'Souls Tech History

1.  Forums

1.1  EZBoard (November 2001 - March 2007)

Bleeding Souls started its life on EZBoard and would remain on EZBoard for many long years. At the time, many popular wolf RPGs were hosted on EZBoard, which provided a ready community of players for new boards. 'Souls was on EZBoard's Community Gold Membership, which removed all ads from the board, allowed HTML posting, and various other perks. Unfortunately, Gold Membership ran between $100-300/year depending on the number of pageviews the board got. As 'Souls grew, the financial strain of this membership became more and more obvious. Though many members were generous enough to donate year after year for small incentives, there eventually came a point when the costs of Gold got ridiculous. This became more obvious as other RPGs began a small exodus from EZBoard and onto self-hosted forum software like Invision Power Board (IPB) and phpBB.

The final straw came when EZBoard announced that it would be rebranding and relaunching its service as Yuku and that all forums currently hosted on EZBoard would be forced through an eventual conversion. Unsatisfied with EZBoard on the whole and indignant towards a forced shift to Yuku, the 'Souls Assemblage took this as an excuse to finally jump ship.

1.2  IPB 2.2.2 (April 2007 - October 2007)

IPB 2.2.2 was first installed in April 2007 on 'Souls's website host at the time, 1portfolio. Sadly, this move was short-lived as the SA struggled with deciphering the many complex functions and modules that came with the software. Kiri was the only one able to figure out skinning, but even their attempts left much to be desired. Members missed things they had become accustomed to on EZBoard, such as custom titles and icons, and many other small things just seemed out of place. Negative feedback and open frustration accumulated for several months until late October of the same year, when the SA threw together a new board in about two days and launched it.

1.3  IPB 1.3.1 Final (October 2007 - October 2012)

IPB 1.3.1 Final was the more popular and less complicated version of IPB's software and thus, much easier for the SA to understand and sort out. The rushed launch of this again new board was met with mixed reviews initially... probably because the first layout was a blinding orange-red for some reason. Gradually though, as more and better skins were released and as modifications were installed to the board to bring in small perks, old and new, members came to accept IPB 1.3.1 enthusiastically. Since moving to IPB 1.3.1 Final, there have been a number of minor errors on the board, especially when new mods are installed. These include the fast reply error, the mySQL-error-when-posting, and the missing-title-when-archiving error, all of which are still being looked into.

1.4  phpBB 3.0 (October 2012 - August 2020)

We moved to phpBB after it was discovered our host, Surpass, would be upgrading to PHP 5 -- a version of PHP incompatible with the IPB software. The IPB software was, at the point we moved, over a decade old and the move was a loooong time coming. While many modified/"hacked" features of IPB (such as CSS in profiles) were missed, the new board did have some new features and more stability.

phpBB 3.0.x became developmentally unsupported in January 2017, and the current version of phpBB is 3.3.x. Unfortunately, 3.3 differs greatly from 3.0 and there's no easy upgrade path, especially with the number of board modifications 'Souls has. While another forum platform move is probably inevitable, SA is sure to put it off for as long as feasible...

1.5  myBB 1.8 (August 2020 - Current)

Alas, eight years later (a record!), the day came when another server PHP upgrade forced our hand. In early 2020, our host announced a plan to force all servers to upgrade to PHP 7.2+. At this point, phpBB 3.0 is over 10 years old. The PHP 5 to 7 upgrade has a lot of significant changes, and most software written for PHP 5 would have lots of errors in 7, including most forum software.

And so, after much procrastinating, we made the jump from phpBB 3.0 to the current version of myBB, which seemed to be the favoured software by some newer RP boards (despite that myBB has actually been around since 2002, like most other forum software). As the board is now finally on a current version of a forum software, the hope is that we'll be here...permanently?

2.  Websites and Hosting

The original website for 'Souls was hosted on Geocities. During the early and dark times of 'Souls, there were incarnations of the site hosted in various places, including eracreations (defunct) and animeafterhours (defunct), both websites of Sie's high school friend.

When Sie purchased her own domain (acetonic.net) and hosting on Netrillium, she redid and moved the 'Souls website onto a subdomain, souls.acetonic.net. At some point, the RP Guide and pack websites were added to the collection of 'Souls-related websites.

In May 2006, Kiri registered bleeding-souls.com and moved the website to 1portfolio following various server issues on Netrillium. When 'Souls moved off EZBoard in April 2007, the new IPB 2.2.2 board was installed on the same hosting at 1portfolio.

Several months later, the IPB 1.3.1 Final was also installed on 1portfolio. Unfortunately, starting in late November 2007, 1portfolio started having tons of server issues with the site and board going up and down constantly and with miscellaneous board configuration files being tampered with with no explanation. Despite several weeks worth of emails to helpdesk, the SA was unable to garner any sort of response from the host. Frustrated and angry, the decision was made to move to a new host as soon as possible.

After carefully reviewing their options, the SA settled on SurpassHosting.com in late December 2007. Thankfully, the board and all of its information was successfully backed up, no data was lost in the transfer, and 'Souls suffered relatively minimal downtime. After that, the board and all auxiliary websites (RP Guide, pack websites) were happily hosted on Surpass. There was occasional downtime for server maintenance and a number of occasional mySQL errors (described below), but for the most part, 'Souls trucked along on Surpass without major problems for a long time.

In October 2008, following the game's renaming after the April Fool's Day 2008 plot, a new domain, soulsrpg.com was registered. The old bleeding-souls.com domain remains registered and parked on top of the new one so all old URLs continue to work. The SA initially intended to phase out the old URL and let it expire, but decided that, given a small surplus of funds, that they may as well keep it.

After more than ten years on Surpass Hosting, 'Souls in July 2017 moved to Dreamhost because Surpass was unable to offer a reasonable timeframe for upgrading their servers to desired newer versions of PHP and could not offer affordable options for SSL encryption. The SA also took this opportunity to upgrade to a Virtual Private Server and launched a fundraiser to help procure funds for the much higher annual cost of a VPS.

The move took several days, but all assets were moved successfully, including all forum data (even the IPB archive), all auxiliary websites, pack sites, and other materials.