Quote:
Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek
I had no idea so much went into it.
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Oh, yeah, for sure. I've spent countless hours behind the scenes. Far too many to count, thousands.
I could leave things go and GC would continue to eke on for probably a long time. Then it would just be a matter of putting out fires from time to time (like the datacenter problems in 2018, what a mess that was). But the end result eventually would be something similar to all the others that closed down.
Over the years I built servers primarily for hosting GC because to rent a similar server was so expensive monthly, $500 or so per month. The servers cost a lot to build and took a while to sort out, but it enabled me to get the current monthly hosting cost under $100. Last server I built for GC was in 2013 and the site is still running on it. That server saved a ton of expenses over the past decade, but it's really been struggling lately.
Nowadays I have much better hosting options available as computer hardware, networks & etc have improved so much while at the same time prices have come down significantly for similar server hardware (at least with budget providers). So have been looking more into that.
One issue GC has been facing for a while now, and I'm sure most GCers have noticed, is terribly slow page loading at times. That's the sort of thing which basically chokes out a website. Something like 50% of site visitors abandon sites if they don't load within a few seconds. I've seen GC on a regular basis in the past year take 2x-4x that time to load. So a bit of a problem there to sort out. Sometimes GC is blazing fast and other times, far too often, it slows to a crawl.
The easiest solution for me with GC site speed issues would probably be one that everyone dislikes: making GC members only & shutting down new account registrations in order to quickly block all the bot traffic that has been hammering the site. And maybe add on to that anti-bot checks throughout the site. But... that would take most GC pages out of the search engines, would make the site less usable/convenient (= more visitors leaving) & just add to the overall general slow decline.
Well, hopefully I'm successful at turning the challenging stuff around and at least stabilize things better. On the other side of this, things might even turn out much better. I'm actually quite optimistic, but we shall see soon enough.
Quote:
Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek
There was an actual Greek chatroom (for actual Greek people) I used to post on before I came to this one. Apparently, the administrator used sponsors but it still eventually shut down.
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We had a real-time java based chat server on GC for years. And it was also used by many actual ethnic Greeks. There was one chat room on the chat server that was used primarily by the ethnic Greeks and most of the time there were more ethnic Greeks in the entire chat server compared to GCers. I shut the chat server down quite a long time ago.
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