We're working on it.

the only person who can fix this website when it goes to crap is the server owner as he is running servers from his letteral home apparently, the only thing the mods can do is sit back and hope he can fix the servers when someone trips over the Ethernet cord.

@deathsia
I was talking about that they barely approved the new pending uploads. And barely answered the user’s questions in the forum too.

One of my pictures been uploading. The one of Asher McShane, an MLP version of Ace from Doctor Who. To any, see it and add to the comments.

This website needs to be fixed. I’m zero able to add any tabs or pictures. It keeps failing for some reason.

When i tried to download pictures, it keeps saying ‘internal error’.

@Anonymous #6C1D
I was able to download them just now without any errors.

There’s a bunch of issues since the bots started messing everything up. I’ve gotten some of this shit back to working order, but it’s genuinely not enough.

Need to repair auto imports next.

I believe the real reason at this point is not because they want to take the site down but because if they caused enough stability problems, the userbase would eventually leave instead. I can already see it happening because I’m definitely expecting baloney to happen any time.

I really wish who ever is messing with the website would just give up.

The thing keeps doing ‘internal error’ whenever I try to load pictures.

Whenever I try to load pictures, it keeps saying 500 Internal Server Error.

tl;dr FUCK AI SCRAPERS, sorry for the downtime.

Alright,

I’ll make this quick: I don’t plan to dump the site and close it, at least as long as we’re willing to keep going.

Issues fixed:
503 errors: If it’s a white page, our DDOS protection temporarily blocked you for a few seconds, stop spamming and click 1 image per second or wait longer.
Purple errors: No fixes, no idea what is going on, post an error if there’s a unique error so i can work on it. We have identified 1 issue as Elasticsearch being shit. We’ll need to reset the elasticsearch database and “reindex” at a later date, will probably pick a week that shouldn’t be too busy to do that.
Content Length mismatch / Images are blank or half loaded: Identified an out of memory / out of storage error in our front end server, this popped up as implementing ddos protection resulted in a list / db of IPs so large that it crashed the front end. We upgraded our front end system, this should be fixed.
Content of the page not loading, broken, no css, etc. See above, ddos crashing.

Things still on our plate:

Upgrade to latest philomena, and update our profile / themes profiles to match with the new philomena themes code. This isn’t hard but it is time consuming, hence not being a priority among other messes
We need a few more staff members. We’re getting older, we have lives. If you don’t have a life and just want to help us out clearing duplicates, approving upload queue and reducing spam please reach out to one of the admins or myself.

Fixing the display / previews of images on outside platforms, but I think most people use discord so we’re prioritizing that.
Fixing importing of images in general. (Uploads work again?)

Bots, fuck them. We don’t want your link backs, stop using our site to boost your SEO. I do not give a fuck what pill you’re trying to sell today, yesterday, or tomorrow. If you want an ad, you make a request and pay for it. My prices are cheap, and free if it’s MLP related.

Likely course of actions coming soon:
Attack mode - disabling account creation, comments, threads / forums while we’re actively being targeted by yet another spam farm.
Aggressive and re-tuning of our ddos protection.
Adding offensive AI tarpits, shit that makes AI not want our site anymore. It’s time to grow spines.

Regards,
Zizzy

@ZizzyDizzyMC
Thank you.

Whenever I keep trying to add tabs and new pictures, it keeps refusing to do so.

@Anonymous #6C1D
I’ve noticed there being a lack of new images as well.

@Anonymous #6C1D
Anon uploads are broken atm, it’s being worked on.

@coolmaster43232
Importer is also slightly broken atm. It’s also being worked on.

@Napsack
Thanks for the info. I had feeling it was.

It still keeps doing the error thing whenever I try to add new tabs and new images.

We’re migrating to newer hardware!

Moving from the Xeon 2690v4 to Ryzen 9900x, our storage backend won’t change much though it will be network storage, which may incur an additional 4-6ms of delay for images.

We’re moving as part of a greater initiative by Z+ / TPA to reduce overall power usage.

On the technical side, PB sits on an array of 21 3TB hard drives, it’s what we had at the time and I am not going to say anything negative about it, it works great. It does use 190w of power doing nothing however, with just storage alone. This is on top of running on decade old hardware.

TPA is also migrating from disks and whatnot, and other storage units will soon follow.

All said and done, we’ll be pulling 1 server, and 1 storage cluster offline reducing our costs by ~100 / month. Which gets us almost to even on the subscribe star. Current running costs is around 750 / month for the Z+ network.

https://subscribestar.adult/theponyarchive if you’d like to contribute, you may. Good news is that Z+ is slowly moving towards being out of debt after I fronted the entire cost for what was essentially a full upgrade top to bottom.

No equipment will be sold, it’ll be kept and maintained for a backup system in case we need it.

Expect about a week of downtime starting tonight at midnight. I’m doing this the lazy way. Turning off the server, copying the data, starting it up once it’s provisioned on the new server. This means no syncing, little room for error, and if something goes horribly wrong I can re-enable the old server.

@ZizzyDizzyMC
Hell yeah, week long vacation for everyone!

@Deserter
I gotta postpone it, realized I needed to migrate a large portion of TPA that I thought was already copied. But eventually it’ll happen and I’ll have a page up explaining what we’re doing.

@ZizzyDizzyMC
Vacation’s cancelled, we’re turning this car around.

Will be pointless if the law does pass. But to quote Vitalstatistix, “Tomorrow never comes.”

@TrukkinDuck
Gotta be optimistic about it, it’s the least we can do.

@TrukkinDuck
I’m all in on NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.

@ZizzyDizzyMC