back! And two changes!

[Alex Hornstein]

Hey cubeheads,

Cubetube is back and ready for action!  I’d also like to point out two changes we made to cubetube.

Most visibly, we’ve updated our forum from the original Google Group to the more modern Discourse forum currently at forum.cubetube.org   We’ve heard a lot of feedback that the google group was difficult to use, post files and photos, and was generally kinda clunky.  It also has the annoying feature of subscribing everyone to every conversation, even if it’s not relevant to your interests.  The new forum lets us show suggested topics as users post, so that people having common issues with wifi connectivity or seating LED rods can get an answer to their questions immediately from previous threads, without needing to post and wait for a response.  Also, forum users have the option to only get email updated from threads that they’re involved in, minimizing the amount of chatter in everyone’s inboxes.  The indefatigable Werner went through and migrated all the posts from the Google Group over to the new forum, so we didn’t lose any of the previous conversations.

You will need to make an account in order to post on the new forum.  It takes about 30 seconds, and then you’re ready to go.  Please let us know how you like it.

After this latest outage, we finished migrating cubetube over to Amazon Web Services, which should improve the robustness of the site.  Over the ~1.5 years that cubetube has been in operation, the two major* outages we’ve had were when a datacenter went down, in one case because of an attack and in another case because of a connectivity issue with the data center.  We looked at ways to build a completely custom system that would keep two systems in different physical locations in perfect sync, each one backing up the other in case it went down, but this is a non-trivial feat to pull off, and we (teaser alert) were hard at work on a new hardware project.  Amazon Web Services gave us that layer of redundancy without needing a ton of custom engineering, and that appealed to us.  You shouldn’t see any functional changes to the site — all this means is that the site will stay online and be a robust, sturdy home for your cube projects.

If you do notice anything out of the ordinary, please let us know.  Without further ado, please enjoy the new site, and as always, happy cubing!

—alex & the L3D team.

* both were resolved within a couple hours, but it’s still annoying to have downtime that we can’t control, and we want to get to a point where no one bad thing can take cubetube offline, so nothing stays between you and that sweet, sweet cubin'