UnmannedSpaceflight.com and The Planetary Society, "A match made in the heavens" Options

[elakdawalla]

I, along with the rest of the admin team here at UnmannedSpaceflight.com have a big announcment to make today: The Planetary Society and UnmannedSpaceflight.com are joining forces. Here's the Society's press release about it. I'm so excited! You guys with your fantastic work processing space images are exactly the kind of people we seek to connect with, inspire, educate, and in turn, see you educating everyone around you about what's going on in the exploration of our solar system.

Some of you may be a little concerned about this new partnership -- you may be thinking that the Planetary Society will try to change the way the forum is run. Let me assure you that that will not happen. My bosses at the Society recognize that the reason this place is so great is that it is a community that has grown around itself, developed its own rules, and is functioning very well on its own terms. The administrative policies will not change. All that is changing is that the Society is agreeing to be responsible for the financial maintenance of the website; and that when you make donations to support this site, your donations are tax-deductible (at least in the U.S).

If you have any questions or concerns about this new collaboration, please do not hesitate to ask me or any other member of the admin/mod team.

[ElkGroveDan]

Your McMansion in Woodland Hills is safe. Again if it was inappropriate, it would have been deleted. The junk drawer is just a place to move OT discussion when a thread is getting too cluttered. I even moved some of mine and Doug's comments.

[Stu]

In fact I think I just saw Stu banging a wrench on a steam pipe down there.

That I am Sir, that I am.

Ye cannae change the laws of UMSF...

[JohnVV]

i have always considered this site to be VERY professional ( more so than most) and as such , I treat it as such . ( way different than at shatters , or even LQ )
now there will ALWAYS be a bit of cross talk , and a very small amount is good . SO as long as WE HERE keep up with what we have already been doing . There will be no problems

and maybe the " more general public" site will get a bit more like this one

[Greg Hullender]

I think it's important to keep UMSF professional enough that actual scientists are comfortable posting here from time to time. In my mind, that's the #2 attraction of this board.

The brilliant amateur work on image processing is #1, of course. :-)

--Greg

[nprev]

An advanced planning question here. Us older heads remember the Phoenix landing on UMSF very well, including the traffic spike that began roughly 2 hrs. before EDL & peaked at somewhere around 273 users, most of whom were apparently first-time visitors. The new association with TPS could quite possibly double--or triple, or even quadruple--that number during the MSL landing less than two years from now. Are there any early notions about boosting server capacity in advance of the event, perhaps just temporarily by setting up redirects to mirrors for the duration (...if that made sense; not an IT guy), or throwing the discussion to a chat host (that could prove very difficult to moderate, or even follow coherently)?

Just askin'. It would be a real tragedy if we went down during the heat (ta dah, dah!) of EDL. The dialogue on UMSF during the Phoenix descent was one of the most enjoyable & memorable times on the forum for me, and I'd venture to guess also for many others; it would be terrible to not have something similar for Curiosity.

[djellison]

The server was explicitly over specified when we got it - it could handle 10x the traffic and none of you would notice. Indeed we had one hack-attack about a year or so ago that emulated hundreds of thousand of visits per hour, and nobody noticed a performance hit for 24 hrs.

Plus, adding mirrors is an exceptionally complex and expensive thing to do for database driven forums.

Every now and again we'll get massive temporary spikes in traffic, but we only know by looking at stats, nit wondering why the site is tuning slow.

[nprev]

Asked & answered, plus I learned something. Warm fuzzy achieved. Thanks, Doug!

[NMRguy]

Very interesting news, indeed! Thanks to all for years of interesting discussions, and looking forward to many more.

[cbcnasa]

UMSF is and has been a fantastic professional source for information to a casual follower, thank you so much.