Future of ShoutBox

Post by **Yoon** » March 24th, 2008, 5:43 pm

As some of you might have noticed in the ShoutBox, it appears that our ShoutBox provider may be shutting down the ShoutBox service for good.

Here's the announcement made by Charles Stover (ProBoards ShoutBox provider):

Dear users,

I am Charles Stover, the creator of the ProBoards ShoutBox.

At this time, the ShoutBox can no longer be hosted for free due to the negative affect (e.g. lag) it has on paying customers. While I have significantly reduced the bandwidth over the past month (from ~50GB to ~2GB), the server still requires an extremely high usage of CPU power solely for the ShoutBox.

Unfortunately, the options at this point are:

1. Purchase a dedicated server and pay a monthly fee.
This would have to be through donations, as I do not have the funds to pay out-of-pocket.
2. Find another hosting provider who will host the ShoutBox for free.
Considering the excessive amounts of resources the ShoutBox requires, this won't be possible unless there are multiple hosting providers who are each willing to host small percentiles of the ShoutBox.
3. Come up with a CPU-friendly, alternative method of running the ShoutBox.
Brainstorming has led to a dead end. If you have any ideas, we'd all be glad to hear them.
4. Kill it.

Ruby Ring Technologies will continue free service until March 31, 2008.

If you're interested in donations, providing partial hosting, or helping brainstorm (professional coders only, please), then please drop a line on the forums.
Thanks for all the support over the years,
Charles Stover
GamingMedley

Source: http://proboards.gamingmedley.com/overuse-notice.html

If it does go down, there are some alternative shoutbox services that I can implement, but it may not be as seamless/convienient as the one we've been using.

Jaegar · Post by **Jaegar** » March 25th, 2008, 1:07 am

I'm hoping he'll manage to work out that donation thing. That seems to work for a lot of other things. I'll be sad if our awesome shoutbox dies =/

oh! while I'm thinking about random stuff for the forums, have you figured anything out regarding code boxes? They look good in the preview and everything but then the actual post has a useless (for me anyway) text box.

Tarquin · Post by **Tarquin** » March 25th, 2008, 12:53 pm

Oh, I do hope he figures out how to keep hosting it, I would hate to lose our shoutbox <3

longshin · Post by **longshin** » March 26th, 2008, 6:28 pm

Dun die...Mr Shoutbox please....... n

Saxire · Post by **Saxire** » March 27th, 2008, 5:31 pm

Nooooooo i like the shoutbox >_< do whatever you think is best yoon

But don let it die entirely :'(

Jaegar · Post by **Jaegar** » March 27th, 2008, 11:13 pm

Unfortunately, there's not much any of us can do. Well, unless you can host the shoutbox yourself or offer to throw money at people so they'll host it. lol

Saxire · Post by **Saxire** » March 30th, 2008, 3:40 pm

But it still survived YAY!!

Jaegar · Post by **Jaegar** » April 1st, 2008, 1:23 am

oooh it's not there anymore O.o

I hope that gets fixed. I wonder if it was the hax or the hosting service? Just in case it doesn't return, I'll repeat my previous observation.

ROFL! This is our next visitor! First we had a troll, then a spam bot, and now we've been visited by a hacker! I wonder what the internet will throw at us next? XD

Post by **Yoon** » May 2nd, 2008, 12:49 pm

Still waiting for Charles Stover to implement the ShoutBox service plans. The support forums for the ShoutBox have been down for a few days. I'll definitely be getting the premium plan, so that we can bring the ShoutBox back to this forum, so no worries.

Jaegar · Post by **Jaegar** » May 2nd, 2008, 1:24 pm

yaaay ^_^ happy

glad to hear that our shoutbox is (coming) here to stay

Saxire · Post by **Saxire** » May 2nd, 2008, 3:04 pm

Yoon good

and me is speak bad english right now ...

Post by **Yoon** » May 4th, 2008, 11:07 pm

An update has been posted over at the RubyRingTechnologies.com (ShoutBox Host) forums:

At this time the shoutbox has been disabled. We have been working with Charles over the last two months to reduce the system resource usage, or to come up with enough money to rent a dedicated server for this product. At the time of extended ending date we feel that there is not enough positive response to cover the basic costs of running or maintaining a public or privately paid shoutbox.

We are sorry to see such a good program go under, however we at Ruby Ring Technologies have been funding and maintaining this project for about 2 years now. Over the last few years this project has grown to a level that has a several hundred dollar a month server to power its needs. We wish we could keep this programing up and running but at this time we don't have the extra resources on hand to maintain the server it uses.

If anybody has a server they want to donate, or the funds to donate please let us know.

Some resource usage stats.
These stats reflect the avg day usage this shoutbox uses.

Over 1 Million hits a day.
Over 3 Million database calls a day. Which is about 35 calls a second.

The server is currently sitting on a 8 Core Xeon with 8 GBs of RAM

Again we are sorry to see this project close down.

Thank you,

Anthony Torreso
Director of Technologies
Anthony@RubyRingTechnologies.com
http://www.RubyRingTechnologies.com

Source: ShoutBox Future

There's still no info. on when (or if) the ShoutBox service will be coming back.

In the meantime, I will continue searching for alternatives.

EDIT: It's back! It looks like Charles Stover was able to find a temp. host for ShoutBox!

I ain't gonna give up on the shoutbox. It may take a while and a ton of programming, but I'll be damned if I just up and discontinue it. =P
It's currently being hosted thanks to Wrighty (vForums and ProBoards profiles).
I don't know how permanent of a host this will be, but it certainly works well until a permanent residence can be found.

Source: http://forums.rubyringtechnologies.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=1144

Dark Falco · Post by **Dark Falco** » May 6th, 2008, 11:31 am

lets just hope that the temp host can hold it up for a while, and we dont loss it again >.<

Saxire · Post by **Saxire** » June 27th, 2008, 10:55 am

What happened to the shoutbox now?

Slayer · Post by **Slayer** » June 27th, 2008, 11:23 am

it got stabbed in the back, blown up with a rocket launcher,tied up in a bag,shot by a 12 gauge,thrown off a cliff, thrown halve way across the room,crushed by a apple core remover, hit with a baseball bat,diced by a samurie, fired in a cannon,left in a burning building,shoves into a safe and threw dinomate into it, got nuked by a nuke, got eaten by a lion, the lion threw up, hit by a crowbar, spin dashed by sonic, jumped on by mario, ran over by a truck, spat at with a hair ball, chainsawed, screwdrivered, frozen and finally killed by a virus