Reply To: The Random Post Thread (Game Potential)
Hmm. I’ll start with the stuff I know the answers to — those with actual technical chops will have recognized that I’m only fake-techy; as with all things I purport to know something about, there are people who know more about technical matters than I.
- First off, what it means that I’m the administrator. Well, I’m a “user administrator” (as you can see from my profile); JoCo is the “master administrator”. This means that I have (as I’ve said before) very little to no access to the back end of things, not that I would have any reason to be poking around back there. I can’t see the source code, user stats, database, or anything, and I can’t, for instance, install new extensions (which are things that add functionality to the forums — for instance, not too long ago JoCo installed the “poll” extension, which is why we can start polls in the forums).
I see the same exact forum you do, except I can do a couple more things — you know the little “edit” link on the far right of all the comments you create? Well, I’ve got an “edit” and “delete” link on every post in the forums. I can also close threads, sink threads, or make threads sticky, as well as create new categories (e.g. “Forum News and Issues”). As far as managing users, I approve new membership applicants, and I have the ability to move users to different “membership roles” (I could ban someone, for instance, or I could promote someone to “moderator”, for instance, which is a rung below “user admin”).
The short answer, then, is that “user administrator” means very little on the technical side of things. I’m not sure if the title’s supposed to mean that I am a forum user with certain administrative abilities or that I am supposed to administer to users, but both are accurate.
(I’ve said before, many a time, that everything I do as “user administrator” now is really far overstepping the bounds of the actual authority that JoCo intended to give me. I volunteered to help maintain the then-newly-minted “JoCo Tabs” forum category, so he gave me the edit power so I could move already-posted tabs into the right category. That’s it. Now I can ban people or delete whole threads.)
(I feel as though I’ve said all this before, in fact. FAQ time, I think.)
- I have never owned my own website, so I’m not the best person to ask about the rest, particularly cost. (If Mark weren’t on vacation already, I’d expect him to give a far better answer than I could.) Typically, the two things you pay for, though, when your site is hosted on a server, are space and bandwidth. Speaking untechnically, space is how much you can store, and bandwidth is how much data gets accessed by visitors.
These forum pages are mostly text, so even if there are a lot of them, they don’t take up as much space as the music files, which are much larger. The bandwidth costs of a forum like this one are also, I imagine, reasonable — the really, really popular forums out there, with many thousands of members, often end up charging for memberships in order to defray the costs a little. But once again, I’d expect music downloads and such to take up most of his bandwidth. (I don’t know the site stats, and I don’t altogether believe I’d be able to see those stats anywhere anyway.)
(Maybe someone else knows this, but the forum pages might also be generated on-demand — that is, if that’s true, they don’t “exist” until you access it. Think of it this way: with “static” pages, it’s like you ask me for a certain piece of paper and I open up my binder, find the page, and hand it to you. What I’m suggesting is that when you ask for a piece of paper, I hurriedly scribble out the information you want and hand it to you on-the-spot. Don’t know for sure if that’s true, but it demands a little less space, I think, the tradeoff being that it obviously takes more processing to construct a page than just to fetch one.)
(cont.)