SpaceSimCentral

I've been getting a lot of 503 Service Unavailable errors recently when visting the site

Sorry for the late reply, yes I saw this too @classyk and did a little research on my host (godaddy) they are charging me way too much for what I get...
On my current plan which I paid upfront for 3yrs of hosting (which is due to renew in Jan 2026), this plan I get 1 CPU/1 GB Mem/500GB HDD which its on a shared host. Cannot afford a VPS since SSC makes no money  
So I am probably going to self host the site, I think in the long run it should be cheaper for me and hopefully more reliable. Plan....
Just ordered a Raspberry Pi 5 w/8GB Mem, and I have a 1TB nvme SSD coming. I will set this up on Linux (probably Ubuntu), get PHP 8.x installed (godaddy is on 7.2, they wont let me update). And then I will probably have AI assist me in converting WPForo forums to PHPBB 3.3.15 and will use Apache/MariaDB. Least this way i have FULL CONTROL on what gets updated and I can do backups etc...
SSC getting hit hard with spam as well and WPForo is awful at eliminating it. I think I will have all the pieces I need next week and then I will start building the RP5 into a webserver It will be 6-8x more powerful and running on updated everything. Only issue may be my home connection but since SSC is mainly only text shouldn't be that much of an issue. I need to get my butt in gear because I don't want to have to renew with Godaddy, they are just not worth the money and I need to get off WPForo (I HATE THIS PLATFORM NOW).
So when I get a demo site up and running and my firewall setup properly I will post something and get peoples thoughts. The big issue I think with the process is migration of data away from WPForo and into PHPBB and securing the site.
So I am aware of the outages and I am going to try to fix this or least have the site under my control so I can update things when I need to on shared hosting I don't get that ability sometimes.

Been working with AI to assist me with the conversion of the WPFORO database to the PHPBB and I still have to work on the theme/style a bit more and tweak the data import but from a data aspect its coming along nicely. If I can unpersonalize the script enough i may put it on github for others to use. It migrates all the data in like 15-25mins so not bad. Things I still need to look at is Avatars and Attached files. Then I have to figure out what to do with the download library....? 
SSC-phpbb.jpg

Hi Everyone
I have been absent a lot recently but I wasn't doing nothing. I think I have scripts in order to attempt a total site conversion to PHPBB
As I have said before, here is the challenges:
- WPForo is not compatible (ie: schema and plugins) with PHPBB so there is a lot on manual manipulation that will need to happen and there will be some features removed or just offline until I can manually convert.
- Probably before Xmas I will probably disable all posting for SSC so I know when I capture the DB that its all the data with nothing being added to it. Plus it will give me time to clean up the database and remove users from the system that are not active.
- I need time to convert some of the pages as well so I can retain as much data as I can I will backup everything so I hope nothing major goes wrong, but priority will be the forums.
- Passwords, I think I can retain user passwords but I will send out a email/PM to all the users if I cannot with a default password to use. WPForo uses a different hashing logarithm from PHPBB so I cannot promise and I will try to keep avatars too.
So after this post I will lock the forums allowing new logins while I purge unused accounts. Wish me luck and if you go to SSC and its offline its not gone I may need some time for this conversion and I will also need to redo all the DNS and unhook from godaddy hosting.
If I don't get to chat much with anyone, everyone have a safe and happy Christmas
-D1-

New registrations are disabled. So if you are wanting to register your going to have to wait until site is converted.

Hey Everyone,

Been grinding over the last 3 days trying to get everything working.... at the moment everything seems to be working.

- DNS looks to have propagated to my public IP
- NGINX is serving the pages quickly (a lot quicker than godaddy)
- Purged like 10000 accounts
- Post/thread cleanup
- Configuration of extensions (manually uploaded and configured download area)
- Constructed pages
- New games list
- Setup some interesting Captcha for those spammers

So hope everyone will like the simplicity and its very quick from what i been noticing with serving up the content. Like I have said before I am self hosting the site its on a RaspberryPi 5 /8GB Mem and 1TB NVMe so its almost 6x more powerful than the shared hosting with Godaddy. Only bad thing is I am the single point of failure if SSC goes down So if I have internet or power issues SSC will be down but soon as i know I will get SSC back up as soon as I can

Please let me know if you see issues with the site, errors, etc...

Things I still need to do:
- Ranks
- Look over all security
- Investigate SSL (right now site running just HTTP)
- Look into integration with social media (mainly twitter)
- Styling tweaks, I see some places where I need to play with some css still.
- Look into blacklisting certain email providers to prevent spammers

-D1-

SSL Cert is now running on the site. I dumped the site cache, people may need to drop their cached files for the site/cookies as well for everything to load right. There is a 'Delete Cookies' link at the bottom of the page in the footer.

Wow, amazing! So glad it's back and it's so shiny and new

It looks like maybe some of the bbcode tags like [ quote ] and [ url ] have been converted to plain text OR there is some processing effect that is only run on posts after they are edited that recreate the bbcode effects. For example, in one of my posts the URL tag was visible but after I edited and saved the post the URL tag was converted to a link again.

classyk wrote: Fri Dec 26, 2025 12:24 am It looks like maybe some of the bbcode tags like [ quote ] and [ url ] have been converted to plain text OR there is some processing effect that is only run on posts after they are edited that recreate the bbcode effects. For example, in one of my posts the URL tag was visible but after I edited and saved the post the URL tag was converted to a link again.

It was like that for the video embedding. I had to create some scripts to go in and strip out the [youtube] or [video] tags and then I had to rerun phpbb cli commands to like reparse all of the posts. I can look into the [url] tag, it is a valid tag. But new versions of phpbb should just auto convert it to a hyperlink. But I noticed that a edit/save fixes it so its definitely a importing issue. I am not sure what I can do with quotes... because their formatting is a lot different from WPForo, phpbb actually tags it with more data that I can't just replicate. I would have to experiment on a post and see if I can do it.

One good thing is I will stay on phpbb for good so going forward formatting issues will go away.

classyk wrote: Thu Dec 25, 2025 8:58 pm Wow, amazing! So glad it's back and it's so shiny and new

How is the site running for you is it more responsive than before? I know fopr me sometimes pages took 5-10s to load with godaddy and when saving a post would take sometimes more.

sscadmin wrote: Fri Dec 26, 2025 1:37 am How is the site running for you is it more responsive than before? I know fopr me sometimes pages took 5-10s to load with godaddy and when saving a post would take sometimes more.

The speed is great now. Really responsive. It feels like a normal bulletin board now. Before it was slow. You're inspiring me to self host in 2026. I love the addition of direct messages too.

I'm just really pleased you're re-inventing the place, you've got something really special here.

classyk wrote: Fri Dec 26, 2025 6:36 am The speed is great now. Really responsive. It feels like a normal bulletin board now. Before it was slow. You're inspiring me to self host in 2026. I love the addition of direct messages too.

Godaddy hosting was going up every year and the quality of the hosting was going down. I only had 1 CPU/ 1GB mem on my shared host and I was getting frustrated knowing I was paying them hundreds a year for this. The one downfall for self-hosting is that if my power or internet goes out (which if very possible in the winter since I live in NH, USA) the site will be down until it comes back online. And another possible thing that could bring down the site is if my internet provider changes my IP, which so far its been static.... but if that changes I will see to purchasing a static IP.

But for the price of less that one years hosting with godaddy I was able to purchase:

- RaspberryPi 5 w/8 cores and 8GB mem
- Purchase the addon card for PI5 to allow hooking up a full sized NVMe drive (1 TB Western Digital Black Drive)
- Purchased a case with passive cooling
- Use linux for OS (RaspOS) everything is updated

Went with running NGINX for the webserver more complex to setup but I think its more secure and much faster at serving pages. Running PHP8.2 and latest PHPBB and DB is latest MariaDB. All running in a box about the size of two decks of cards stacked It connected directly into my router and runs headless. So I SSH into it whenever I need need to work directly on it.

Currently CPU load rarely exceeds 5% and Memory rarely goes above 30% and still have plenty of HDD space left. In my calculations I almost 7x my performance over GoDaddy with a PI5 and Linux.


Yeah every 4-6yrs I may have to buy a new RaspPi setup, but for about $300 one time purchase I will save thousands over a 4-6yr time period. Took me about 1 day to get all the DNS/Router/SSL straight. GoDaddy is still my Domain Name provider since that is cheap at $15yr

But overall nice learning experience and so far I am really liking the results.

I forgot to ask, did anyone get a email from SSC about the login/password if your existing didn't work the logs said it sent. I just don't know for a fact people got it?

I honestly think self-hosting can make a big comeback (or even be bigger than it ever was). Mobile phones could also easily become personal social media servers to friends and family.... like Facebook but for your closest 100 friends and family.

sscadmin wrote: Sat Dec 27, 2025 5:29 pm I forgot to ask, did anyone get a email from SSC about the login/password if your existing didn't work the logs said it sent. I just don't know for a fact people got it?

I haven't got an email notification from this domain since November if that helps

Spam seems to be a problem with the new setup

I put in a 3 post limit, before posting URLs, its definitely less than before. I will look into more measures to stop it, but its difficult because you also don't want to stop users from signing up too Least with phpbb I can just click on the user and delete them with all their posts in one motion.

I didn't want to have to put in moderator approved posting cause that sucks if I am not around for a few days. I will continue to tweak things.

Ooh new look for the site D1? I like it!
It kinda reminds me of the very old site the SSC had years ago!

Geraldine wrote: Sun Feb 01, 2026 9:43 pm Ooh new look for the site D1? I like it!
It kinda reminds me of the very old site the SSC had years ago!

Thanks Geraldine, yes initial SSC was on PHPBB. Decided to go back to minimal site and just have a forum, plus this new setup will run a lot faster than GoDaddy. I basically have 6x the resources on a Raspberry Pi5 (like the size of a deck of cards) and it runs everything with all updated PHP/SQL/NGINX so it should be really responsive compared to before.

Only downside its self hosted so if my power goes out the site goes down until my power/internet comes back :0