stm32duino forum "Server quota exceeded"

[Andy2No]

The stm32duino forum, linked to from stm32duino/Arduino_Core_STM32, has been down for at least a few days.

Visiting the home page, http://stm32duino.com/, gives "Server quota exceeded".

[fpistm]

Hi,
See #574

[Andy2No]

I see. I looked at Issues first, but of course that's only Open issues.

FWIW, closing an issue is a pretty sure fire way of avoiding people seeing it.

Also, having read that, I'm really none the wiser. Is there a plan to get it running again, or not?

[fpistm]

I didn't close it.
We try to find a solution but this requires some time.

[Andy2No]

Given the data protection law problems which Roger mentioned, it would seem the only viable solution, in the short term, would be to bail out Roger's account - and pay his hosting company for the traffic.

Before finding that forum, I tried very hard to make any sense out of the main STMicroelectronics website. It seems to have been designed to bring web browsers to their knees, not for usability. It's impenetrable, frankly.

I hope STM realises the value of having a forum like that. I expect by now, most Nucleo and Discovery cards are bought either for educational purposes, or by hobbyists. Without something like the stm32duino forum available, you're not going to sell nearly as many.

You could, of course, start a new one from scratch, but losing what's there already wouldn't just be a shame - it would be incredibly wasteful.

I expect you have sales and advertising staff who spend more than it would cost to run Roger's forum for the year, in the course of one afternoon. And, I expect his forum has made a lot more sales for you than any of those people.

[TByte007]

The ST's site is absolute ... well - I'm sorry - cr4p. And how hard is for a company like ST to just caught few dollars for the hosting ? stm32duino is the best advertising the are getting - ever. I've never heard of them before finding it. ATMEL is recognized all over but they are NOT and stm32duino was changing that. How can they be so slow to get it :(

[fpistm]

@rogerclarkmelbourne already said he wants simply stop all stuff related to the forum so do not want this solution else this would be easy.
ST and Roger tried to find a proper way to handle GPDR without success.

[TByte007]

@rogerclarkmelbourne already said he wants simply stop all stuff related to the forum so do not want this solution else this would be easy.
ST and Roger tried to find a proper way to handle GPDR without success.

Does that mean that the forum / Wiki would just die ? No ST and no roger taking care of it :)
Can't they just pay for the hosting (or VPS) and administer it so they dont bother roger (without transferring ownership hence the GDPR issues) ? Sorry for the rambling but the forum / wiki was such an useful resource it's a shame for it to get lost.

[fpistm]

Sorry for the rambling but the forum / wiki was such an useful resource it's a shame for it to get lost.

I know we do our best to find a solution as mentioned several time.

[TByte007]

Sorry for the rambling but the forum / wiki was such an useful resource it's a shame for it to get lost.

I know we do our best to find a solution as mentioned several time.

Thank you !

[rogerclarkmelbourne]

Basically my hosting company pulled the plug, and told me it would not be possible to host this with them, even if I upgraded to their VPS package

The forum was taking 100% of the entire CPU capacity on one of their VPS's which is supposed to be shared by multiple users.

Also the traffic was approaching 100Gb this month, possibly with people making backups of the entire site. But even under normal conditions the traffic is often 50Gb per month.

I've been trying to transfer the site to ST since April, but GDPR and other privacy laws make that impossible.

The cost of hosting the site somewhere else would be thousands of dollars a year, which I'd need to pay for myself.
Adding advertising to pay for hosting is not a practical option, because I doubt it would cover the hosting costs.

I suspect if ST funded or had any admin rights to the site that would also be in breach of GDPR.

Also, my paid work commitments mean I can no longer spend the 1000+ hours a year administering the site (unpaid)

So since GDPR and Australian privacy laws prevent the site site being transferred, they have effectively killed the site.

[Andy2No]

What would be the legal situation if an archived copy of the site, without any user account details, was placed somewhere?

For example, it's already on the archive.org "Wayback" machine (at http://web.archive.org/web/20190715072346/http://www.stm32duino.com/), but that's notoriously unreliable to use - pages don't tend to link together properly, many are missing, and of course, the search doesn't work.

Also, it's a couple of months out of date, apart from the actual home page.

To be fair, that archive is working better than most I've found on archive.org, but I expect there's a limit to it - typically, a few clicks in to following a thread, it will say it can't find the corresponding page.

The fact that they are able to do that, suggests that there is no legal impediment to ST hosting its own archive, provided it's just read only pages, with no user account data. I.e., the site as it would have been visible to someone who wasn't logged in. That doesn't necessarily need any actual forum engine behind it, just some html pages with the content, and ideally, at least a Google site search box.

As far as I'm aware, there is no reason why any domain can't be transferred too - the domain itself (stm32duino.com) has no personal data associated with it.

FWIW, I'm still researching using STM Nucleos, and the STM32F103 in particular. Just about every search I do, leads me to a dead forum, called stm32duino.com.

For hobby, and educational purposes, that forum was clearly THE resource for information about these things, and without it, they would not have had the success they have now.

If all we're left with in the future, is the main ST Microelectronics site (which is truly terrible), and the Wayback engine, which most people don't know exists, they're probably just going to sink back into obscurity, and return to being something only professional electronic engineers know anything about.

[blackrosezy]

stm32duino should start using Amazon EC2 to handle thousands of traffic request and about the billing cost, other than get a sponsorship from ST, we can also request donation from users, something like Wikipedia is doing now.

About the GDPR, we can make all the emails in the forum nullified or replace with random strings.

Or if the worst come to worst, just setup a new forum with the same url, and we start again with an empty one.

[Andy2No]

That's a good point, blackrosezy. If all user account information, other than the forum display name / username, is overwritten or deleted, there should be no legal difference between the forum, and an archived copy of the forum. At that point, it would seem that no data protection laws apply which don't already apply to the Wayback Machine.

Incidentally, I have already found several broken links, in the Wayback archived version of the forum - any "Last post" link after about mid March, fails to find a corresponding page. Though browsing by category works better, it's not any more up to date. They seem to have grabbed just the home page, a couple of weeks ago, but not a lot of the more recent pages it links to.

[TByte007]

Well, my HOME internet is regularly going over 150GB per mouth if not more (yea torrents :D) - so it's not an excuse for them (or any hosting). The server load is and if many people are trying to backup the site it could be high. BUT they should have had a requests limiter per IP. I think they are living in 1999 or something or cant keep experienced admins with them.