For the first time i am posting the state of the site in view of the public so that members can hear what is going on within GPM. Since the site got started i have made a state of the site address monthly to staff only. I decided this time to go public with it because i felt it would address many of the questions people send me. The state of the site is usually broken up into a few points to address a few factors of the site.



Statistics

GPM has had a small decline in activity the past month. This month we had 520188 visits vs July when we had 626842. This is not to alarm anyone as july was the month we came back online and everyone had to catch up and see what was going on. From what i see this is a steady average. This month our new bandwidth allocation system has done wonders, we used to cap at 1TB when the gallery was public and before we implemented new measures to secure bandwidth. From the 1st till now we have used 330.49 GBs which will probably round off at 600/700 GB at the end of the month. This is much better as when we exceed 1TB we end up paying MUCH more for hosting.



Financial

The GPM budget has came up a bit since we went down last July, many supporting members have increased donations to allow us to operate without lag. The site itself is running within normal operating expectancy even with the congestion that appears between 9-11 AM PST. Right now the site is running under its own power financially unless the bandwidth exceeds 1TB again which could happen nearing the christmas season. The only issue right now is the forbidden issue we are getting with these servers, it is a SERVER side issues not a website issue that is part of a firewall the host provides that they refuse to change. Firewalls are good but not when they obstruct the operating potential of the system. If the issue is not resolved we will be forced to locate hosting through another company which might not offer us the same good rates we got right now.



Technical Issues

As most of you know there is a random accruing problem that gives a forbidden error when "submitting" any possible field on the site. This issue does not happen to everyone and is random. I personally do not encounter it which is why it is so hard to re-create so it can be fixed. We believe it is a firewall issue on the server which our host has to deal with but they do not get the error either and are unwilling to use another firewall. We will continue to try and resolve this problem but if it is not fixed in the next few months we might consider a host change. In the event of a host change it will be dated and will only consist a 8-16 hour downtime for DNS resolution.



Multiplayer Support

I personally have been a strong objector to supporting multiplayer communities as it causes drama and fights among people. That being said we have decided not to open back up the whitelist/blacklist project. Instead we will only be supporting multiplayer communities under GPM control EXCLUSIVELY. This is not to offend anyone but this is the 5th time we have supported MP communities and ended up with headakes. At this time Fort Carson RP is officially supported and there is a project with bxbugs that involves making a IV-MP server that is still in alpha phases.



APBPolicemods.com

We delayed the APM opening due to the forbidden error, when building APM we discovered that the site engine we are using (which is not this one) encounters the same forbidden issues which basically means its a server side issue. APM and GPM run on the same webserver running linux centOS as the APB community is growing we are working hard to make this site operational.



Conclusion

This has been a very basic month for GPM, nothing really exciting just daly routines. Many people are going back to school at the end of this month which has brought some calm to the community. many of our developers such as Lt.Caine are very focused and busy with their real life careers and just have not had time for GTA. I hope this gets you up to speed with GPM operations as this is the first time i have posted this public insted of to the staff only.



Good night,

Scott Daedaelus

Owner and Director of GTAPolicemods.com