Originally posted by Purple_Rain:

... P.S. existing crawler is far from nice and stable solution;( it is often down for days unfortunately ( dunno how hard to totally rewrite and recompile crawler for VPS usage case so can not comment

Originally posted by VinniV:

Well... crawler could be in simple PHP and will work just fine. ...

Or it could be in Python, or, depending on the specifics, the C# program can be hosted as an Azure WebJob or Azure Function... But that is not the issue at hand, since Webhosts are generally not necessarily happy about hosting whichever self-made crawlers, due to issues such as receiving a lot of complaints from various servers, especially if a crawler doesn't respect robots.txt, and due to issues such as that on a VPS the hardware is shared and if the crawler needs a lot of that hardware capacity pretty much all the time, also not something many are happy about.

Of course, in case of the AStats crawler, it doesn't crawl the entire web. But that isn't necessarily obvious through them automated sign-up forms, so there would have to be individual emails be sent to ask whether or not this or that webhost would be ok with it - and then there would still be that issue about how much hardware capacity it takes. And all that aside from the entire issue of the hosting costs, with the website income perhaps not being even close to 80 a month (meaning that it is possibly quite lower, and the gap would have to be paid from a certain person's pocket, who doesn't have more benefit from the website than everyone here).

With a site like astats, where some information and features are valuable to users and generated by the users (I specifically have my own playlist in my mind which I took some effort to create, and also the guides written by people, some of them are unique to this site and not anywhere else), I think they could be made available through a "feature-reduced" but more stable site. The reasons why the website is often down shouldn't impact the site as much as they currently do. I guess my suggestion could be called a "less monolithic design", with the parts that are stable and easy to keep avaiable, should be available.

Splitting a bit of the site to a more stable version is a good idea, it's the crawler and the leaderboard that are filling most of the database and causing most of the troubles. Just having a site with guides, playlists, and so on would be a lot easier. As it goes now, restoring the profiles and achievements everyone gained are causing me the most trouble, those tables are over 100GB, and certainly to get it all synced up. It might be good to get a basic site running, perhaps I can finish that tomorrow and add the rest of the things the days after.

I am curious, do you really need to restore that? Couldn't the crawler just rescan the profiles? I mean sure it would be a lot of data, but not so much at a time, some user might have quitted hunting and do not need to be rescanned. As you do not have much time for astats, it might be wiser to spent it enchancing the crawler so it is more reliable. Rebuilding the entrys wouldn't be so much of a problem then anyways ;). Just asking, as I have no idea how astats' DB structure is anyways.

Originally posted by 501 Gurkoel:

I am curious, do you really need to restore that? Couldn't the crawler just rescan the profiles? I mean sure it would be a lot of data, but not so much at a time, some user might have quitted hunting and do not need to be rescanned. As you do not have much time for astats, it might be wiser to spent it enchancing the crawler so it is more reliable. Rebuilding the entrys wouldn't be so much of a problem then anyways ;). Just asking, as I have no idea how astats' DB structure is anyways.

I think this might give problems if you have earned achievements on games that aren't on your profile, like with steam's family share. Or sometimes my review copies say on astats that I only have a license for 2 weeks or something like that (While those are just like normal games in my library and other achievement website don't show any mention like that. )

For ppl looking for a temp site, exophase is probably my favorite whenever astats is down.

We appreciate all your work Myth.

Is it End? Game Over?

Originally posted by NutellaOrgies:

For ppl looking for a temp site, exophase is probably my favorite whenever astats is down.

I also like completionist dot me. The only thing it (and all the other websites, really) doesn't have that AStats has is all the (manually set) categories for the achievements. Before starting a game I'd open AStats and check if there are any missable achievements.

Originally posted by Vora:

Is it End? Game Over?

YUP

I also echo the sentiment that the site is especially useful for the information it provides. The little guides for certain achievements that don't appear anywhere else, the broken achievements being marked and the tags for missable or limited achievements.

I don't think anyone outside of the top 50 users or so take the leader boards that seriously, and there are other sites that have leader boards for those that care, (some with arguably more balanced scoring systems). So if the scoring system and leader boards are causing the issues with getting the site running and are the cause of the crawler going down all the time, then I would be all for the site not employing those until such a time as stability can be achieved. A leaderboard also increases the need for moderation, which is an extra burden.

In fact my ideal site would be a cross between the UI of completionist, with the extra information of astats, so I can research a game before starting it.

Have to massively agree with Formidolosus. I also like that it combines a time to 100%, and a user score with everything above. It's all succinctly displayed.

Wait, is the site down for good? I'm devastated.

Still down...

And what's the point of saying "still down" or "game over"? Everyone interested knows that the site is down. Mytharox is working on it. Show some fucking support, guys, or move on.

That being said, I think it's a good idea to set a Patronite/Patreon or whatever for the site, or something like Buy me a coffee or Ko-fi, where we can show our support even if the site is down (so no option to become a VIP is available). I feel bad I use AStats so much and have pretty much no way to help now.