State of AFN (2020)

[Hazyrook]

That's a great idea man, I ordered my quantum boards from alibaba super cheap and they are great lights could pick some up they will etch the afn logo into them and sling them bitches on here!

 

[420Forever]

AFN fanny packs for the hiking trip.
AFN speedos for the day at the beach.
AFN Rompers.... Because somebody must wear them.
AFN Aviator glasses for those bright sunny days.
AFN Satchel, because Indiana Jones carried a satchel.
AFN stickers. who doesn't love stickers/stencils
AFN Covid-19 vaccines.

AFN's own grow shop. We know what we need to grow, scoop up and try out some unbranded products. Do a grow journal with each product then slap an AFN sticker on it and sell it in your AFN store. As a new grower I was in all different directions trying to find stuff I needed for my first grow. I came here for most of the info. I bought things I didn't need. AFN can cash in on its knowledge. Or vendors can pay AFN a pecentage whenever an AFN coupon code is used on their site.

"alex, i'll take an afn bong for 100 plz, ty"... ppp

 

[Son of Hobbes]

I've sent off a detailed e-mail of the issues we're having on the site, screenshots of errors, and as much specifics as we can. Waiting to hear back if they are willing to tackle it, told them we'd like to start immediately if the quote and response felt reasonable.

Main issues we're going to tackle:
1. Oops! error
2. Cloudflare
3. General Lag/Latency
4. E-mail server configuration

We're going to work on having a full "tune-up" done, and hoping to have the e-mail configuration looked at too (e-mail is only working half the time, and we're getting flagged as spam by like every major provider lol. We don't send out ANYTHING other than what the forum software defaults to sending out (for alerts, replies, etc.)

So just keeping everyone updated, we're ready to rock and roll on this laggy beast.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

Hopefully going to hear back today from the tech company on the price quote for the work requested (heard from them yesterday, corona virus has slowed down their team a bit it sounds like, understandable.)

I believe Man o Green was working on a solution for photo voting/polling on the forum as well.

If the price looks good, we're going to see if they can start immediately.

 

[Son of Hobbes]

Invoice has been generated, paid for, logins created, and should see work starting up soon!

 

[Shiva's Mistress]

Invoice has been generated, paid for, logins created, and should see work starting up soon!

Thanks for all your hard work @Son of Hobbes and Admin team!

 

[Son of Hobbes]

Just a heads up, the company we've hired to help with some of the tech issues will begin working today/this weekend on the site and configurations. I don't believe we'll see much (if any) downtime, but please be aware that we do have someone working in the back panel and server and that the site may experience some abnormalities (beyond the normal abnormalities lol.)

Fingers crossed and lucky rabbits feet danglin', hope this gets our site fixed up back to good.

 

[nekvt]

With almost 2 million posts I'm sure the search function is using a ton of resources. I have a site with around a million posts that was getting very slow. We turned off search for guests and archived everything except the past 24 months. That's probably not an option here, but it worked great in our situation.

 

[mcpd_refugee]

@Son of Hobbes - I know you have the original GoFundMe, but have you thought about or researched setting up something like a Venmo or PayPal account where members could make ongoing donations or where you could have semi-regular public-radio-type donation drives? Just a thought. Or will the original GoFundMe page accept donations forever?

 

[Son of Hobbes]

Keeping everyone in the loop, we had technicians working on the site and server over the weekend and they found a good chunk of things that, were in fact, not quite correctly configured.

I've been given a list of suggestions of things to do/try on our end on top of the config settings that were changed; I've been working on the list here the past few days.

We're still hammering out what's causing some latency on the site when we turn Cloudflare down (the tech thinks he knows what it is, but we're going back and forth on it at the moment, we're thinking something is not communicating correctly with one of our add-on's, and it's causing some issues with Cloudflare (giving the oops error on timeout.) With Cloudflare turned on/up, the site is the FASTEST I think I have ever seen it. Ever.

So we'll continue hammering on that, but hopefully some of you are seeing a faster, more responsive site. I wish I could say the "oops" error was 100% eliminated but we're making a good deal of progress, so let's keep on keeping on.

And thank you again to all of you, whether you donated or not, to help keep the energy of the site going. Been a few times we just wanted to throw in the towel over this frustrating ordeal but some of you won't let us quit lol, so.... we really appreciate that. And now we're finally seeing some positive results.