Difference between revisions of "State of UOGuide 2014"

Revision as of 19:57, 8 November 2014

The state of UOGuide is good. Since I have been actively maintaining the website again there have been some improvements. A new server has fixed latency issues. In August 2014 the average response time for the Main Page was 13.6 seconds(!). Last month that has dropped to 1.6 seconds. FYI: the Main Page is the slowest loading article on the site due to the amount of templates and plugins it uses.

I personally apologize for not taking care of this sooner. When I realized how bad the situation was it only took one day to correct.

Site Backups

Last year there was a situation where some database tables had just completely vanished. Our web host takes daily database backups so it was an easy matter to fix the issue with minimal data loss. The site was only offline for about 1 day. In fact in the past year UOGuide has been online 99.6% of the time according monitoring software.

I personally take a very keen interest in making sure the websites I run are backed up well. This stems from early experiences (1999-2001) posting on other websites which frequently were wiped and restarted. In fact it is the whole reason I started the UO Atlantic Forum which has not suffered any data loss in over 10 years!

Suffice to say, UOGuide's record is impeccable when it comes to not losing data and staying online.

Future Projects

At the moment there are none planned. There are no plans to expand into other MMOs. There are no plans to add premium features you have to pay for.

This is not to say something big will not happen in the future. But for now the only thing on the table is supplying you with the most up to date UO information. Which UOGuide does a pretty good job at.

Stratics

It is truly terrible was has happened to Stratics over these years. The site has suffered at least 2 complete forum wipes. Last month during the most recent transition they lost some of their most important data, the Hunter's Database. It is frustrating that they are not even working to put that back online until after some new site launches (which does not have an ETA). In their recent State of Stratics address they talk about the site not being a business, but then go on to discuss premium features they want to add!

A choice had to be made - spend the time and limited resources to fix the older part of uo.stratics, or maintain what was migrated and put the time and limited resources to the development of the new stratics where everything will be in one place. The choice is to get the new site up, populate the information there, and launch it as soon as we possibly can. - Stratics Staff

Replacement Databases

Here are some pages on UOGuide which can help you out until Stratics finally gets its act together again.

The only thing we don't have is calculators. If anyone knows of a replacement for ones that Stratics no longer offers let me know and I'll add in some links to the appropriate places.

Forum

At this point it seems there are a lot of people who wish there was an alternative forum to post on for UO. When I started UOGuide I did not include a forum because there was always Stratics and then UOForums. Well UOForums appears to be mostly inactive now and Stratics is an unreliable mess. You can come join us on the UOGuide forum if you like. It has been around for a few years but has not been advertised. This should change a little now that you can clearly see the link in the tab menu at the top of every page.

Contributing to UOGuide

Anyone can contribute to UOGuide, including you! All you need to do is signup an account and you can get started in under five minutes. There is a whole article that explains how to get started. There is a a Help section which details how to format pages (which is really easy, similar to posting on a forum). If you ever need a reference you can find the link in the red banner menu.

There are a lot of pages that have gone slightly out of date over the years. There are also sections which are missing completely. Any help, even correcting one number, is always appreciated.

Have a Nice day.

-- JC the Builder 19:57, 8 November 2014 (PST)