Folks,

I've started migrating some site support to Cloudflare, starting with the DNS.
Cloudflare took over as the authoritative DNS about an hour ago as I write this.

I have set it up to more or less mirror what was set up before (in our own DNS server,
which was previously authoritative) so in theory nothing should change or break.
However that's theory, not practice :)

I've left the old authoritative servers active for the domain as the change propagates
as I'm still seeing queries for povray.org come in to them. I'll shut that off in a
day or so.

Please let me know if anything breaks or seems wrong, preferably in this thread,
however if it's serious please email me.

I'll keep this thread up to date with any further changes as I turn things on/off
during testing and integration. Currently nothing is turned on.

For those who are interested in why the change: I want to speed up access to the site,
and particularly to downloads. My first tests will likely be on www or wiki.

One obvious candidate for improved speed is the web forums. However as things stand
that is not possible without breaking NNTP, as caching news.povray.org requires its IP
address point to Cloudflare , and Cloudflare don't do anything with NNTP so
connections would fail. There is some ways around this but it costs extra and I don't
see the need when we have a better alternative.

Originally news.povray.org was named as such because it was our NNTP server, which
originally had no web backing. When we added the web view it just used the same domain
name.

However as the decades passed, the prefix 'news.' lost any association it had with
NNTP and is now taken to mean news in the literal sense. Most sites seem to go with
'forums.' for their forums, so much so that I added 'forums.povray.org' to the server
many years ago (it just redirects to news.povray.org at the moment).

My intention in the short to medium term is to make forums.povray.org a distinct site
which will contain a read-only version of the newsgroups. This is primarily aimed at
getting content indexed and available to people who use google for search (as some of
you know I've had heaps of trouble getting google to properly index the newsgroups).
The 350,000 or so messages we have are an important knowledge-base that needs to be
available to anyone who uses a search engine. If getting it properly indexed means
changing stuff here, then I need to deal with that.

On forums.povray.org each thread will have its own page within its group (no paging on
individual threads) and will be formatted in nesting threaded form. Each will have a
link to the same thread on news.povray.org for replies. Each thread will be marked as
being the canonical source (this is one thing google complained about not having).
These pages will be cached via Cloudflare so will load very quickly once the content
has propagated to Cloudflare's edge servers (time to load is another thing google
occasionally complained about too).

I may give in to temptation and turn on caching for news at some wee hour of the
Northern Hemisphere morning just to see what effect it would have. If so I'll change
it back immediately. If you find an NNTP connection is going to anything other than
203.29.75.35 then that's likely why. If it persists please flush your DNS cache.

TL;DR: for all intents and purposes nothing should change for users of
news.povray.org. If something does, it's probably because I or Cloudflare
mis-configured something.

-- Chris

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