Unleashed2k

I've provided an update to the original post, THANK YOU ALL!!

Hi all,

It's been a tough 24 hours for me dealing with this and it's hard to even think right now. Starting yesterday my cat Gordon started throwing up over 20 times, unable to keep food or drink inside of him or even use the bathroom. For the initial hospital cost for him to stay overnight to get hydrated, get blood work, and xrays we paid 1800 which we could already barely afford. Unfortunately the doctor contacted me saying Gordon needed emergency surgery. I now owe them $3000 of money which I don't have and was denied carecredit and scratchpay. This whole situation breaks my heart and he's like a son to me. I would do anything for him. Anytime I'm down, playing guitar, gaming he comes to me and lays on me or next to me. A true buddy. If you can help please do, if you can't but know someone who can please feel free to share this. I am heartbroken and would do anything for my cat.

This is one of my last resorts to see if we can get the surgery crowdfunded. I'm happy to edit this post to let you know that Gordon's surgery was a success. I have not talked to the billing department yet to figure out what we're going to do but I hope they will work with me so we can get all of this behind us and have a healthy 6 year old boy who still has plenty of life left in him.

I hope everyone has a pleasant day and Gordon can make it through all of this. A donation goal has been setup and any amount helps.

 

http://customsforge.com/donate/goal-149-fundraiser-goal-for-gordon/

 

Thank you so much,
Mark Beeson - CustomsForge Founder

 

UPDATE!!: Gordon has successfully woken up from surgery. They found a large string and tons of fur. I'll be arranging with the doctors on how to pay soon. At the moment I don't have much options so hopefully we can all figure something out.

 

 

UPDATE!!!! 5/13/2020 

 

Thank you everyone for the support!! It means the world. This has definitely been a journey and a learning experience. I'm so happy to report that Gordon is back home, and healing. For those who have never been a parent, but at least have an animal at home. There's no feeling in the world then helping your pet back to health by feeding him and giving him drinks with plenty of pets. He's getting better day by day and we had to move his sister to my in laws for about as week as he heals. For those who want to see what is in his stomach, all I can say is graphic warning as it's pretty gross. https://i.imgur.com/Co3DKXk.jpg (not gonna display it here, but it's basically a big bag with a long string...maybe a shoelace? bunch of hairties?) either way, I'm shocked that he was able to fit all of that in him and glad we got it out. 

We've worked out an arrangement with the vet and the new total is $2683 so I've adjusted the goal for that. If we're able to reach even half of that, that would help us out so much. Thank you all for being able to help.

 

 

I've got the file. I'll reupload it after I do some fixes to it.

If you're doing repairs to PC Plum's CDLC make sure to credit him, thanks!

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_apr_2020.pdf

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_mar_2020.pdf

 

When I go to the CDLC search part of this site nothing shows up. It comes up with zero results. I can't search for individual artists or songs. Also, for me, the site is running very slow.

 

Any help appreciated.

 

Thanks.

 

Check the filters in the top right and try clicking the reset button next to the search button.

Double check it says just "http://ignition.customsforge.com/"at the top, since filters can change the url.

 

If none of that works try a different browser?

 

Site being slow is normal lol.

 

I hope to resolve this soon with the website upgrade. It's the old code unfortunately. :( 

Thanks for this. This has been a long broken feature that will be fixed on the new ignition. We're not really fixing anything on old ignition unless it is super critical. If you want to check on how I4 does it just PM me on discord and I'll set you up with early pre-alpha access ;)

Do you ship it?

Amazon makes them for us and ships them

We have some new tools in development that will help you find and discover artists. The main problem was the time it took to rewrite the current ignition. It's almost done and even if we do not see some of the features requested here upon release, it will take a couple months instead of years to release any additional features. We already have genre tags (generated by a 3rd party api and not the user), a love system if you like a CDLC, and a report button. It's all looking good and I hope we can release this soon for everyone.

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_feb_2020.pdf

 

Any news on the updates about forum and ignition?

They are still awful slow, most of the time I start browsing my other things that I want to check, meanwhile hoping the forum or ignition will finally have loaded.

Also posting a comment or so, sometimes does not work first time, and needs to be redone, hence why I copy my typed messages before trying to post them, else I have to rewrite them.

This ofc also causes why some comments or submitted CDLC are double.

I think they are working on fixing all the problems since that day, and you are right, this site it's a little slow but for me it's fine for what I do. And I do the same as you; copying my typing before post it in case that some error happen.

 

And I am a CDLC charter and sometimes I had the 502 error (I think that's the number) and if I refresh the page it happened that I upladed the same song twice, and I can't find the option to erase one of those :( so the solution was that I had to make another Custom fast to edit one of the repeated songs and change it for the new one, it's annoying but what can I do. Now that I had that experience, when I upload a CDLC (since november xd) and I get that error I just close the tab and open a new one and search for the song and that's the solution for me.

 

I hope that in the new ignition 4 we don't have those problems but we have to wait for that.

 

And I don't know if this is the place to say my complaints but you know them already, most of the people don't leave likes or don't comment about the song, just "add bass", "could you do this one", "this is thing is bad, and this too", but the comments saying "thanks" are so rarely to happen, the charters as me we don't get the appreciation that we deserve just if the song it's too famous even if it's super bad tabbed they get the best compliments.

 

So the new problem that I had is that I get some old comments in my Customs but I don't read them because I don't get any notification (just the replying ones), but may be there is an option that I don't check and that's the problem, but if not they have to leave a like on the custom post so I get the like notification then I can check the comments and I could see them, but if not there is a problem. It's a lost of time looking on each CDLC if there is an old comment to respond. So if I am wrong and there's a solution like a check mark please tell me, if not they should solve it in the future.

 

And I don't know If there are new comments while I am writting this because I heard like two times a message tone in my computer but I don't see nothing. And because I can see there is 3 guys and me reading this... Good Morning!!!

 

Saludos.

 

We are already working on solutions to all your complaints with Ignition4. I hope to wrap up the release and update of this soon. Once we upgrade the forums the "post" deleting issue should go away as well. I know it's frustrating and I wish I could just release ignition4 but we want it done right.

Hi Guys,

 

I have started using Ad Blocker Plus to get rid of the ads at customsforge that are getting in the way.

Link for Google Chrome version: https://adblockplus.org/ It works for me.

 

I have started on some new customs after nearly a year. More Cars, Sex Pistols, Motörhead, Black Sabbath and Willie Nelson so I can work on perfecting a decent Acoustic Guitar Tone, Hopefully!

 

Later, Terry

Please remember these ads do support CF. You can use ADP just to block the bottom ad and keep the remaining ones to still support us.

Much appreciated. 

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_jan_2020.pdf

No newsletter this month but I am happy to let you know that we have been hard at work on the new Ignition and we should have something to show you soon!
 

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader

You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_dec_2019.pdf

 

What about now? Can you check to see if it works and let me know?

Yes, now it woks again, thank you. What was wong?

 

I just reapplied your user group. I'm going to change it again let me know if it breaks.

What about now? Can you check to see if it works and let me know?

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_nov_2019.pdf

You can find additional support on the official discord:

 

https://discord.gg/z4UE7vE

To view this months newsletter please use a PDF Reader such as Adobe Acrobat Reader
You can also download this PDF here: https://customsforge.com/newsletter/newsletter_oct_2019.pdf

I am closing this topic as we have a new updated post: http://customsforge.com/topic/55497-state-of-customsforge-full-10182019/

Our current plan with development is to get the rewrite out asap of Ignition and upgrade the forums to the latest version. This will resolve a lot of issues. Additionally when we have the new ignition out it will be easier to push new features out since we know what we are working with now. The current code is just too integrated with the forums to do anything with, which is why we had to rewrite it. 

But yes, features like tags will be coming and we will be adding more features after Ignition4 gets released that the community wants. But our main goal is to get it rewritten and released so we can stop having performance issues.

 

 

Sorry man but thats the truth this site is just a forum with a big database and everything like you said i really dont want to get into your shoes i know that running this website is a big responsibility ;but there must have been a hugh mistakes made in the past 2 years

Because noting has changed ; there is still not a proper search engine for people to search and find out new songs

When you post a cdlc its got buried upon others cdlcs and you will never know what you missed because the system of this forum is super old and not changed for the past 2 years ; Theres got to be a rating system for people to know the good charts (and ive said it like 2 years ago)

Theres got to be a suggestion system for people to get suggestions for good new charts they might like

And get people encouragement to download the good cdlcs of this site

and last one theres got to be encouragement system for charters ; because no one ever saying "Thank you" or good words and thats not all youre fault because people(me included) dont like to say thank you for things but thats the way it works If you dont people will get much less quailty

charts and less rare charts that got no tabs online

A rating system will never happen and it was the downfall of the previous site before CF. A user can rate a custom bad just for not liking the artist. I was there around the end of SA and the rating system hurt a lot of charters. Rated songs 0 even if the CDLC was good. What we will introduce is a new like or report system. You can like it if you enjoy it, and add it to your collection. Or you can report the cdlc and give reasons why. But we will NEVER introduce a star rating system.

 

No proper search engine? Ignition is our search engine and does its job I have no clue what you are on about.

 

I agree there has been problems within the last 2 years we were near deep with an ignition prototype and our developer disappeared. We had to start over and that screwed us pretty hard. That's why this time I was involved so I could help document and learn the code.

 

But I still don't understand how you don't use Ignition properly. I have thousands of CDLC even after my hard drive crashed its not hard to discover CDLC if you go through artist view and download songs. I'm going to have to majorly disagree with you there.

 

 

I found out that the Ulitimate-guitar rating system is pretty good ; It needs 3 votes to show the rating and if the user update his tab the rating is starting all over again ; you can also make it that only users with 50+ messages can rate a cdlc ; but still i can understand how trolls can ruin the charts i just trying to find away that people will find out the good cdlcs over the bad ones

 

My problem about the search engine is that i cant found out what im looking for

For example i want: 2000s music ; female fronted ; pop ; youre search system doesnt allow me to make it and thats what need to be fix

Because when i want to put up some rare charts in this website they are just got buried upon others cdlcs and getting really low downloads

and thats because people dont know what it is ; and people wont click on them (even to show up the video)  because there are too many cdlcs

Maybe my solution is to force charters to do at least 3 Tags to explain what the songs are ; and that will show up next to the cdlc

Another solution is to give a medal(that people will think its like offical chart) next to trusted users who are known as making great cdlcs ; that way it will help people choose the good cdlcs

 

I appreciate youre work around this website and i understand you are working around to get a new version and its not all youre fault

Im as a charter i  dont really having fun when my cdlcs turn into a block of texts and people cannot discover them unless they know the bands name

And recently when putting up some rare cdlcs that got no tabs and getting 20 downloads+10 more after a week (on my new user)

 

Sometimes i request my cdlcs on twitch to get people to know the songs more but most of the streamers dont know those songs and already playing plenty more charts so people cant really get there what the songs about too

Thats why i prefer that people will know them here with a system that explain the cdlc rather then twitch where people just get to hear it played alongside many others and get confused

 

There's a thank you button on the bottom of the record page

 

And people dont click on it ;trust me i got too many cdlcs and its super rare to see some giving you a thank you

 

The new ignition will have tags, so that's a plus. 

Sorry man but thats the truth this site is just a forum with a big database and everything like you said i really dont want to get into your shoes i know that running this website is a big responsibility ;but there must have been a hugh mistakes made in the past 2 years

Because noting has changed ; there is still not a proper search engine for people to search and find out new songs

When you post a cdlc its got buried upon others cdlcs and you will never know what you missed because the system of this forum is super old and not changed for the past 2 years ; Theres got to be a rating system for people to know the good charts (and ive said it like 2 years ago)

Theres got to be a suggestion system for people to get suggestions for good new charts they might like

And get people encouragement to download the good cdlcs of this site

and last one theres got to be encouragement system for charters ; because no one ever saying "Thank you" or good words and thats not all youre fault because people(me included) dont like to say thank you for things but thats the way it works If you dont people will get much less quailty

charts and less rare charts that got no tabs online

A rating system will never happen and it was the downfall of the previous site before CF. A user can rate a custom bad just for not liking the artist. I was there around the end of SA and the rating system hurt a lot of charters. Rated songs 0 even if the CDLC was good. What we will introduce is a new like or report system. You can like it if you enjoy it, and add it to your collection. Or you can report the cdlc and give reasons why. But we will NEVER introduce a star rating system.

 

No proper search engine? Ignition is our search engine and does its job I have no clue what you are on about.

 

I agree there has been problems within the last 2 years we were near deep with an ignition prototype and our developer disappeared. We had to start over and that screwed us pretty hard. That's why this time I was involved so I could help document and learn the code.

 

But I still don't understand how you don't use Ignition properly. I have thousands of CDLC even after my hard drive crashed its not hard to discover CDLC if you go through artist view and download songs. I'm going to have to majorly disagree with you there.

I appreciate your detailed response.

 

>large queries that is slowing down the server

Those can't be simple lookups for the forum/ignition, can they?

 

>DDoS and scrapers that cause heavy load on the website

You should look into putting the entire domain behind CloudFlare's reverse proxy. Even their free tier could be very beneficial.

We've been under cloudflare for a long time but due to recent issues with SSL and other weird issues I had to remove the site from it. I'm still working on some odd login issues users are experiencing that has to do with SSL and cookies.

 

The slow queries are from a function called core_like and is very intergrated with the forums and ignition. When you follow a post, like a post, reply to a post, view a record, etc this function is used. It's the largest function and is multiple gigs by itself. It's a major design flaw unfortunately but we've fixed it in the new ignition.

 

As of right this second I am running an experiment on the website. So far it fixed performance issues but I need to see how it works during the day. Hopefully it improves performance but basically I am killing long lasting queries now. Just not sure if it's fully working yet.

 

At the risk of sounding like an asshole (sorry in advance), one would think that you could easily run a web server as well as the database for the forum and ignition on a VM for 10 bucks a month (20 if I'm to be generous and include some extra storage for backups and whatnot). There are hardly thousands upon thousands of concurrent users and neither do you store any CDLCs yourselves. The donation goal is 900 (!!!) a month and still there are performance problems that originate who knows where. I'm really puzzled by the situation. Sorry again and thanks for the service despite the recent issues.

Exactly. I wrote this very thing to Unleashed2k some months ago as well (it took several tries to load the page for sending the message and for it to actually go through).

 

I cannot understand why on earth would they need $900 a month to run a hosting for a forum. And with that, it is - admittedly - the worlds slowest forum in the year 2019. Perhaps in the history of the Internet.  I am just sad that this is a super useful forum which many people like, and donate to, but can still barely load forum pages without throwing an error five times out of six. And it has been pretty much like that ever since I discovered CF something like a year ago.

 

Administrators, hopefully this message will be considered as fair criticism so that you seek professional help with the problems with the website and resolve them in a long lasting way.

 

There are big query issues with the website that can only be fixed by upgrading the website & forums. There are issues with the server being maxed out (both CPU & Memory) over time when services are restarted. This is due to long slow queries that do not close, therefore it builds up on memory and CPU over time. Please note the $900 IS NOT JUST for servers. It is for development, email services, backups, and more.

 

There are several issues with the website I'm trying to resolve and rework asap. Soon I will be changing our servers from 2 to 1. One of the reasons the costs of the servers were so expensive was that we were paying for three servers (one for data, one for mysql, one for development) + backups + service licenses cost. 

 

Other problems we deal with include DDoS and scrapers that cause heavy load on the website. 

 

I wish I could host the website on a $10-20 server, I truly do. But due to the way the forums & ignition are coded it is not possible at the moment. Our database is over 20gb and has several issues that we're working on resolving. In fact, CF uses around 100gb of space.

 

My main goal is to finish Ignition4 asap, we are very close and after that we will start the migration of the website to the new forums. The new ignition is separated from the forums requiring only authentication from the forums. With clean code and queries it should run without using a massive amount of resources. 

 

I hope this can help you understand the cost of running the website and that my plan is to reduce the costs asap. It's hard to finish the website when our developers are volunteers. Our main developer in in India and deals with constant issues of terrorism & the government shutting down the internet. So he has been trying his best to wrap up the development of Ignition4. We just need more help finishing the user side and a few other functions then we are done. I have been personally working on the development this go around with additional front-end developers that have been working with me on completing what we can asap. 

 

Originally I wanted to begin beta testing this month but unfortunately due to problems beyond my control that is not happening. 

 

I'll be trying my best to lower costs and speed up the website. I love CF and I am sad I am letting people like you guys down. 

 

- Unleashed2k

 

Edit:

To be transparent here is an example of the large queries that is slowing down the server. I've came up with a solution that might resolve this. It is not ideal but in theory it should work.