I've been hosting NGLogs and the EGB website now for over 15 years as a labor of love, evolving the code and making changes to keep up with the constantly changing needs of the NewGrounds community. When Casualty asked me about taking over the NG Logs site, I wasn't sure at first, but when I discussed it with my friend and business partner John, he thought it would be a nice way to give back to the NewGrounds community. We made some space on our hosting platform, grabbed a few domain names, set up a MySQL database, and off we went.

Since then, NGLogs has grown to include the Portal Guard program, more functions and lists were added, and it was reformatted to be mobile-friendly. All of the manual lists that many members used to create manually are now provided as reports on the site. Users can check their stats as often as they wish, and on the last day of the month ALL users are automatically scanned and updated for the monthly status reports.

Along the way, I also wound up taking over the Elite Guard Barracks site from EagleRock, and gave that an update as well, adding month roster reporting and publishing as well as the history and manifesto of the Barracks.

I did this all because I wanted to - there was a need in the NewGrounds community, and I had the ability to fill that need. I used the resources I had at my disposal, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

But time has a way of catching up to us all. I'm not as young as most of you - in fact, I'm willing to bet I am older than 99.9% of all users and employees at NewGrounds. I have lived (so far) just over 6 decades, and between my age and some non-terminal health reasons, I am planning on retiring by the end of 2025. Going to be doing a lot of travelling to places I haven't been, or revisting cities that I've seen on business trips but never had a chance to enjoy. I'll still be popping in once in a while, but I know I just will not have the time or ability to maintain these sites and databases once I start.

So where does that leave all of you?

To be honest, I think it makes the most sense to move all the code and data to NewGrounds. I am going to reach out to Tom, Wade and Brentheman to see if they are willing to help out and rehome everything. Initially, they can pretty much leave everything as-is, and later, they could work on cleaning up some data integration and process optimization. If you think that is a good idea, send them a PM and let them know that. I did post a message like this in September of 2023, thinking I was going to retire at the end of 2024. But for many reasons, that got pushed off. But this time, it's going to happen.

But if they decide that they don't want that responsibility, I will then need to find a willing volunteer that will take over the site. There's a few details we need to cover, so if you're interested, please keep reading!

Requirements:

1) Hosting - the system needs a Linux web server running PHP 7 and MySQL 5.6 (yes, it's old code). The code takes up about 100MB, and the total for all of the data is about 1.2GB (many tables, some very large with hundreds of thousands of history records).

2) There are two domains used: nglogs.com and eliteguardbarracks.com

3) The sites are actually stored in folders off of my test server at wkrconcepts.com (wkrconcepts.com/nglogs and wkrconcepts.com/egb) but the domain names redirect to those folders. Currently hosted by "Domains Priced Right", which was actually a GoDaddy reseller. The estimated annual cost for web hosting, domain names and SSL is about $300 US.

If you were starting from scratch, that's going to be your approximate annual cost. But if you already have access to a public Linux web server that can run old PHP/MySQL code, then you only have to worry about the SSL and the domain names, which runs about $100 US per year.

I do NOT ask for any money to run the site, and I ask that you don't, either. The new owner needs to be comfortable enough to take on these expenses without worrying about the financial impact on their budget.

The sites are fairly stable; there are a few tasks you need to do on a monthly basis to keep it running (all on the last day of the month):

- Run the full stat polling scan for all NGLogs users (takes a few hours to run)

- Update the monthly reports based on the new data (that's literally just clicking a button and confirming a run date)

- Run the monthly stat collection for the Elite Barracks

- Post the Barracks roster from the stat page into the Elite Guard Forum



There's also the occasional user maintenance, where you may need to make adjustments to user records in the system (usually a renamed user or setting someone active or inactive)

The weak point of the system is the stat reading code - in order to retrieve the stats for any given user, the system has to read 6 different web pages from the NewGrounds site via the CURL functions in PHP, parse them and extract out the data. Occasionally, the programmers at NewGrounds change the layout or underlying coding for a user page, and the stat programs fail - until you review the page and adjust the keyword / scanning data within the program. It's actually not that bad, as it's all about looking for patterns and keywords in the code, and the process is all array driven - but we'll get to those details later on.

So to recap, here's what the sites need from their new owners:

- Good understanding of PHP/MySQL

- Willing to spend $300 a year to host the site, SSL and domain names

- Will dedicate time to always run the end-of-month programs (or have someone you trust run them for you if you can't)

- Will post results once a month to the EGB forum

- Will perform occasional user maintenance and be able to adjust the CURL page reader if NewGrounds changes any user pages.

- Will be a good steward to the site, and run it for the foreseeable future

- And if it comes to it, be willing to find a new responsible owner and pass it on to them.



It sounds a little crazy - why would anyone spend their own money and time to maintain all of this information? Because the NewGrounds user community needs it and uses it daily, and until I can talk the Fulps into taking it over, we will need to continue to manage it ourselves.

I hope I can find a willing volunteer in the next 8 months - and when I do, I will work out all of the technical details on transferring the site over to them.

If you are interested, please send me a PM. We can work out the details as we go.

Thank you all for your support and friendship for almost 20 years here at NewGrounds. It's been a blast!