@MikeeUSA: Not trying to fear monger, or say the site is in imminent danger of collapse. Just rasing some alarm bells about the future of the site and some sad endings I see as entirely possible for it.
Regarding backups, I am not concerned about how the site is backed up, presumably there is some roboust setup for doing that as part of the server hosting arrangement.
My concern is more that something might 'go bump in the night' (eg. database corruption, configuration hiccup, disk or memory utilization maxes out, unpatched security vulnerability, etc. etc.) and there'll be no one around with the access, ability or time to fix it. Like any web site, OGA has suffered from these kind of errors in the past (you can think of the current issues with search as one of them). So far there's always been someone around to set the ship right again, but there's no guarantee that'll be the case in the future.
For certain, as with any large archive, finding what you're looking for on OGA does take a bit of work and dedication. However, it should be patently obvious that hiding works newer than January 2016 is in no way part of the intended design for the site.
About, further development, you're right the core of the site certainly works as needed (busted search aside). But if you browse these forums for a bit, you'll see that the list of ideas for little improvements, new features, etc. etc. is endless. Not saying it all needs to be done, but for sure there's always room for some work to be done. A good case in point is the new search engine bart was working on, development of which appears to have stalled indefinitely.
Finally, thanks for your dedication to the site! Considering the spectre I was raising of artists gradually losing interest in the site, it's great to hear so many speak up and express their commitment to the site!
Thursday, December 22, 2016 - 18:45
As far new development, I could see the case for putting a priority on re-tooling the main page.
But IMHO beyond a shadow of a doubt any and all work on the site right now should be focused on fixing, patching, adjusting, or otherwise kludging search so that it returns results newer than January 2016.
The is an absolutely core feature that needs to work properly and it is a serious disservice to everyone who has posted work in the last year, bordering on disgrace, that their work is ignored by searches.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - 15:09
@RainbowDesign: Sorry I didn't mean to imply that questions about the server arrangement or patreon money were inappropriate or somehow wrong for folks to raise here. You're right, given the subject of the thread, they're entirely reasonable discussion points to have brought up.
All the same, I'd still ask that discussion of the patreon money and server arrangement be moved to different thread. As you can imagine, they are huge topics for discussion in their own right, and as stated my main concern is how to get search fixed and how to transition the site away from it's heavy dependence on one person. I think it'll be all to easy to lose sight of these goals if we get caught up in a discussion of the patreon and server setups.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016 - 10:06
To borrow from the good poet, I don't think it's a matter that Bart loves OGA less, but rather that he loves his children and family more.
I don't think there's much point to discussing where the patreon money goes or how much the OGA brand might be worth in a sale. If folks want to discuss those issues can they please start a new thread and talk about them there?
For this thread, I'd like us to stay focused on:
How to fix search?
How to organize the OGA community so the site is not so entirely reliant on single person for fixes and foreard development?
Monday, December 19, 2016 - 09:53
@all:
It's great to see this thread come alive again! It just shows that there's still plenty of passion and excitement for the OGA project out there! The site is still seeing a very healthy number of new submissions (easily 20-30 a week) with many of very high quality, so I think from it's core objective of being a place to distribute and find good high quality open licensed art assets, the site is still very much alive. That said, it's clear from the comments above, especially some of the most recent ones, that there's a growing level of frustration at the lack of basic updates and site maintenance. I think we're fast approaching the point where that frustration will become toxic and the site's death spiral will begin in earnest.
For those new to the thread, we've been over quite a bit of this ground before (including 'where does the paetron money go'). You're encouraged the read through the earlier posts to catch up, but here's the TL;DR version:
1) The patreon money covers basic server and administration costs but is not nearly enough to fund any professional development activity even on a part-time basis. More money for the patreon is not likely to happen, and wringing a better deal out the server costs is unlikley to save enough to fund any professional development.
2) There is already a decent sized web of volunteer admins and power users on the site, some of whom have the kind of direct, low level access required to make feature improvements, bug fixes, etc. But this group is entirely volunteer and their activities are constrained both by their other time commitments (families, jobs, lives, etc.) and an understandable reluctance to make major changes to a site that has rightly been called 'Bart's Baby'.
3) Bart still loves his baby, but he's become very busy with alot of other stuff in his life recently (family, job, etc).
Regrading search, we've also covered a good bit of ground on what might or might not be the problem. The general gist of the thing seems to be that it is broken and it would take many hours of investigation to find and fix the problem. None of the admins with access to do this work are particularly interested in putting in that time for the double reason that they haven't got it and Bart was about half way through setting up a new search engine anyway (the solr stuff).
Considering the 'title' search workaround works, may I suggest the following 'low cost' solution:
1) Switch the main page search bar to using 'title' search
2) Add a 'Description' field to the advanced search page. This would search for entries based on words in the full description.
3) Remove the 'Search' field from the advanced search page. (in it's place would be the fields for 'Title' and 'Description' search)
4) Put a post up on the main page announcing and explaining these changes.
This would effectively bury the broken part of search. It's admittidly not a great solution as it just hides the problem and it's technically a step down in functionality since 'Search' evidently searches some kind of mass index of keywords from title, description, comments, etc. But...
It would get us back to a search that returned results newer than Feb. 2016.
It would generally work as advertised/expected (unlike the current state, where searching by title, tags, submitter, etc. returns current results but general search does not, a confusing point for anyone not versed in this thread).
It would not require wasting the time and effort to sort out the problem with a search engine that is likely (hopefully!) going to be replaced at some point anyway.
It should not require a great deal of new work (assuming 'Description' search can be implemented as easily as 'Title' search was, and if it can't, well Step 2 is optional anyways.)
Moving forward with the site, I suggest we/someone contact Bart and ask that he designate 2-3 of the current admins (any volunteers among them?) as mini-Barts who are explicitly allowed to make large changes and/or fixes as needed/desired on their own. The goal would be to distribute ownership of the site across a pool folks, so that OGA isn't so entirely dependent on Bart for forward movement. Of course, that group would have to be very carefully selected, and I know it's entirely possible none of the current admins would have the time to help even if given the full clearance to do so. But all the same, I think this (or something like it) is the necessary next step to take OGA from being 'Bart's Baby' to be being a true community run project that can survive and endure long past any of our involvement with it.
@RedShrike: Congratulations on getting your masters! Now you can truly say: "Now I am the Master!" :)
Saturday, December 17, 2016 - 09:10
> Once OGA goes away (and sadly it's just a matter of time)
Ah!! Don't say that! There's got to be something we can do! There are plenty of community run projects that have been around for years. OGA seems to have plenty of willing and able volunteers. It seems like it's just a matter of coordination, getting the right community members in the right roles.
Personally, I don't know much about Drupal, but have definitely been around a web site and database or two, and am not at all afraid to learn. And while I don't have gobs of free time, at this point I am more than willing to contribute what time I do have to help fix the search issue and get OGA back on more sound footing.
Friday, December 16, 2016 - 14:50
Still keeping the faith here, are we really going to pass the 1 year mark without even an announcement about the search issues?
I also just noticed that the chat logs stop at October 8, 2015. I guess it's been a bit since I joined the chat, but I usually like the look through the recent log before logging on just to see if I am jumping into the middle of discussion or there are any recent questions/comments I can address.
Monday, December 5, 2016 - 11:38
Yeah, like I was saying in the other thread, the title search was specifcally added as a work around for the main search being broken. I think the deal is the title search just looks at the title field which doesn't require any fancy indexing to stay updated. But the main search searches the text of several fields (description, comments, etc) and so in order to be remotely fast, it requires some kind of advanced routines to run and keep it's index/cache current. And something is either broken with those routines or with the thing that is supposed to make sure they get run. Well at least that's my speculation looking at the situation purely from the outside.
Monday, December 5, 2016 - 10:45
hmm... Yeah, I've usually seen it on search sites where you can do 'lpc+base' to get results that match both lpc AND base. But checking that just now it doesn't seem to work that way on OGA. No matter what you do, it always seems to do an OR search.
Well I'll add my voice to the cause and say I agree having some way to do an 'AND' search would be very useful. Of course, I'd prefer search got fixed to return results past Jan 2016 first.... :)
Sunday, December 4, 2016 - 18:32
Just want to say I agree with all SpiderDave's suggestions and foz's suggestion to put all competitions in their own sub section.
@MikeeUSA: Not trying to fear monger, or say the site is in imminent danger of collapse. Just rasing some alarm bells about the future of the site and some sad endings I see as entirely possible for it.
Regarding backups, I am not concerned about how the site is backed up, presumably there is some roboust setup for doing that as part of the server hosting arrangement.
My concern is more that something might 'go bump in the night' (eg. database corruption, configuration hiccup, disk or memory utilization maxes out, unpatched security vulnerability, etc. etc.) and there'll be no one around with the access, ability or time to fix it. Like any web site, OGA has suffered from these kind of errors in the past (you can think of the current issues with search as one of them). So far there's always been someone around to set the ship right again, but there's no guarantee that'll be the case in the future.
For certain, as with any large archive, finding what you're looking for on OGA does take a bit of work and dedication. However, it should be patently obvious that hiding works newer than January 2016 is in no way part of the intended design for the site.
About, further development, you're right the core of the site certainly works as needed (busted search aside). But if you browse these forums for a bit, you'll see that the list of ideas for little improvements, new features, etc. etc. is endless. Not saying it all needs to be done, but for sure there's always room for some work to be done. A good case in point is the new search engine bart was working on, development of which appears to have stalled indefinitely.
Finally, thanks for your dedication to the site! Considering the spectre I was raising of artists gradually losing interest in the site, it's great to hear so many speak up and express their commitment to the site!
As far new development, I could see the case for putting a priority on re-tooling the main page.
But IMHO beyond a shadow of a doubt any and all work on the site right now should be focused on fixing, patching, adjusting, or otherwise kludging search so that it returns results newer than January 2016.
The is an absolutely core feature that needs to work properly and it is a serious disservice to everyone who has posted work in the last year, bordering on disgrace, that their work is ignored by searches.
@RainbowDesign: Sorry I didn't mean to imply that questions about the server arrangement or patreon money were inappropriate or somehow wrong for folks to raise here. You're right, given the subject of the thread, they're entirely reasonable discussion points to have brought up.
All the same, I'd still ask that discussion of the patreon money and server arrangement be moved to different thread. As you can imagine, they are huge topics for discussion in their own right, and as stated my main concern is how to get search fixed and how to transition the site away from it's heavy dependence on one person. I think it'll be all to easy to lose sight of these goals if we get caught up in a discussion of the patreon and server setups.
To borrow from the good poet, I don't think it's a matter that Bart loves OGA less, but rather that he loves his children and family more.
I don't think there's much point to discussing where the patreon money goes or how much the OGA brand might be worth in a sale. If folks want to discuss those issues can they please start a new thread and talk about them there?
For this thread, I'd like us to stay focused on:
How to fix search?
How to organize the OGA community so the site is not so entirely reliant on single person for fixes and foreard development?
@all:
It's great to see this thread come alive again! It just shows that there's still plenty of passion and excitement for the OGA project out there! The site is still seeing a very healthy number of new submissions (easily 20-30 a week) with many of very high quality, so I think from it's core objective of being a place to distribute and find good high quality open licensed art assets, the site is still very much alive. That said, it's clear from the comments above, especially some of the most recent ones, that there's a growing level of frustration at the lack of basic updates and site maintenance. I think we're fast approaching the point where that frustration will become toxic and the site's death spiral will begin in earnest.
For those new to the thread, we've been over quite a bit of this ground before (including 'where does the paetron money go'). You're encouraged the read through the earlier posts to catch up, but here's the TL;DR version:
1) The patreon money covers basic server and administration costs but is not nearly enough to fund any professional development activity even on a part-time basis. More money for the patreon is not likely to happen, and wringing a better deal out the server costs is unlikley to save enough to fund any professional development.
2) There is already a decent sized web of volunteer admins and power users on the site, some of whom have the kind of direct, low level access required to make feature improvements, bug fixes, etc. But this group is entirely volunteer and their activities are constrained both by their other time commitments (families, jobs, lives, etc.) and an understandable reluctance to make major changes to a site that has rightly been called 'Bart's Baby'.
3) Bart still loves his baby, but he's become very busy with alot of other stuff in his life recently (family, job, etc).
Regrading search, we've also covered a good bit of ground on what might or might not be the problem. The general gist of the thing seems to be that it is broken and it would take many hours of investigation to find and fix the problem. None of the admins with access to do this work are particularly interested in putting in that time for the double reason that they haven't got it and Bart was about half way through setting up a new search engine anyway (the solr stuff).
Considering the 'title' search workaround works, may I suggest the following 'low cost' solution:
1) Switch the main page search bar to using 'title' search
2) Add a 'Description' field to the advanced search page. This would search for entries based on words in the full description.
3) Remove the 'Search' field from the advanced search page. (in it's place would be the fields for 'Title' and 'Description' search)
4) Put a post up on the main page announcing and explaining these changes.
This would effectively bury the broken part of search. It's admittidly not a great solution as it just hides the problem and it's technically a step down in functionality since 'Search' evidently searches some kind of mass index of keywords from title, description, comments, etc. But...
It would get us back to a search that returned results newer than Feb. 2016.
It would generally work as advertised/expected (unlike the current state, where searching by title, tags, submitter, etc. returns current results but general search does not, a confusing point for anyone not versed in this thread).
It would not require wasting the time and effort to sort out the problem with a search engine that is likely (hopefully!) going to be replaced at some point anyway.
It should not require a great deal of new work (assuming 'Description' search can be implemented as easily as 'Title' search was, and if it can't, well Step 2 is optional anyways.)
Moving forward with the site, I suggest we/someone contact Bart and ask that he designate 2-3 of the current admins (any volunteers among them?) as mini-Barts who are explicitly allowed to make large changes and/or fixes as needed/desired on their own. The goal would be to distribute ownership of the site across a pool folks, so that OGA isn't so entirely dependent on Bart for forward movement. Of course, that group would have to be very carefully selected, and I know it's entirely possible none of the current admins would have the time to help even if given the full clearance to do so. But all the same, I think this (or something like it) is the necessary next step to take OGA from being 'Bart's Baby' to be being a true community run project that can survive and endure long past any of our involvement with it.
@RedShrike: Congratulations on getting your masters! Now you can truly say: "Now I am the Master!" :)
> Once OGA goes away (and sadly it's just a matter of time)
Ah!! Don't say that! There's got to be something we can do! There are plenty of community run projects that have been around for years. OGA seems to have plenty of willing and able volunteers. It seems like it's just a matter of coordination, getting the right community members in the right roles.
Personally, I don't know much about Drupal, but have definitely been around a web site and database or two, and am not at all afraid to learn. And while I don't have gobs of free time, at this point I am more than willing to contribute what time I do have to help fix the search issue and get OGA back on more sound footing.
Still keeping the faith here, are we really going to pass the 1 year mark without even an announcement about the search issues?
I also just noticed that the chat logs stop at October 8, 2015. I guess it's been a bit since I joined the chat, but I usually like the look through the recent log before logging on just to see if I am jumping into the middle of discussion or there are any recent questions/comments I can address.
Yeah, like I was saying in the other thread, the title search was specifcally added as a work around for the main search being broken. I think the deal is the title search just looks at the title field which doesn't require any fancy indexing to stay updated. But the main search searches the text of several fields (description, comments, etc) and so in order to be remotely fast, it requires some kind of advanced routines to run and keep it's index/cache current. And something is either broken with those routines or with the thing that is supposed to make sure they get run. Well at least that's my speculation looking at the situation purely from the outside.
hmm... Yeah, I've usually seen it on search sites where you can do 'lpc+base' to get results that match both lpc AND base. But checking that just now it doesn't seem to work that way on OGA. No matter what you do, it always seems to do an OR search.
Well I'll add my voice to the cause and say I agree having some way to do an 'AND' search would be very useful. Of course, I'd prefer search got fixed to return results past Jan 2016 first.... :)
Just want to say I agree with all SpiderDave's suggestions and foz's suggestion to put all competitions in their own sub section.
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