There are still a few things to do that really need to be fully tested on a live VPS for optimisation and a few tiny but important plugins to finish that would also benefit from being live.

I was just about to spin up another VPS on hetzner to probably end up taking over as the main LES server, then I see that the prices went up +300% they are charging around $20 now for a fairly basic 2GB VPS, its a bit silly, sorry hetzner... you are not LE* anymore, so we need to move.

Looking for recommendations, currently LES lives in Germany, yet looking at traffic patterns, about 70% is north america based, so I am thinking the best option is to look for East Side USA, part of me kind of likes the idea of Ashburn... feels like a good home for old internet things

Does not have to be Ashburn but that would be a bonus, I probably would not want to get any further west than Dallas, though.

Looking for strong recommendations, I was going to put it on quickpacket, but they only do dedicated servers and it feels like LES should really be running on a VPS.

Updates.

Lots of other Ui fixes and theme fixes and also some standardisation, side bar has been updated, more for trending and offers, and a lot of irrelevant or duplicated UI stuff has been removed.

Theme toggles on the top bar now, no password needed, as well as a slider, if you want none of the animations or anything related to karma that has a visual impact, you can have it.

The support system and blog system is built directly into vanilla now also.

It's not really THAT different to how it is now, at the core, it is the foundation and groundwork for a much more self-moderating community; not everything connected to that is in, yet, but the foundation for that to happen is, once live it will become easier to do these updates and have a better test environment.

Once V2 is live, I will start to drop some of the old resources and drop the price, google adverts are still enabled for none logged in users, so far that gave a total of £5.20 over 24 days, so probably about £6.50 by the end of the month.

On that basis, I will be looking for ways to better monetise, probably either in the promoted listings or buy a square type of things, prices will be low, and karma can be used, and it will be open to everyone, but I will try to keep it tasteful and non-flashy as much as possible.

Before any of that, though, I need to work on the numbers, or why would anyone be here

Also as a heads up, part of this rejig is going to make a little bit of a conflicting mess with the old tag system and the new karma system, they can both exist together but it looks a bit funny, I will be starting to remove tags that are not really in use much like the senpi and content creator / writer tags, and reduce the old tag system to functional only.

@yoursunny troll will be turned into a 1 of 1 karma badge, only he will have, unless he decides to pass it on (That will be possible)

We will also have host-specific decorations if you want to show support for specific hosts.

So at some point, without much warning, this place will go into maintenance mode or just offline while I panic and realise what I forgot to consider when migrating everything, hopefully not more than a couple of hours.

That's all for now.