How much does a niche anime board cost to run? How hard is it to find decent hosting?
> How much does a niche anime board cost to run?
$0
Depends on how popular it is. A lot of the larger niche boards are paid for. Expect about ~$10 a month if your board is too large for free hosting.
Your best bet for finding a decent host is to peruse http://webhostingtalk.com/ for a few hours, finding links to well-liked hosts, and then comparing plans across them. You generally get what you pay for.
I can vouch for Site5 and Dreamhost. Site5 has amazingly fast response, and Dreamhost has a lot of bandwidth available for cheap.
Sounds interesting. Does anyone want a referral if I decide to sign up?
ZOMG REFERRAL PLZ
http://www.dreamhost.com/rewards.cgi?albright
Heh, I haven't even done anything with my dreamhost account since I signed up.
Perhaps I should make a imageboard as well. Can't figure out about what though...
Quite a few people here keep mentioning they would like an upload board.
Esp. me
Seriously though, I think it would be cool. It would be good to have an option to share smaller files without having to hack a zip into a gif or set up a torrent for really small files and such.
I believe hotaru has a hack of Wakaba for the purpose of an upload board.
But I don't know how such a board could be effectively moderated, though.
Well, yeah, an upload-board could be good. I currently have one running on my webspace, but I don't know how to moderate the content.
Other than that, it wouldn't be a problem to let people use it.
I think this is how most Japanese upload boards go about it:
Another option for an upload board: Make a couple of icons for zip, rar and lzh files, and set up a Wakaba with FILETYPES => { zip => 'icons/zip.png', ... }. This wouldn't be as compact as your usual upload board, but it'd let you comment on files.
This sounds like a great idea. Is there a perl mod that allows you to peek what's in the archive files and list it?
There's Archive::Zip. Or you can run unzip -l and capture the output. Probably best not to bother with a listing though, because it could be abused.
BTW:
http://wakachan.org/junk/archive-7z.png
http://wakachan.org/junk/archive-bz2.png
http://wakachan.org/junk/archive-gz.png
http://wakachan.org/junk/archive-lzh.png
http://wakachan.org/junk/archive-rar.png
http://wakachan.org/junk/archive-zip.png
Only problem is that uploads would probably take a whole lot more bandwidth than images.
