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This is a HOBBY, folks. Don't blow it.
Posted By: Louis Wu <halo@bungie.org>Date: 5/17/03 3:01 p.m.

I'd just posted a bunch of pictures from the fanfest, and was feeling a glow of warmth for the fan community in general, when I saw two posts on the forum:

Boll's reply to Opie on the refresh thread

Shishka's announcement of shwag theft

The second sucks, and isn't really forum-related, per se... but it certainly kills my buzz. The first is a bit more immediate, in terms of you guys. (There's nothing really special about BOLL's post, by itself; it's just the first one I saw about this issue, and allowed me to determine that the thread in question was, in fact, responsible for the outage this forum experienced on Thursday.) A few idiots (and I don't use that term lightly) thought it was an okay thing to abuse a forum put here for no other reason than to give you, the HBO community, a place to gather. They did such a good job that they crashed the server - hard. Things to remember:

  • This site is not run by some multinational corporation, out of a datacenter on a huge multi-server cluster, with backup capability and around-the-clock tech support - I run a small webhosting business out of my home, and I'm currently 3000 miles away, in LA, covering a gaming convention so I can bring you, the HBO community, news about Bungie's latest goodness.
  • When you crash my less-than-industrial-strength hardware, and I'm not there to see that it's happened, it STAYS down until I can do something about it. In the case of this totally idiotic incident, that meant over 5 hours, on a day when traffic would probably have been the highest in recent memory, due to the anticipation of the fanfest and information coming from E3 visitors.
  • When you crash my less-than-industrial-strength hardware, you don't just bring down the HBO forum - you bring down DOZENS of sites, most of them PAYING me for hosting. Those people are (understandably) angry that their websites were offline for 5 hours in the middle of a Thursday. I can't really tell them "well, sorry, but a bunch of assholes who visit a gaming site I run decided it would be fun to trash the server..."
  • Let me make something crystal-clear: if it comes down to a choice between maintaining this forum, and keeping paying clients... this forum is HISTORY. That's such an easy decision it's not even funny. And if you ASSHOLES (you know who you are, and thanks to server logs, I know who you are too) ever do something this monumentally stupid again, I'll shut it all down in a heartbeat.

Yes, I'm really, really angry. No, I'm not home yet, and no, I can't do much about banning (temporarily or otherwise) the people involved at the moment. Do it again, though, and you'll see just how fast this site comes offline. For good.

(Unlike Miguel, I'm not gonna lock this thread. I think, as he does, that it's pointless for folks to respond to it - there's really nothing to say; I don't want to hear 'I'm sorry', or 'you're right', I just want it never to happen again - but if you want to chime in anyway... feel free.)



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