my.esoTalk
my.esoTalk is my latest project. The goal is to create a free forum hosting service for users to take advantage of the esoTalk forum system without worrying about hosting costs or setup.
Main goals include
- Free forum for everbody
- Multiple servers to balance load
- Simplify administration overhead
Right now the admin system is being written. The system needs to automatically find the least-loaded server, create the forum on that server, report back to the account owner their forum information, and have it all easily upgradeable and manageable by my.esoTalk admins.
The main issue right now is the upgrading feature. New versions of esoTalk will be released, and upgrading hundreds of forums at once is a big task. Possible solutions include
- Modify esoTalk core to handle multiple sites. This way, every forum will be served from 1 install of esoTalk, and only requiring admins to upgrade 1 instance of esoTalk
- Write a system to upgrade all forums at once. This is possible, but then we run into time-out issues, and it something goes wrong it could stop the whole process. This would also take a long time, and create a lot of downtime.
I'm looking more at modifying esoTalk core to handle multiple sites. More information will be posted here as I get going.