UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard/Archives/File Hosting Feedback

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File Hosting Feedback

Those who have been around here a while might know of my eventual wish to begin hosting more files on UESP. I'm closer to actually thinking about implementing something but would like to get everyone's feedback on it. My basic thoughts on it are:

• This is not to compete with all the other ES hosting sites but provide another option. I find most of the existing hosting sites extremely slow and annoying overall (I recently reinstalled Oblivion and was re-downloading mods...ugh). I also want to make sure ES file content is always available in the future.
• I don't imagine trying to host every single MW/OB mod. I'm mainly interested in making sure all the good quality mods and utilities from all games will be always available.
• I'd like the download/upload interface to be as simple as possible and fit within the MediaWiki framework. Ideally I'd like something similar to how the Image namespace is used allowing users to upload and manage files themselves.
• File hosting will mainly affect the site's bandwidth and the site load very much. I'll likely setup a separate light-weight web server (tinyhttpd?) to serve files/images so as to not interfere with the main web page server. The site's monthly bandwidth can be easily increased and we can upgrade from a 10Mbs to a 100Mbs connection relatively cheaply. I'll likely also design the system to allow the file/image server to be a seperate physical machine to allow it to scale easily in the long term.

No rush on this as I haven't even done any planning or designing yet beyond what I've done in years past. -- Daveh 18:13, 27 March 2007 (EDT)

Your choice, of course, but I tend to think that it's better to stay focussed. Download sites are already pretty well covered. And running one of them is a lot of work. And I'd be very concerned with major downloads interfering with the wiki operation. OTOH, a concern about always keeping mods available is reasonable -- I remember multiple Morrowind sites going down. But a solution there might to act as a backup site for the other major sites. (If they're interested -- and assuming licensing concerns don't get in the way as they did for MW. Painful long battles just to rehost files that people weren't sure they had the permissions to redistribute. Aaargghh.) --Wrye 21:03, 27 March 2007 (EDT)