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At a certain point all of the reasoning in the world can't take the place of action. And on that note, we are honored by your efforts Llama, but what happens when life changes, and you also move on? We're losing a well respected host as we speak, no? We can count on you today, and we're more than grateful, but tomorrow, the only server we can count on, won't be privately operated. Well, maybe day after tomorrow, or next month, but someday for sure! <3
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I am trying to set things up so that, should I become hopelessly busy or my attention moves elsewhere for a while, all can carry on without me. At the moment I'm only needed for the actual starting of the games, which does not take too long, but I hope to automate that ultimately as well.
The only outgoing at present is the cost of the domain name, which is something like £9 a year. I can cope with that, indefinitely I'd say. If, in the future, my brother can no longer let me use his mail server (which is what we're using at the moment), then hopefully I will be able to set up my own.
Finally, all the game files on the llamaserver are backed up every turn to another system. So I think there's no need to worry about games disappearing entirely if my machine explodes.
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And I think its fairly agreed between the server people that automating game setup such as I have in that example page would be BAD. Its not the hosting of the games that is hard on the server. But starting hundreds and hundreds of games that no one comes back to would definetly kill one. I suppose that setting it up thru paypal to charge would solve that.
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I do dream of one day making such a setup page. I started work on it at christmas, but then got busy. It's a huge job. But if I do ever get it working I will have quite a remorseless system of game-culling: If there's no activity on a game for a week, it'll e-mail the game admin to warn them. If they don't do anything for another week it'll kill the game. Possibly I might include another warning week in the middle there. But anyway, ultimately I will not have to watch it at all to prevent the number of games growing too large. Of course, with a PBEM system there is no overhead from dormant games anyway, so the main reason for culling would just be to keep the website tidy.
Any system requiring input from me is ultimately in trouble if I get distracted, so I will try to make sure that I can just leaving it ticking away on its own with no problems.