Hi 
I know I have been sort of "absent" from all the fun (a well-deserved rest from the CDS cloak-and-dagger politics, heh heh) but I just wanted to tell you about two small things.
First, the other day, the forum software was upgraded to the latest version. This took just a few moments so I'm sure nobody noticed 
The only reason for upgrading was that each successive upgrade comes with more security features to keep the spammers and scammers at bay; since we have registrations closed anyway, I'm sure that there weren't many cases of spam/scam in the past few months, but, better safe, than sure...
The second thing might possibly have more positive impact. I was checking on the performance and bandwidth consumption of the server where this forum is hosted. Traffic is not overwhelming, but it's not zero, either. So I've placed a content delivery network (CDN) service in front of the slcds.info domains.
What does this mean? This is the same technology that Linden Lab uses to deliver textures (and many objects, inventory assets, and so forth) to people logged in to SL. Instead of downloading all those textures to the 50,000+ simultaneously logged in users, Linden Lab pushes them instead out of a CDN (they're using Amazon's cloud service for that). CDN providers usually have several servers spread around the globe, so that depending on your location, you will get access to a server that is closest (fastest) to you. Every time a texture is uploaded to SL, it goes into LL's main servers; but a cached copy will be sent to the CDN provider, which will in turn be delivered to the users. The advantages? The central LL servers will not be so overloaded. When this is well configured, they can actually save a lot in bandwidth costs, but, more important, overall CPU consumption by their central servers will also be much reduced, as they will handle far, far less connections.
Each CDN operates in a slightly different way; each has advantages and disadvantages, and some might give better results than others, depending on the kind of data that is transferred. In the case of the slcds.info domain, I obviously can't afford to pay Amazon to store cached versions of the forums and the portal and the costs of bandwidth — it's too expensive for my purse, and we're not so many anyway that it truly pays off. But there is a simple alternative for free, called CloudFlare (http://cloudflare.com/). CloudFlare is geared to people who don't have much technical know-how and just want things to work — preferably, at zero cost (I'm sure this will change some day, as I don't understand their business model, and nothing is for free for long unless the company has some way of getting an income...). You just let CloudFlare handle DNS for you, and they will re-route all Web traffic through their caches instead. To be more precise, what they're offering is not a "true" CDN (that's why they don't announce their services as a CDN), but more like a transparent proxy system: they will accept Web requests from external users, ask our own servers for the data, and cache everything that is static (this mostly means images, CSS files, videos, etc. — but not only that!... See below).
But they do a bit more than that. They also have a huge database of malicious users and a way to detect many typical hacker attacks to exploit systems via the Web. All these get blocked before they hit our own servers. Although no solution is 100% secure, this will at least mean that typical spammers/scammers won't even be able to reach our forums or the portal, so that means extra safety — and even less impact on the bandwidth/CPU required to run our sites.
As you know, several aspects of our online presence are handled by different people. This was deliberately set up per design, and not because we couldn't agree on a single system. The theory is that if someone leaves the CDS angrily — or dies of a sudden death, never revealing their passwords! — we won't lose everything! So while the forums are hosted on one of my personal servers, the CDS portal is separately administered by Arria. Now when designing a system to increase performance, it's hard to deal with many different people, each with their own servers, requiring separate configuration. Cloudflare simplifies all that: no software is required on our servers, it all works transparently at the DNS level (to Arria: Typo3's own webservers also use Cloudflare to accelerate and protect their own sites ). This means that pretty much everything under slcds.info — no matter who is actually running the server, or where it is located, or what software it runs — is now being automatically and transparently cached by Cloudflare and served by their own network.
There are obviously some caveats. For instance, if you're lazy like me and have long since saved the password for the forums because you keep forgetting it, you will need to log in again, because the IP address for the forums (and all other websites under slcds.info) have changed. But once you save it again, it should not forget the password again
The second thing is that bandwidth statistics for our sites will now be much, much lower than before, since most of the data will never be requested from our servers, but only from Cloudflare. My major reason for posting this article is to warn everyone who is managing a website under slcds.info that they should start seeing much less traffic than before. This is not because all of a sudden everybody left the CDS or has lost interest in it No, it's mostly because most of the traffic should now be handled by Cloudflare; and since they also filter spam/scam/hacking attacks, these will never reach our servers either, thus contributing to a further decrease of bandwidth statistics. Note that statistics generated by Google Analytics will not be affected; they don't run on the web server, but on the user's browser, so they should reflect the overall real traffic (I can confirm this from tests done in the past 3 months; my other sites have not seen any decrease in traffic measured by Google Analytics).
How good is Cloudflare? Well, that depends quite a lot from site to site. I'm just testing it on four other domains, and the savings are between 40 and 60% (that excludes the bandwidth used by hackers and spammers, so the savings might be much higher). It might not seem that much, but it makes a huge difference when downloading static images, PDFs, or other documents that don't change — all these will most certainly be cached, and these are usually the ones that take most time to load. The rest — mostly the text on the forum articles or on the portal — depends a bit on the software used to generate them. Both the forum software and Typo3, used to create the portal, also use caches. The better those caches are generated, the more aggressively can Cloudflare serve that content as well. Again, this might cause a huge difference or not, depending on a lot of factors.
So enjoy a (hopefully!) faster and better browsing experience on all CDS sites
