moxiefoxtrot » Ubuntu Forums http://moxiefoxtrot.com ...a random blog about life and technology Sat, 12 Jun 2010 14:53:00 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Ubuntuforums: In a month.. http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/12/16/ubuntuforums-in-a-month/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/12/16/ubuntuforums-in-a-month/#comments Wed, 16 Dec 2009 21:45:30 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=891 The ubuntuforums have grown to be one of the largest linux forums on the internet today with over 970,000 users. I thought it might be interesting to show some other statistics that were generated between 11/15/2009 and 12/15/2009.

Compare these to the numbers I posted in March 2007.

10,901,893 Visits
24,291,004 Pageviews
46.18% % New Visits
6,138,414 Absolute Unique Visitors
Returning Visitor 53.77%
New Visitor 46.23%

Firefox 69.97%
Internet Explorer 10.61%
Chrome 8.33%
Opera 3.80%
Safari 3.09%

Linux 58.11%
Windows 36.44%
Macintosh 4.70%

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/12/16/ubuntuforums-in-a-month/feed/ 4 Authenticate on Ubuntuforums with your Launchpad credentials! http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/06/15/authenticate-on-ubuntuforums-with-your-launchpad-credentials/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/06/15/authenticate-on-ubuntuforums-with-your-launchpad-credentials/#comments Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:59:49 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=876 The title says it all! Thanks to Anthony Lenton, one of Canonicals developers, users on ubuntuforums.org now have the option to authenticate on the forums using their Launchpad/OpenID credentials. The current requirement is you have an active forum account to accomplish this. In the future we’ll look at other options for tighter integration but this is a huge step forward.

Enjoy!

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/06/15/authenticate-on-ubuntuforums-with-your-launchpad-credentials/feed/ 10 His facial expression is priceless! http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/06/04/his-facial-expression-is-priceless/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/06/04/his-facial-expression-is-priceless/#comments Fri, 05 Jun 2009 01:07:12 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=870 Every spring we get our long-hair orange persian cat shaved because his fur gets so long and matted. This year he is really disguested with the fact his hair is gone :)

4513_1110981707226_1607379241_30276297_923192_n

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/06/04/his-facial-expression-is-priceless/feed/ 5 UbuntuForums LoCo Admin http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/05/15/ubuntuforums-loco-admin/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/05/15/ubuntuforums-loco-admin/#comments Fri, 15 May 2009 14:43:00 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=858 I’m pleased to announce that Joeb454 who has been a staff member on the Ubuntuforums for quite some time has offered to take over the managing of the LoCo subforums. The Forum Council gave Joe the big +1′s he needed. We believe Joe will do a great job taking care of the details. So, if you have a LoCo forum and need help or need one get with Joe :)

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/05/15/ubuntuforums-loco-admin/feed/ 13 New Ubuntuforums Staff http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/04/07/new-ubuntuforums-staff/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/04/07/new-ubuntuforums-staff/#comments Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:26:14 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=704 It’s been a pretty exciting week on the Ubuntuforums. We’ve expanded the Forum Council adding 2 new long time forum staff members bodhi.zazen and bapoumba, we are glad to have you on board :) In addition to expanding the Forum Council we’ve also brought  on 4 new staff cariboo907, forestpixie, tinivole and Michael.Godawski who have all excelled within the forums and were glad they excepted the invitation.

Welcome everyone!

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/04/07/new-ubuntuforums-staff/feed/ 3 Ubuntuforums launches a new theme http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/04/01/ubuntuforums-launches-a-new-theme/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/04/01/ubuntuforums-launches-a-new-theme/#comments Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:06:44 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=700 I am proud to announce we have a new theme at the ubuntuforums. You’ll promptly notice its wonderful blend of colors and subtle use of pink. We hop you enjoy, we are calling it ubuntuforums v3.0.

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/04/01/ubuntuforums-launches-a-new-theme/feed/ 17 Ubuntuforums.org maintenance today http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/02/16/ubuntuforumsorg-maintenance-today/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/02/16/ubuntuforumsorg-maintenance-today/#comments Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:20:22 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=695 We decided to do a little maintenance today which will result in the forums being offline for a few hours.

The maintenance includes the following items:

  • Upgrade to the latest forum software 3.8.1
  • Remove old archives and closed sections of the forums that are years old. (this will affect some peoples post counts)

Also, we have a Forum Council meeting today at 21:00 UTC for those interested in joining us via IRC on freenode in #ubuntu-meeting

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/02/16/ubuntuforumsorg-maintenance-today/feed/ 0 Recent Ubuntuforums Downtime http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/01/14/recent-ubuntuforums-downtime/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/01/14/recent-ubuntuforums-downtime/#comments Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:16:59 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=670 I just wanted to take a few minutes and comment on some of the recent issues we’ve had over at the UbuntuForums. Last week Thursday around 4pm EST, our main database server went into a “crashed” state. The result of this state was over 2000 queries that were lingering without completion for over 8000 seconds which resulted in resource issues, this caused the mysqld process to go into an unresponsive state and would not shutdown effectively. After the crash it was realized we had some inconsistent data in the database and a check/repair was ran to potentially correct the issues.

On Sunday evening around 11:30pm EST the forums were down again but this time with table corruption on our largest tables which is our post table (it has around 6.5 million rows) and the thread table (over 1 million rows). I’m assuming everything “wasn’t” ok, after the crash on Thursday even though the checks said they were. Monday was spent cleaning up the tables, fixing corruption issues etc. Unfortunately, because of the massive size of our tables a check and repair takes upwards of 4-5 hours per check and repair until the issues were mostly resolved, this had to be completed a few times. We’ll be monitoring the data integrity over the next couple days to ensure everything stays consistent.

When the forums were ready to come online last night around 7pm EST, we ran into issues with the amount of traffic the site was getting (benefits of being popular eh?). To help ease the pressure on our main database server we have utilized the “slave” feature in vbulletin which will send queries to a slave server to help reduce load on the master. So far this has been working pretty well except for a few hiccups which were easily corrected by changing mySQL variables.

James Troup from Canonical was a great help making sure the proxies were stable last night and will be getting us additional hardware to help with our explosive growth as we have outgrown our current servers. James, thank you for your help, it is appreciated.

Until things stable out we have disabled a couple of popular features on the forums namely the “Thank you” and the “Solved Post” features. We hope to re-enable them again soon. I expect we’ll have a some rough patches ahead of us until the new hardware is in place and we look forward to getting things more stable in the near future. We’ll also be implementing a better method of communication to our users when the forums are offline, expect an announcement on the forums in the near future about that. We appreciate everyones patience during this time.

Ubuntu-geek

I also posted this on the forums here.

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2009/01/14/recent-ubuntuforums-downtime/feed/ 4 Ubuntuforums.org Upgrade http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2008/12/23/ubuntuforumsorg-upgrade/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2008/12/23/ubuntuforumsorg-upgrade/#comments Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:34:47 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=402 Over the past weekend I took the ubuntuforums.org site offline and upgraded the software to the latest Vbulletin 3.8 release candidate. Previously we had been running version 3.7.4p1 and felt the 3.8 serious was stable enough to move forward with even though its still a RC. The upgrade took about an hour and gave the forum community improved features to Social Groups, Private Messages, Profile Privacy, Albums and other misc fixes. 

Thanks again to everyone helped test and find bugs after the upgrade.

]]> http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2008/12/23/ubuntuforumsorg-upgrade/feed/ 8 Thinking about the Ubuntu Forums http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2008/12/02/thinking-about-the-ubuntu-forums/ http://moxiefoxtrot.com/2008/12/02/thinking-about-the-ubuntu-forums/#comments Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:41:54 +0000 Ryan http://moxiefoxtrot.com/?p=358 It’s been just over 4 years since I started the Ubuntu Forums and tonight I found myself thinking about it’s life-cycle, my frustrations, the forum council, current staff, ex-staff, the community, ownership changes, Canonical and the interesting conversations that took place in its younger years. I’m glad to still be apart of it and look forward to what the future brings.

I also want to say thanks to the dedicated staff and the community who make the Ubuntu Forums what they are.

A little history of the forums from it’s first launch and today…

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