Moving Forward: Hosting Changes

My friends,

I have decided that the best direction forward is to focus development efforts on changing the way data is hosted and accessed within Refsheet. The plan is to divide the servers into many smaller servers that anyone within the community can host if they so choose, and to make each server invite-only. I will continue to host existing users across 13 official servers, roughly the same amount we have now, but allocated differently. Patron accounts will be hosted on the same primary server you are on now, with no change to your username. All other accounts will have a domain ("shard") name appended to their username, and be migrated to a free-tier server with content limitations.

Additionally, I am ending customer support via email and DMs across all platforms, and will be bringing back the on-site report feature to handle all complaints there. I liked the personal touch that resolving disputes by email brought in the beginning, but over the past few years those platforms, email specifically, have been used for harassment and targeted hatred toward myself and my former moderators. If there are those who cannot remember that we are human, then we will no longer present our humanity to them. Formal DMCA complaints will have a process outlined, as always, but all other cases will need to be facilitated on-site.

As you have perhaps read, managing this project has taken a heavy toll on myself, and if it were not for the kind words of each one of you who left them, I would have not had the strength to keep it up for as long as I have. Running a website at this scale will subject a person to a large amount of unexpected burdens, beyond financially, from the unkindness of others.

With the financial burden now temporarily lifted, it has given me the time I need to consider the future of this platform. I have, for so long, refused to simply shut down the servers. Hopefully these changes can bring a long-term stability to the platform, and allow others to more easily contribute to its maintenance.

It has been the greatest honor I could imagine to be a silent keeper of all your worlds. I never could have imagined that we would make it this far, but the spirit of this community is staggering, strong, and committed. Thank you for taking this journey with me, and may your worlds and those who live within them continue ever onward.

Yours most sincerely,

Mau Abata

---

Technical Details:

- Usernames will append a domain, similar to Blue Sky, which will be used to direct the viewer to the correct server. Unlike BSky and others, there is not data redundancy here, this is just a simple server address. It is up to the maintainer of the server to protect the data.

- A server package will be released which can be deployed onto a variety of hardware. Once set up, you may use the viewer at refsheet.net to direct to your server and load content. For example, if your server is hosted at "cool.art" and your username there is "joe", then your full Refsheet username will be "@joe.cool.art". Your url, "https://refsheet.net/joe.cool.art/character-page" will connect to the server indicated by your username.

- The default server will become "ref.st" for Patrons, and each Shard will have a name thereafter. If a server is omitted, for example by going to "https://refsheet.net/mauabata/yuki", the default server will be used, which will redirect the client to "https://refsheet.net/mauabata.ref.st/yuki" and load the page there. If no such user exists on that server, it will check outbound transfers and redirect the client to the new server. This will resolve all current Refsheet users automatically, without needing to rewrite your links, regardless of which shard your account was migrated to.

- Servers will keep a record of past usernames transferred off. This is similar to how Refsheet keeps a record of past usernames as well, to prevent impersonation. In this case, the username will redirect to where it was transferred to if a transfer record was created. Users created directly on new shards will not benefit from this, as the primary server at ref.st does not know about their accounts.

- Social features ARE going to be removed. This may be temporary until we get a moderation system in place, but allowing the internet unchecked free-form text that they can direct at other users was, as evidenced by the many essay-writer spams and printer salespeople on the site for some reason, a mistake. This absolutely applies to DMs, where I had to shut them down because users were exchanging unlawful messages and hatred. No biggie.

-  Character links and any future cross-account options WILL continue to resolve as normal, and eventually notifications will work cross-server. These are future problems to sort out.