it's a pretty significant time commitment. He's mentioned several times that he screwed up and tried to do it the lazy way, and that in the last couple of years there have been significant family emergencies which took up time that was supposed to be devoted to fixing CG. Stuff happens and people don't put money aside for future planning (the roofing analogy used above is good).

I don't know why he wouldn't accept the offers of help from folks here who know what they're doing, that's the confusing part to me. The money side of it (or lack thereof) makes sense to me, but not asking for help.

 

[lostinsd82]

my understanding is most of the offered help has been offered no cost, so its a no brainer

 

[ikeo1]

I don't know why the number sticks out in my head, but I think that annual vendor memberships/ads were only $600/year, and I have no idea how many there were but if there were a hundred

I really do appreciate your loyalty, but let’s do some basic math. $600/year for BOTH ads and memberships.

For easy numbers. The contributors plan was $20 per 6 month $30 per year $300 lifetime.

Let’s just say at $20/6 mo 1 person contributed to $40/year. That takes 15 people at its lowest plan to hit $600/year not including ads. The number of registered users was ~374,000.

The number of ads were also about 8 spots at the top of each page. The number of impressions was 1 million in June on cloud. Typically an advertiser would pay on the low end $1-2 per 100k x 8 advertisers per month.

In full transparency, just the ad at the top and sidebar pulls $100/mo, not including memberships. This site with all the licenses and add-ons is well over $2k to startup, not including cloud costs. Most of what I get I reinvest into features that were missing. The search feature alone cost $500 plus another server to run for indexing. The classifieds and feedback system cost an annual fee as well. Calguns was fixed at $179 no add-ons.

Thanks to contributors I’m able to break even with the support and offer this for free. Otherwise I wouldn’t support a losing endeavor and also why I offered to help for free the first time around, it was easier to help. Now that I’m somewhat committed. I’m building out this site.

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I’m trying to level with some of you as someone who’s done thing for the last 20 years in the space. Typically I work for big companies, so I have some knowledge in both advertising and tech.

 

[Chupacabra]

I don't know why he wouldn't accept the offers of help from folks here who know what they're doing, that's the confusing part to me. The money side of it (or lack thereof) makes sense to me, but not asking for help.

my understanding is most of the offered help has been offered no cost, so its a no brainer

It's because he's a stubborn. The worst enemy of TOS is the janitor.
CAguns.net is the future.

 

[Warpspeed]

I think we can all just stop trying to use any logic at all to explain / figure out what or why.

At some point we all just throw up our hands and ask for help a it would have been 20 minutes in for me TBH. No one goes 2 weeks banging their head against the wall on an IT thing over ego or pride.

 

[dickasauraswreks]

I'm part of another forum run by oneish guy and they ask for a 1% dono whenever somebody sells something through the forum. Might be an option here or for calguns as well?

 

[ikeo1]

I'm part of another forum run by oneish guy and they ask for a 1% dono whenever somebody sells something through the forum. Might be an option here or for calguns as well?

It's ok. We only provide the website and advertising space. Anything else is up to the person. It keeps a clear separation that we're not involved in any of the transactions. If you want to donate, you can by clicking on the Donate button in the private messages or at the top CAguns.net banner.

Once we get going and our traffic warrants it, bigger 2A companies will want to advertise here. California is a strong market. We'll provide extras for members who support the site both financially and via content. So we can start to build an ecosystem. There may be some changes in the future when it comes to this, but we'll let people know in advance for some input.

Then plans for more community get togethers.