QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND GENERAL REQUESTS GO HERE
UPDATE MESSAGE - NEW UPDATE 10-26-2020:
Thanks to our nice hosts and some wizardry in the caching system the lolis have been restored to the clearnet. They can only be linked to or accessed from 8chan itself, and all are invited to list if they would like to.
Welcome back, and sorry for the trouble.
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Tonight's work is done. We fixed 2 small bugs and are also now GEOIP blocking Russia, China, and the JIDF. 8chan.se should be working again soon, along with custom error messages for the tor boards.
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We're back! I just relaunched 8chan.moe on the new server. Thanks to Codexx's hard work on the 8ch.moe clearnet proxy the site was never forced completely offline, but it's certainly good to have the main domain back again. I would like to go over the current site situation and plans from here on:
At the moment the new server is running the same HTTP accelerator cache that we set up on the old server, but this cache is being used as a remote proxy. Except instead of being a stopgap like 8ch.moe, this is a robust setup that proxies the entire main site and serves it from the egregiously powerful new hardware. This setup has been placed behind Cloudflare as an extra security layer, but this layer is optional by design. We do not need Cloudflare and the site will not suffer much without it, so them cucking out is only a minor concern. While the main site is being served by the proxy, we will slowly transfer over LynxChan and the site databases to the new server so that we can run everything natively on that hardware as well. This way the older server and the new act as backups for each other. If one goes down, the other takes over serving the site and downtime is minimal. We can keep this up for a while, and with even modest crypto donations, indefinitely.
From here we will gradually make the LynxChan move and probably implement new proxy rules to serve site content faster. We now have a multi-layer fallback system - not in our pockets in case of need, but running and ready to go at a moment's notice. And beyond those we still haven't touched the nuclear option yet.
We have made significant strides improving Redchannit as well, and it now functions similarly to the main site in all ways but thread user IDs, and believe it or not we're working on a fix for that just for your convenience.
Loli boards are currently only on tor, and will remain as such for at least a while as we sort things out with the host. I sent a message to the admins of the panda asking for their advice, so we'll see what they say. In the meantime I ask that any such content be kept there. My next tasks tonight are to port over the .se domain and to implement the GEOIP blocks on the Russians and a few choice others.
UPDATE 9-18 9:51
The host has confirmed our server has been ordered, but they have us in the queue to the delivered and set up on Monday. So Monday night will likely be the earliest time we can start the move, which will take a few hours. We will leave the current site up as long as possible while this goes on so we can post regular updates on our progress. We're also going to implement at least one fallback plan in case of any kind of unexpected problem with our new hosts.
The dev team are as tired of this shit as you guys are, but we're gonna fight.
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As you know the main site is "sort of" back up via 8ch.moe and Redchannit.org. Its time I gave a detailed account of what happened and what has been going on behind the scenes.
On 9-16 the Russian government internet censorship department sent Vanwanet an ultimatum about our site. Since Vanwa has parts of its business in Russia, the Russians basically told them to get /tot/ and /delicious/ off their networks or Russia would kick them out and block their CDN. Vanwa immediately contacted us and told us to remove those boards or get nuked. So I removed them. We then worked a very long night moving all that sort of material to the Tor service, off of Vanwa's network entirely, and we added in /sm/ and /loli/ for good measure. I also requested that Vanwa block all of Russia from being able to see our site, which they agreed to. Satisfied that we were gucci, we dusted our hands off and went to bed after what had been a hard day and a very long night.
On 9-17 at about 1:30PM I got a notice from Vanwa that our service was suspended. I checked why, and it was because the same Russian agency had just sent a mountain of further complaints to Vanwa. Vanwa only forwarded me 5 of them, but of the five 2 were orphaned images left over in the database from /delicious/ and three were from a loli thread that existed on /h/. I presume the others were the same. This should have been a straightforward fix, but because the Russians sent a separate legal complaint for each individual image, it must have looked like an avalanche of shit. Vanwa panicked and pulled the plug on us without notice or giving us time to address it. They also went beyond by actually terminating every site on my account, which also took down Redchannit. This was unexpected, and trying to get Redchannit.net back up has caused a DNS pileup where the domain changes are not propagating correctly. When we realized this we spun up a second Crescent Isle at Redchannit.org in about an hour. The tone of the conversation I had with Vanwa during and afterward did not leave me feeling like we were going to be reinstated any time soon.
Thus we activated Plan B.
The site is going to be moving to a new server and routing through a different, in-house CDN. We're going to eliminate the "trusted others" that are always the weak link in the chain that allows for deplatforming to happen. As much as we practically can, anyway. The new server is being set up now, but its on foreign hours and setup takes one business day. I received a support ticket a couple hours ago that they're working on it, but they didn't have the processor I wanted so they upgraded to a nicer one. We will be IP blocking Russia and Germany off the bat, but the new host is otherwise pro free speech, and is (one of) the hosts that serves the Panda. If these guys don't work on Saturdays then the new server may not be up until Monday, so Codexx activated 8ch.moe in beta to get everyone back together in the meantime.
Since we're moving to Plan B I'm also assembling the pieces for Plan C, because it will be next if anything goes pear-shaped with our current course. Plan C is full-proxy bunker mode. We're going to test some provisions of it (like the 8ch.moe site some of you are using right now) on the current setup and the new server too, to make sure its ready to roll out if needed. For the moment, we wait for the new server setup to finish and then Codexx and I are gonna get to work.
Edited last time by Acidadmin on 10/27/2020 (Tue) 10:22:27.