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Forums where down for 4 hours...

As far as I could be clued in it’s traffic.

I don’t mean to point out the elephant in the room director and whatnot, but we’ve gone down a couple times recently during higher traffic times and I think it’s unlikely we can stay up in a defcon 2 or 1 situation as it currently stands
 
intel-bank said:
As far as I could be clued in it’s traffic.

I don’t mean to point out the elephant in the room director and whatnot, but we’ve gone down a couple times recently during higher traffic times and I think it’s unlikely we can stay up in a defcon 2 or 1 situation as it currently stands
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This was the longest out of my two decades on these forums has it been down without a formal notice for maintenance. 4 hours... and with everything going on that was rather not cool.
 
intel-bank said:
I don’t mean to point out the elephant in the room director and whatnot, but we’ve gone down a couple times recently during higher traffic times and I think it’s unlikely we can stay up in a defcon 2 or 1 situation as it currently stands
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You're right. But we don't have the funds for the necessary infrastructure for the kind of traffic we might get.
 
DEFCON Warning System said:
You're right. But we don't have the funds for the necessary infrastructure for the kind of traffic we might get.
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That’s gotta change. Let’s all begin putting our heads together to figure out fundraising. I know we all prefer remaining in the shadows, but we may have to become less subtle. Like, going through neighborhoods and putting a DEFCON warning system card in everyone’s mailbox (1,000 homes or more) would create potentially national buzz. Just silly stuff like that.

One Issue is awareness. 99% of the general public doesn’t know what a DEFCON level is, let alone seek out a forum for it. The community here represents 0.0000001% of the human population.
 
Spyglass said:
That’s gotta change. Let’s all begin putting our heads together to figure out fundraising.
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A lot of it is visibility. YouTube doesn't share our videos. Our articles go unread. If we had more people coming to our site, visiting our forums, and watching our YouTube videos, the money would come in.

Sadly, self-promotion is not my forte.
 
intel-bank said:
As far as I could be clued in it’s traffic.

I don’t mean to point out the elephant in the room director and whatnot, but we’ve gone down a couple times recently during higher traffic times and I think it’s unlikely we can stay up in a defcon 2 or 1 situation as it currently stands
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This is a very good point, and it immediately occurred to me too when I saw the forums go down yesterday.
 
Only thing this site has going for it is its venerable age. In terms of content - it doesn't really have an edge over what can easily be found via some intelligent googling (although I will add that the recent analyses posted by the staff are of surprisingly high quality), and the forums are your usual mix of real news, fake news, smart opinions and dumb opinions. There are professional OSINT sites out there that are light years ahead of DWS (*cough* Rochan *cough*) - but they charge for their services.

If you ever end up advertising, my suggestion would be to add a "founded in" banner to your logo. :P
 
We can take this offline/private conversation if needs be. However, what kind of investment is necessary to acquire the infrastructure to support anticipated DEFCON 2 or 1 traffic? (Though I suspect the infrastructure required to support DEFCON 1 traffic will not be needed for a significant period of time, assuming anyone paying attention really has the time or desire to log on to the internet in a DEFCON 1 situation.)

As far as fundraising ideas, what if members created relevant videos and donated them to DEFCON Warning System to be published on YouTube for monetization where the funds go to support DWS? For example, videos on how to rapidly build an expedient shelter, collect and sanitize water, or how to store food supplies? I realize some members may need to be incentivized in order to build up a good content library, and the content would need to be vetted to ensure it aligns with DWS policy and YouTube's monetization rules to help ensure the funds rolls in. Just brainstorming....
 
teekay99 said:
We can take this offline/private conversation if needs be. However, what kind of investment is necessary to acquire the infrastructure to support anticipated DEFCON 2 or 1 traffic? (Though I suspect the infrastructure required to support DEFCON 1 traffic will not be needed for a significant period of time, assuming anyone paying attention really has the time or desire to log on to the internet in a DEFCON 1 situation.)

As far as fundraising ideas, what if members created relevant videos and donated them to DEFCON Warning System to be published on YouTube for monetization where the funds go to support DWS? For example, videos on how to rapidly build an expedient shelter, collect and sanitize water, or how to store food supplies? I realize some members may need to be incentivized in order to build up a good content library, and the content would need to be vetted to ensure it aligns with DWS policy and YouTube's monetization rules to help ensure the funds rolls in. Just brainstorming....
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Well it is my opinion the resources it would take to hold 2 or 1 are just too in excess of what we normally get to outright justify continuously paying for more resources, but maybe things could be configured so that resources can be put into use is acquired momentarily. But it’s just unrealistic. I imagine we would need easily 5-10x the resources.

Best thing that can be done is have alternative channels of communication. As far as I can tell forum software doesn’t have a low bandwidth mode or anything.
 
intel-bank said:
Well it is my opinion the resources it would take to hold 2 or 1 are just too in excess of what we normally get to outright justify continuously paying for more resources, but maybe things could be configured so that resources can be put into use is acquired momentarily. But it’s just unrealistic. I imagine we would need easily 5-10x the resources.
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That's a good point I had not considered. DEFCON 2 or 1 would be an exception, and as an IT manager, I did discourage my team from investing a lot of effort in coding for exceptional circumstances.
 
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Not a bad point. In other words, put together a DEFCON fund so that The Director can immediately swipe a card and purchase additional bandwidth.
 
Spyglass said:
Not a bad point. In other words, put together a DEFCON fund so that The Director can immediately swipe a card and purchase additional bandwidth.
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Bingo! Use it only in a emergency. If the world doesn't blow up can downgrade next payment period worst case.
 
If you host your domain through Amazon, they have a system that will automatically increase the bandwidth demand. Don't know anything about the cost but worth investigating.
 
teekay99 said:
what kind of investment is necessary to acquire the infrastructure to support anticipated DEFCON 2 or 1 traffic?
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Our own server. Or a more professional one. outpostgallifrey.com seems to handle large amounts of traffic pretty well (they get slowdowns at times), but the prices they pay are more than the site can afford or that I can pay for myself.

teekay99 said:
what if members created relevant videos and donated them to DEFCON Warning System to be published on YouTube
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I would love to post those.
 
Whatever happened to the days where you could run a T1 line and build a server farm in your own garage, and host yourself?
 
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