Due to the sad events that has befallen the main sponsor of this forum, and because taking this over presents a major conflict of interest for myself (my employer already runs a forum of the same caliber) the current plan for Energy Talk is to shut it down in the coming weeks.
At the moment I have no idea until when the hosting will continue. It could end at any moment.
A backup was created of all the content up to today, December 30th. If the forum continues in some form, it can be done with this data.
It is unclear whether we will be able to keep the domain name. This only expires later this year, and I have no access to the DNS. I do not want to burden the bereaved with requests for this.
Traffic has also declined greatly recently, which also contributes to this decision.
In order to keep the core group of posters in contact, we might consider using another public platform. I am open to suggestions.
If any of the core members – if you were invited to come here back in the day, that is you – feel like they want to keep this going, please let me know. I am willing to help with migration of the data.
Some technical details about how this works.
We use the open source product called Discourse
We use docker to make it easy.
It runs on a virtual host at Digital Ocean right now
We use our own mail server, exim4 running on Debian, but that has already proven problematic in the past and should probably change. Some blacklists blacklist entire ranges of virtual hosters.
Let me know about any ideas you have for the future. Sadly I cannot do this.
No load shedding. Traffic has declined on the other place as well.
I completely understand why this has to happen. I will miss this forum. I got some good advice here and was impressed by how helpful and gosh darn nice folks are here.
It always comes to this, I’m afraid. I’ve seen forums wither and die before. I never have any resentment, but I do miss some of them.
Yes, since that sticky on Let’s Talk Victron at the top of the page was placed there with any and all side swipes against Victron removed it became quite enjoyable posting info there.
There are a number of Victron and even more “silent” Victron users on that forum.
The Victron users that do ask for help there at times are quite interesting issues, helped by other Victron users.
Hence my suggestion:
I’m sure the owner, Dirk, would not have a problem.
well looks like the SSL cert expired, which will definitely make it harder for users to visit now.
ps. A forum like this can technically run free apart from the domain name registration when using the free tier of Oracle cloud. A worthwhile idea to look at for anyone looking into taking this over.
Sad indeed when these things happen. Only on thing stays constant in life, the fact that things will always change.
Thanks @plonkster indeed a sad day - I concur that the winding up of this forum for the stated reasons is justifiable. If it is possible to migrate to a like minded forum I would be willing to tag along - not that I can contribute but losing access to the quality, both in members and content, would be a double blow.
Regards,
g
I fixed the issue with the SSL cert. It should auto-renew every 3 months but something went wrong.
The decision has been made to keep the site going.
Because I don’t have access to the old domain name, this will move to wattgeeks.co.za in the near future. As long as this server is up and running, there will be a note or a redirect somewhere to take people there.
For myself, I don’t have a lot of time to work on this right now, so I do one small task every day. The next step is to get an SMTP solution, because the current solution of running our own copy of Exim4 (mails server) has been problematic from the start, and will not get better in future.
Some people have asked for a breakdown of the costs.
Hosting is about 14USD per month.
Domain registration per year is R100-ish. Not a big deal.
There is a plugin at the moment that uses an AI subscription somewhere to check and prevent spam submissions. I don’t know what this costs, and how badly it is needed. Simply requiring people to read the site long enough to transition to trust level 1 before they can post, might be enough.
In short, the costs are not super high. That was one of the things we wanted from the beginning: The owner of the other renewable energy forum was using a commercial forum product, cloudflare, and several other services that ran up to over a thousand a month iirc. There is no reason it has to be that expensive.
How much emails are actually sent by this website? If you can keep it down to 200 mails / day, you can get it for free.
I run a postfix container at home, for my (1 email a month) email I send myself. ok ok its only if the synology wants to email me about running out of disk space.
SMTP2GO give 200 mails / day outbound or 1000 mails per month, on the free plan. PLENTY, unless this website sends spam?
CLOUDFLARE gives unlimited emails inbound for receiving and forwarding to whereever you want.
Seeing as you mentioned this website already uses docker containers, here is how I have it configured: (you obviously just need to tweak it)
I’ve narrowed it down to two options, Zoho has something called Zeptomail which is designed specifically for the application we need it for, and which is super cheap.
The next option, in terms of value for money, would be a Google workgroups account at 7 USD a month.
The issue with a limited amount of emails per day, is that a spam attack like we had last year can quickly drain all of them, and at our user levels we might already be on the low side (we send emails also if someone asks for a notification on a topic).
My wife also has quite a bit of experience with Zoho products and they are not bad. So I’m going to try that. Of course nothing prevents us from changing later.
Okay the costs don’t seem to be that much but it’s still there.
If it’s possible to set up a donations feature then I don’t mind contributing to keep this alive.
in terms of the spam / bots, could also enable a manual approval process to prevent auto registrations like what other forums do.
@plonkster if there’s anything that I can do to assist, let me know.
I never met Jaco but engaged with him a few times when I needed anything and he was always willing to assist. Once I asked about where I could get an mc4 removal tool and he actually drove to my home to drop a few off but I wasn’t at home at the time.
i had the wrong impression about him from the other site and I remember commenting about it on mybb. I couldn’t have been more wrong about him at that time. He really went out of his way to help everyone, even random people online.
