@Lunics said:
Just joined, coming from LET.
The server bill is approaching 4 digits? I don‘t understand. My forum over at netcup costs like 15eur/year.
i really should edit the OP, I thought the runcloud bill was $600 /year, its $160 I made a mistake
But there are 3 VPS in hetzner for the forum, the dev and the support desk, the domain itself, and runcloud and amazon ses for mail so the bill is actually closer to $400 ish.
Either way its still to high, I will reduce it as much as possible.
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@Lunics said:
Just joined, coming from LET.
The server bill is approaching 4 digits? I don‘t understand. My forum over at netcup costs like 15eur/year.
i really should edit the OP, I thought the runcloud bill was $600 /year, its $160 I made a mistake
But there are 3 VPS in hetzner for the forum, the dev and the support desk, the domain itself, and runcloud and amazon ses for mail so the bill is actually closer to $400 ish.
Either way its still to high, I will reduce it as much as possible.
Welcome to LES anyway I hope you enjoy it.
What specs do you require for the whole LES?
I happen to manage a certain website that might come in handy if you should decide to shop for cheaper alternatives :D
When I installed Vanilla to develop the VPS Price Tracker addon that nobody apparently cares about, I saw that the forum was primarily I/O and CPU heavy. Especially the I/O was lagging the page load times on mechanical disks.
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@AnthonySmith said:
Its on a 4GB Ram hetzner VPS iirc, obviously I have to try and get that down to 512mb because its me, but prbably not possible now.
How about 128? 128GB dedicated server that is
I speak fluent sarcasm and broken logic. | I would agree with you, but thæn we’d both be wrong.
Could the forum run on ZAP Hosting Lifetime Dedicated/VPS to avoid recurring fees? Of course, that would require backups in the event ZAP goes south and Hetzner/Amazon are way bigger players, ofc.
I was going to comment that phpBB v3 doesn't look too bad, I just noticed as Gentoo forums just upgraded to that.
Maybe coincidence, or not, I don't know, but the Gentoo forums are down today, though: It's not just you! forums.gentoo.org is down.
Last updated: May 18, 2026, 1:32 PM (1 second ago)
I spent the morning re-reading that massive post I made, while I dont agree with myself completely many years later, it was also a good reminder for myself too, it was almots like reading someone elses words, the plan part funny enough and future predictions are still aligned with my existing plans so thats good.
I have a few day work left on a major TierHive hurdle then I am going to seriously get to work on LES.
Sorry for the slow takeover @Mason@mikho I will start doing the full take over in the next few days, changing access, passwords, and billing etc.
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I'm sure all of this has already been thoroughly discussed. I'm here to chime in to the original post, I haven't read any of the replies yet, so please just ignore most of what I'm saying if it's already been repeated. Hopefully there's maybe a few "new" things that I have to add to this that may be helpful.
@AnthonySmith said: Host validation
It occurred to me when handling tickets requesting a provider tag recently that it's not really offering any real protection; it takes about an hour to register a company, you can do it pretty much anonymously, and we then trust the information source provided to validate against. I am not saying it does nothing, but it may be a bit of a paper shield in reality.
I recently had to allow a host I can't really get any information on because I am not a lawyer, and their country makes finding details ridiculous. Meanwhile, I rejected a sole trader for being a sole trader who had clearly been doing a bang-up job for a while.
So I am proposing that the community gets to decide. I don't know the exact method or mechanism yet, but this is in principle, if it's a yes, we will do the checks we do that I can't discuss openly to ensure its not ban evasion, known scams, etc.
My thoughts on this is that it's very easy for anyone to just register a company and knowing it is registered, or has someone's name attached to it does absolutely nothing. Even if you are a lawyer, it's effectively meaningless. The community basically already "decides" by having to do some basic risk assessment in their heads for new providers and doing their own research that they see fit for the amount of money they are spending, payment method they are using, as anyone would when purchasing something online. As well as using the message board to communicate whether they've been outright scammed and then it's process of elimination from there.
What you could do if you are keen on having some "verification" level for providers is to just make sure you label well-known providers as such (and let the community basically vouch for them, you can have a threshold that auto-activates this verification level or simply display the number of these "points" a provider has and determine at what threshold they're seen as trusted.)
Then if you really want to protect people, by default you can just hide "risky offers" and put some kind of banner for any providers that have not yet been on the community for long enough or well known.
If anything, doing any "screening" beforehand makes it easier for some people to assume you are vetting providers and therefore it is a meaningful process and therefore people who do not want to do their own research end up putting way more trust into the system than they should, which potentially leads to more people getting hurt.
Of course you don't just want a bunch of spam offers from random new accounts either. I don't know to what level that'd end up happening -- if you implement your upvote/downvote system though and allow it to apply to even the offers then that takes care of itself as well (and if people really want, they can click to still view downvoted offers.) If a provider is more well known for being a good provider, and enough people are interested, that'd naturally balance itself out and it could also be a great way of calculating where to display offers rather than based on which thread gets bumped up the most with replies. (This could be net upvote/downvote over last X days type of thing instead of all time.)
I feel like if anything, if we take a step back for a second and ask what we're trying to achieve in the first place: the priority should be making sure things are more lax here for providers so that LATER down the line, this bulletpoint becomes addressing a serious problem. You need more offers. LES is not in a state where we can make it more difficult for providers to participate. This works out great to increase the quality when there are TOO MANY providers and offers but LES does not have that problem right now. For the place to become so big that scammers actually want to come here in droves, and then worry about them. And this idea basically goes against that, it just leads to ensuring it never becomes a problem because there's barely any providers or offers.
@AnthonySmith said: Offer post format.
The way offers are posted and displayed needs to change. I am proposing we remove offers from the standard forum feed and instead, they will display on the right-hand column (which obviously needs to be refactored). Clicking on them will still take you to them as a post, just like now.
The offers will be posted via a form that providers will have access to, rather than a free post, to force rules being followed and make any rule-skirting very obvious, this also gives us the opportunity to better manage the data and make things more database-driven.
I really hate this idea, at least the way it's being presented.
This takes it from being less like a message board. Sure it can objectively be better but the whole vibe is that it's a message board. Here's where I'll also pull out my "well you have a upvote/downvote system" card. If you want the community to have more power as you mentioned, the ultimate power is voting and if a provider is breaking the rules and it matters to the community, then the community can uphold the rules by downvoting the offer. They can even reply to the offer and say "downvoted, you broke this rule." If an offer still gets upvoted even if it broke the rules, then the community didn't really care for that rule.
I guess it does matter which specific rules are being skirted as you mention, you've obviously seen more specific cases.
What exactly keeps them from skirting these rules, if for example, you mean the maximum price for a VPS offer? Is it that there is a form that validates that the price inputted for a VPS cannot be more than $7? If so, what stops the provider from editing it to $7 and then having the price be more than $7 on their website? Or having a setup fee? What stops them or makes it more obvious, with the use of the form, that a provider did not reduce the price below LES limit for less than 12 months? For the 7 day between offer limit, can this not just be gated for making a post rather than submitting a form?
What's the point of segmenting the feed as proposed to have them on the right hand side? I guess I wouldn't be necessarily opposed to this. It just seems like this can be achieved in other ways such as at least having a toggle (which can be on by default) to exclude offers from the feed and it moves over to the right-hand column instead (and you can also just hide that section.)
Then going back to what I already mentioned: this will not increase the number of providers posting offers here because to them LES is currently "I guess I'll copy/paste my offer that I already wrote here." The barrier gets increased from that to having to fill out some form and there is no offer. It also segments the "offers" from the community and basically creates a world where it's easier for people interested in offers to never get involved in the community, and the people who are interested in the community to more easily ignore offers.
@AnthonySmith said: Advertising and money in general.
This place is creeping towards a 4-figure per year bill, apart from the fact that it is not low-end and that I am ok to pay for it out of my own pocket, it would be good to get some support.
This does not mean it is going to turn into low-end talk. Initially, my thinking is to use something like TinyAdz (which filters bot traffic) minimally and for not logged-in users only and taking a judgment call from there, it was a previous suggestion i think from @bikegremlin. Sorry if I am not remembering the exact details.
Excess money if any can be used to sponsor community projects and increase the resources of the free services providers to benefit the community by way of grants or paying invoices directly.
I'm not the type of person to say that there shouldn't be advertisements.
However, it does seem like a very "slippery slope" since a big part of the principles seem to have been "no ads" (for whatever reason.) I am not saying that it's unrealistic to expect some revenue stream, this could just very easily lead to "well costs are even higher now" or "we hired help, we have so many community projects now" and then move to advertisements for logged in users once the easier registrations kick in, and then move on to "well, providers make all the money and benefit, so we optionally allow providers to donate money to advertise with us but don't worry we're not requiring it like some other places."
I don't know how many other providers would offer to do this. I know we would (but I also know our offer would be declined, for reasons.) Why not just ask providers if any of them want to help out with hosting? And don't give them anything crazy like a pinned thread or a banner ad, just a small badge that basically indicates that fact. Perhaps it's not realistic to do with how the backend works since I know nothing about it, I do know some other forum software do support clustering.
I did actually just skim over some replies trying to find more information on the "costs" and it does seem like it would definitely shave at least a bit.
If advertising is being considered (which is fine) perhaps it should just be done in a more meaningful way from the start with some actual boundaries set in place if it's important to the community that it doesn't lead down a slippery slope. For example, ads are only shown until X budget requirements are met, let users opt in/out of certain types of ads such as optionally opting in for "higher paying" ads which I assume won't be TinyAdz for guest traffic, and having some transparency policy where you post quarterly revenue and expense data.
@AnthonySmith said: Dedicated Server offers
We need to do something about dedicated server offers, the world is just different now, static pricing is not fir for purpose, I don't know what that is yet, but once offers go form based we may be able to do something about a scale per region/hardware type/GPU etc
I feel like if you do push forward with a "form submission" type thing, try to keep it as an optional thing, try to integrate it with the actual post using some plugin, and make it beneficial for providers to use it.
The best place for this to shine would be with dedicated servers and allowing the community to filter through dedicated server offers that actually post the optional information. So to take it from their offer not appearing on these filtered out offers, they're encouraged to actually define more data on the form. See how it goes, and then if it goes amazing move this feature gradually to other offer types and then finally "require" it to match what you originally envisioned for the "form" idea.
@AnthonySmith said: LES Exclusive offers
This is probably going to change completely. During the last poll, what was very obvious is that it was the need to be exclusive that was kneecapping it; instead, the section will probably have different, no need to be exclusive but require a reply to reveal, maybe spend karma points on, because I can say first hand, you post in there, its on nodeseek in 5 minutes or a telegram group. it does not serve its purpose.
Just keep LES exclusive offers. I think they'll become big and meaningful once the community grows. If you want the section to be "different" then just create a "different" section. However with that said I don't understand how requiring a reply to reveal it solves anything, other than turning it into being analogous to "please double my bandwidth" except it's just "please let me see what the offer even is I guess, thanks."
As for it not serving it's purpose, it sounds like it should actually be taken a step further and actually have some kind of API that providers can use to optionally validate that an LES member is actually purchasing the plan. It wouldn't be too hard to even include some kind of optional addon module for popular billing systems.
Alternatively, if you want to go the "reply to reveal" path maybe instead have it be "reply with your email on the provider's website" that only gets displayed to the provider, so they can validate it manually if they desire, and I suppose at least give the provider an option to actually do an LES exclusive offer (but make it a soft requirement.)
@AnthonySmith said: Community Notes
This is more of a concept in my head than a fully formed idea, but an X-style community notes plugin would be a good modern tool to have in today's internet discourse.
I do not see how this would be used in any meaningful way in a community of this size. I also do not see where it would be necessary.
I guess it wouldn't hurt to let trusted members add a community note to an offer to protect users if they want to do that? Do people actually posts that require a community note instead of just a reply calling them out? It seems like people can usually see the next few replies under a post already. For X, it makes more "sense" if you agree with that type of system, because maybe these replies get buried or there's just thousands of replies in a short period of time.
@AnthonySmith said: Blog/microblog/content
I don't really want to give this a name, but something that allows good quality content and information to be indexed better, in a more generic way, not buried 5 years and 20 posts deep in a forum and provide a platform for content in general.
This could be anything from good reviews, how-to, tips, mitigations, warnings, or dedicated provider pages.
Just have a system that highlights some "gems" from the past at the top in its own section at the top. It'll end up getting more views that way anyway, right? Than having another section. For SEO purposes, I'm not sure what difference it would make? For example if you are searching for something, a Reddit thread doesn't just NOT pop up in the results because it's a bit older.
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Comments
I used to have a nice LCARS theme for WinAmp, so … LCARS, please
Some change was needed
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Just joined, coming from LET.
The server bill is approaching 4 digits? I don‘t understand. My forum over at netcup costs like 15eur/year.
i really should edit the OP, I thought the runcloud bill was $600 /year, its $160 I made a mistake
But there are 3 VPS in hetzner for the forum, the dev and the support desk, the domain itself, and runcloud and amazon ses for mail so the bill is actually closer to $400 ish.
Either way its still to high, I will reduce it as much as possible.
Welcome to LES anyway
I hope you enjoy it.
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What specs do you require for the whole LES?
I happen to manage a certain website that might come in handy if you should decide to shop for cheaper alternatives :D
When I installed Vanilla to develop the VPS Price Tracker addon that nobody apparently cares about, I saw that the forum was primarily I/O and CPU heavy. Especially the I/O was lagging the page load times on mechanical disks.
Its on a 4GB Ram hetzner VPS iirc, obviously I have to try and get that down to 512mb
because its me, but prbably not possible now.
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How about 128? 128GB dedicated server that is
if you need some free VM to replace it, hit me up. as long as you manage cloudflare and SES, I'll have room for it.
Could the forum run on ZAP Hosting Lifetime Dedicated/VPS to avoid recurring fees? Of course, that would require backups in the event ZAP goes south and Hetzner/Amazon are way bigger players, ofc.
Ympker's VPN LTD Comparison, Uptime.is, Ympker's GitHub.
I was going to comment that phpBB v3 doesn't look too bad, I just noticed as Gentoo forums just upgraded to that.
Maybe coincidence, or not, I don't know, but the Gentoo forums are down today, though:
It's not just you! forums.gentoo.org is down.
Last updated: May 18, 2026, 1:32 PM (1 second ago)
https://lowendspirit.com/discussion/2317/a-year-in-les-reflections-thoughts-my-history-and-the-future-for-lowendspirit/p1
I spent the morning re-reading that massive post I made, while I dont agree with myself completely many years later, it was also a good reminder for myself too, it was almots like reading someone elses words, the plan part funny enough and future predictions are still aligned with my existing plans so thats good.
I have a few day work left on a major TierHive hurdle then I am going to seriously get to work on LES.
Sorry for the slow takeover @Mason @mikho I will start doing the full take over in the next few days, changing access, passwords, and billing etc.
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Lovely to see you back!
I'm sure all of this has already been thoroughly discussed. I'm here to chime in to the original post, I haven't read any of the replies yet, so please just ignore most of what I'm saying if it's already been repeated. Hopefully there's maybe a few "new" things that I have to add to this that may be helpful.
My thoughts on this is that it's very easy for anyone to just register a company and knowing it is registered, or has someone's name attached to it does absolutely nothing. Even if you are a lawyer, it's effectively meaningless. The community basically already "decides" by having to do some basic risk assessment in their heads for new providers and doing their own research that they see fit for the amount of money they are spending, payment method they are using, as anyone would when purchasing something online. As well as using the message board to communicate whether they've been outright scammed and then it's process of elimination from there.
What you could do if you are keen on having some "verification" level for providers is to just make sure you label well-known providers as such (and let the community basically vouch for them, you can have a threshold that auto-activates this verification level or simply display the number of these "points" a provider has and determine at what threshold they're seen as trusted.)
Then if you really want to protect people, by default you can just hide "risky offers" and put some kind of banner for any providers that have not yet been on the community for long enough or well known.
If anything, doing any "screening" beforehand makes it easier for some people to assume you are vetting providers and therefore it is a meaningful process and therefore people who do not want to do their own research end up putting way more trust into the system than they should, which potentially leads to more people getting hurt.
Of course you don't just want a bunch of spam offers from random new accounts either. I don't know to what level that'd end up happening -- if you implement your upvote/downvote system though and allow it to apply to even the offers then that takes care of itself as well (and if people really want, they can click to still view downvoted offers.) If a provider is more well known for being a good provider, and enough people are interested, that'd naturally balance itself out and it could also be a great way of calculating where to display offers rather than based on which thread gets bumped up the most with replies. (This could be net upvote/downvote over last X days type of thing instead of all time.)
I feel like if anything, if we take a step back for a second and ask what we're trying to achieve in the first place: the priority should be making sure things are more lax here for providers so that LATER down the line, this bulletpoint becomes addressing a serious problem. You need more offers. LES is not in a state where we can make it more difficult for providers to participate. This works out great to increase the quality when there are TOO MANY providers and offers but LES does not have that problem right now. For the place to become so big that scammers actually want to come here in droves, and then worry about them. And this idea basically goes against that, it just leads to ensuring it never becomes a problem because there's barely any providers or offers.
I really hate this idea, at least the way it's being presented.
This takes it from being less like a message board. Sure it can objectively be better but the whole vibe is that it's a message board. Here's where I'll also pull out my "well you have a upvote/downvote system" card. If you want the community to have more power as you mentioned, the ultimate power is voting and if a provider is breaking the rules and it matters to the community, then the community can uphold the rules by downvoting the offer. They can even reply to the offer and say "downvoted, you broke this rule." If an offer still gets upvoted even if it broke the rules, then the community didn't really care for that rule.
I guess it does matter which specific rules are being skirted as you mention, you've obviously seen more specific cases.
What exactly keeps them from skirting these rules, if for example, you mean the maximum price for a VPS offer? Is it that there is a form that validates that the price inputted for a VPS cannot be more than $7? If so, what stops the provider from editing it to $7 and then having the price be more than $7 on their website? Or having a setup fee? What stops them or makes it more obvious, with the use of the form, that a provider did not reduce the price below LES limit for less than 12 months? For the 7 day between offer limit, can this not just be gated for making a post rather than submitting a form?
What's the point of segmenting the feed as proposed to have them on the right hand side? I guess I wouldn't be necessarily opposed to this. It just seems like this can be achieved in other ways such as at least having a toggle (which can be on by default) to exclude offers from the feed and it moves over to the right-hand column instead (and you can also just hide that section.)
Then going back to what I already mentioned: this will not increase the number of providers posting offers here because to them LES is currently "I guess I'll copy/paste my offer that I already wrote here." The barrier gets increased from that to having to fill out some form and there is no offer. It also segments the "offers" from the community and basically creates a world where it's easier for people interested in offers to never get involved in the community, and the people who are interested in the community to more easily ignore offers.
I'm not the type of person to say that there shouldn't be advertisements.
However, it does seem like a very "slippery slope" since a big part of the principles seem to have been "no ads" (for whatever reason.) I am not saying that it's unrealistic to expect some revenue stream, this could just very easily lead to "well costs are even higher now" or "we hired help, we have so many community projects now" and then move to advertisements for logged in users once the easier registrations kick in, and then move on to "well, providers make all the money and benefit, so we optionally allow providers to donate money to advertise with us but don't worry we're not requiring it like some other places."
I don't know how many other providers would offer to do this. I know we would (but I also know our offer would be declined, for reasons.) Why not just ask providers if any of them want to help out with hosting? And don't give them anything crazy like a pinned thread or a banner ad, just a small badge that basically indicates that fact. Perhaps it's not realistic to do with how the backend works since I know nothing about it, I do know some other forum software do support clustering.
I did actually just skim over some replies trying to find more information on the "costs" and it does seem like it would definitely shave at least a bit.
If advertising is being considered (which is fine) perhaps it should just be done in a more meaningful way from the start with some actual boundaries set in place if it's important to the community that it doesn't lead down a slippery slope. For example, ads are only shown until X budget requirements are met, let users opt in/out of certain types of ads such as optionally opting in for "higher paying" ads which I assume won't be TinyAdz for guest traffic, and having some transparency policy where you post quarterly revenue and expense data.
I feel like if you do push forward with a "form submission" type thing, try to keep it as an optional thing, try to integrate it with the actual post using some plugin, and make it beneficial for providers to use it.
The best place for this to shine would be with dedicated servers and allowing the community to filter through dedicated server offers that actually post the optional information. So to take it from their offer not appearing on these filtered out offers, they're encouraged to actually define more data on the form. See how it goes, and then if it goes amazing move this feature gradually to other offer types and then finally "require" it to match what you originally envisioned for the "form" idea.
Just keep LES exclusive offers. I think they'll become big and meaningful once the community grows. If you want the section to be "different" then just create a "different" section. However with that said I don't understand how requiring a reply to reveal it solves anything, other than turning it into being analogous to "please double my bandwidth" except it's just "please let me see what the offer even is I guess, thanks."
As for it not serving it's purpose, it sounds like it should actually be taken a step further and actually have some kind of API that providers can use to optionally validate that an LES member is actually purchasing the plan. It wouldn't be too hard to even include some kind of optional addon module for popular billing systems.
Alternatively, if you want to go the "reply to reveal" path maybe instead have it be "reply with your email on the provider's website" that only gets displayed to the provider, so they can validate it manually if they desire, and I suppose at least give the provider an option to actually do an LES exclusive offer (but make it a soft requirement.)
I do not see how this would be used in any meaningful way in a community of this size. I also do not see where it would be necessary.
I guess it wouldn't hurt to let trusted members add a community note to an offer to protect users if they want to do that? Do people actually posts that require a community note instead of just a reply calling them out? It seems like people can usually see the next few replies under a post already. For X, it makes more "sense" if you agree with that type of system, because maybe these replies get buried or there's just thousands of replies in a short period of time.
Just have a system that highlights some "gems" from the past at the top in its own section at the top. It'll end up getting more views that way anyway, right? Than having another section. For SEO purposes, I'm not sure what difference it would make? For example if you are searching for something, a Reddit thread doesn't just NOT pop up in the results because it's a bit older.
Too much text.
But I like the points or up/downvote thing. Esp. for offers, that could help a great deal with everything.
Combine it with actions, like +100 gets free bump, -10 sets to sink. Think about it...
Up vote, up vote, down vote, down vote, left vote, right vote, left vote, right vote, B vote, A vote.
Did that unlock something?
You get one go back to reddits.
"It's a hard life- to be a stick insect." - Karl Pilkington
Now we're talking!
Sonic boom
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xyzzxyspoonshift+1
Guess this cheat code.
Super easy and exciting game
"God" bless your "balls"
Sweet and sweaty balls