Thanks again to Dominic Legault, who set this up and stopped it. This is my first exposure to a fundraiser; it is amazing what is possible. I was obviously excited about it, but now realize that Digitalfire has to remain completely a volunteer labour of love. I was worried about Dominic's reaction to cancelling this, but he is on board.
For your information: Site security and server resilience have been utmost since January. Digitalfire runs on a very fast server. For example, multiple times per day, it is handling five-requests-per-second from just IPs it has never seen before. Last Friday, it was maintaining 28 million active sessions. I had to upgrade it last March after being swamped by renegade AI scraping. Yet last week it slowed to a crawl because of the traffic generated by people making backups. Now, thank goodness, it is back to normal. But unprecedented security threats are here, via AI-assisted attacks and residential proxy botnets. Digitalfire is custom-coded so bots have no visibility into the code, and I understand it all, so am confident I can come back from any event. Yikes, machines are now smarter than we are in critical ways.
It is a code-museum (because I started around 1982 using dBase II). That being said, about 5 years ago I converted Digitalfire to an API fronted database that endpoint code calls to create pages on the fly. This is coupled with a backend custom content management system that interacts directly with the database; thus, no pages are edited, only DB records. But a lot of old code is still there. Here are the current priorities:
Other priorities that recent events indicate:
As noted above, at the beginning of Covid, I redesigned Digitalfire as a client/server page generation system. An API, fronting the database, can run on one server while the page-generator can run on another server (by querying the API). There is a lot of caching. The content management system is custom-written for the information hierarchy; it runs on the same server as the API.
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