BYOND Labs

If you weren't online between about 9pm and 10pm BST tonight, you may not have even noticed. Those who accessed the site during a short period of time were treated to a moving notice:



And in about 10 minutes, we schlepped the BYOND servers up the west coast of the US, from southern California to Seattle. We sent out change-of-address cards to all the nameservers on the internet, and waited as the community started trickling in to visit our new digs. Some took longer than others, depending on how long it took them to receive those new address cards. If you're reading this, you've made it. Welcome!

Our new server room gives us well over 8 times the processing power of the old, in turn giving BYOND ample room to continue growing. For the technical, here is a comparison of stats:

Old	New
Web Single 2.66 GHz Pentium IV Xeon 4 GB mem 1 SATA disk Hub/Database Single 1.8 GHz dual-core Opteron 4 GB mem 1 USCSI 10k rpm disk	Web Dual 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon (Harpertown) 4 GB mem 2 SATA disks Hub/Database Dual 2.5 GHz quad-core Xeon (Harpertown) 4 GB mem 2 SATA disks 1 SAS 15k rpm disk

That's right, both servers now have 8 full cores, giving us many times more processing power than before. We're still working through a few software-related issues remaining from the big site upgrade a few weeks ago, but the new hardware is humming along mightily!

BYOND is growing. We see that in the internal stats that we collect regarding everything from website hits to number of unique computers logging into the pager each day. It's also quite apparent in the publicly available stats -- namely, the instantaneous number of people online.

You may have noticed that the number of online people is regularly in the 3000s these days. We didn't hit that milestone until earlier this year, on January 14th. Heck, we only hit 2000 for the first time less than a year ago, back in July. And the pace is accelerating.

Yesterday we hit 3900 people online for the first time. But you people weren't satisfied with that. Yes, for a brief 5 minutes or so, we actually peaked above 4000. No fooling. We doubled the number of people simultaneously logged into BYOND in less than 9 months.

For comparison, here are the numbers for the past three years on April 1st:



What a great milestone for BYOND. Thanks to all of you April Fools for making it happen!

After much discussion with the BYOND Staff and the BYOND guild leaders, we're about ready to roll out some new guild functionality: The ability for any guild member to submit a game to the guild's list. As part of this, we've started expanding the hub pages to include guild information.

Here's how it works (subject to any refinements before we roll it out):

Guilds will have two additional options:



And when you go to a hub page you will see a couple of new things. On the left side of the Version box, there is a list of guilds this game is listed in:



On the right side is a new link for submitting the game to a guild:



Because it's a somewhat expensive hit on the database to calculate which guilds you can submit the game to, we wait until you click the link to figure that out, and give you a list like this:



After you've submitted to a guild:



The guild staff sees this:



If you have game management privileges for the guild, or if the guild auto-approves games, then it goes right onto the list.

The first draft of this functionality is in place and we should have it out shortly. We hope it will encourage guild membership and for games to be added to guilds.

We have several more ideas for how to add Member/Guild functionality to the hub pages, and of course we're interested in any ideas you might have.

Okay, not as sexy as getting to dream up features for member pages, but bear with me. I've been lured back to BYOND to work on various aspects of the system; documentation will be a big part of it. We want to make the BYOND software as user-friendly as possible, and also the BYOND website, both the player and developer sections. I thought I'd do a little informal surveying to see what you all thought could use some revamping. Here are some questions, which you can answer directly or just use for inspiration.

First, go back to that time when you were new to BYOND...

1. What were you looking for when you came to BYOND?

2. What were your first frustrations?

3. How did you learn how to program (or to use the Dream Seeker)?

Moving into the present...

4. What advice would you give to someone who was new to BYOND today? (This advice could be about anything.)

5. Have you had friends who tried BYOND, but didn't continue with it? Why did they drop out?

6. Have you had friends you tried to introduce to BYOND, but they decided not to download/use it? Why not?

7. What new documentation do you think would be useful, if any?

8. What do YOU think about the layout of the website, both the "play" and "develop" sides? What would you change to make it easier and more useful for players and developers, new and old?

9. Anything else?

Okay, Mike's Herculean efforts on the Member pages and Lummox's progress on Dream Daemon are shaming me into getting some work done. Next up on my plate is moving the hub pages from the C++ to the Perl backend and adding new hub page functionality.

I'm not sure we've covered this previously, but the BYOND website and hub infrastructure were originally created in C++, and raw C++ with almost no libraries used at that. Everything was built from scratch.

C++ is not the friendliest language for implementing web functionality or for text-based processing, and especially not when you are building everything from scratch. On the other hand, Perl is a text-processing language with a rich set of libraries available to make it easy to generate web pages and access databases and the like. And object-oriented Perl provides a nice clean way to solve problems.

So a few years ago I built a new Perl-based web infrastructure and experimented with it by creating a new admin system for the BYOND staff. That went well, and we started implementing most of our new web functionality, such as the Member pages, with the Perl backend using modern program methodologies such as template-based text generation. This resulted in a vastly simpler, easier to maintain code base (I mean, I can't even express how much simpler) than the original C++ infrastructure. So much so that I coldly left Mike to handle the C++ while I cuddled up to the warm and friendly Perl and promptly tried to forget everything I almost knew about C++.

In the intervening time, Mike has significantly enhanced the Perl infrastructure and we've managed to solve performance issues and such to our satisfaction. So it's our desire to move more and more of the website over to the Perl backend, thereby allowing us to make changes much faster than is possible in the C++ (as evidenced by all Mike's work to upgrade the Perl-based Member pages).

Now that we have this cool new guild functionality in place, we want to extend the hub pages to include guild-related information and whatever else makes sense. So as the first step, I'm in the process of porting the current hub page functionality over to the Perl.

While I'm doing that (hopefully the first pass can be mostly handled this weekend), here's your chance to give us ideas for how the hub pages should be upgraded.

So, how should hub pages be changed?