Hello everyone,

I've been preparing this for over a month, and it's finally live: the site moved to a new server this morning, much more powerful than the previous one.

We're still with the same host, but now in a datacenter located in Falkenstein, Germany. For those who enjoy the technical side, we're moving from an ARM processor to a much newer and more powerful x86 one, and we're taking the opportunity to get 320 GB of storage, as the previous 160 GB were about to be filled up by your creations.

The difference in speed is very clear: pages are now generated by the engine in 30 to 50 milliseconds, compared to 110 to 200 ms before — that's two to four times faster! I really feel it makes a difference when browsing, especially for those of you in Europe. From America, data need to cross the ocean twice (+ 50/70 ms).

Beyond faster pages, this performance mainly allows us to better withstand bots: the site can now serve 400 pages per second, compared to 100 before.

I took the chance to tackle several other projects.

• A new search engine. Until now, search was handled directly by phpBB (the forum software itself), which was both slower and heavier. I've replaced it with a dedicated engine, Manticore, whose one and only job is search. In practice, your searches are now near-instant, while also taking the load off the server.
• New protections against bots. As I've mentioned several times, the site is constantly besieged by thousands of bots (AIs harvesting data, bots looking for vulnerabilities…). To keep them in check without slowing down your browsing, I've put two things in place: caching pages for visitors who aren't logged in (pages are prepared in advance and served instantly, without making the server work again on every visit), and a limit on the number of requests per second for those same logged-out visitors (a bot can no longer hammer the site without being throttled). Those of you who are logged in aren't affected.
• Improvements to make things even faster. The site now relies on more modern technologies to deliver pages to you: HTTP/3 (a faster way for your browser and the server to talk to each other) and Brotli (a compression method that makes pages lighter to download).
• Faster actions on iOS: removal of the 300 ms delay between tapping a link and the next page loading.
• Forum engine updated to the latest version.

Finally, we no longer use Cloudflare (the intermediary that used to sit between you and the site, with its verification step that could sometimes cause trouble). I'm hoping to do without it for good, thanks to all these new protections.

I'd like to say a special word for the site's supporters: I haven't replied to each of them individually, but here is their real "reward": I could never have rented this server (which is more than 10 times more expensive than the one that saw the start of V3, and twice as expensive as the one we've just left) without them, and I'm truly grateful to them.

I also leaned heavily on Claude (Anthropic's AI) to get up to speed on all these technical topics and to help me test many different configurations; it's costly, and the supporters made it possible for me to have the subscription (which I'll keep putting to good use going forward).

So you are very directly, and very concretely, helping the site move forward. Thank you!

I've been at this for nearly 48 hours, so I'm going to take a little break, and I'll see you all very soon.

Thank you Zach for all your efforts for this lovely site!!
Idk about you guys but I did feel a difference

Thank you SO SO MUCHH

Thank you so much! I can feel the difference!!

Also thank you so much for creating this site! It means a lot to me

Thank you for being so invested and dedicated to building this site into something even better than it already is. You're the best, Zach!

This is incredible, Zach! It’s honestly amazing all the things you do for this place! I thank you greatly for all your hard work and dedication! I wish you the best of luck with the site as we move into a new version gradually!

Thank you so much for all your hard work Zach!

Tysm Zach for all your time and effort and hard work that you've put into this amazing site!!

Thank you so much Zach, this site has kept me sane!

This is awesome, Zach! I can already feel the change! Thank you so much!<3