Dear Users!
From time to time I meet with a more or less thought-out offer to make someone's network infrastructure available for Elten usage, I would like to clarify the situation in regard to those propositions.
First of all, thank you very much for this willingness to help. However, the situation is not that simple, either because of the size of our data or our computing power. For several months now, Elten has been operating on a dedicated server, a single machine that serves only this community, and previously used a VPS server in KVM technology (full virtualization), by the way the highest in the offer of the company where the resources were leased. And then too, stability was a big problem.
In the last three months there have been 54 users at the same time active on the server on average. Few websites of Internet forums with even high popularity have to cope with such high activity - this is mainly due to a slightly different form of Elten compared to sites without a PC client.
Also the amount of data produced on Elten is large. Audio blogs or voice messages are very popular. One of the reasons for changing the server was the unlimited storage space available to users. The audio content itself is currently 194GB, the database 3.8GB.
As you can see from the presented numbers, the proposed solutions are usually not able to meet the requirements of Elten.

Another problem is security. Elten processes data of hundreds of people, including private messages, of which there are currently half a million. 174 users use Elten for the regular exchange of e-mails, here I consider the receipt/sending of at least ten e-mails per week from at least three different addresses over the last three months to be a regular exchange.
Numerous incidents show that the priority should be to protect the server from intrusions and overrides, hence the numerous measures introduced at the end of last year, the Cisco hardware Firewall and the ongoing work on private message encryption that will appear in Elten 2.4.
Given all this, there can be no question of using network resources belonging to another private person, either because of the lack of full control over the protection of the machine (Firewall, anti rootkit, etc.) and the risk of data theft.

Therefore, unfortunately, I am forced to reject such proposals, remaining grateful for them.

With respect,
David Pieper

Also, I think it would also help to delete all your private messages which you don't need any longer. In other words said, to do a clean up of all your private messages.

I'm rather anal about doing that. I never like leaving stuff lying around that doesn't need to just uselessly take up space.

Could an optional function be added so that private messages could expire if they reached a certain age? Would this help with the storage load?

Maybe some kind of a trash?

Then there is also the unneeded tons of forum threads and posts that could be deleted in all the forum groups.

I feel like those should be preserved in the interest of public historical records though.

Me wonders if there should be a forum called "Introductions", for simply that specific purpose.

There's several threads with introductions in the Other's forum, and well, just an idea for more organization.

PS. Not sure if this wouldn't be a bad idea also but, anyone thinking that the descriptions for each of the English forums may need a slite fix in how they are wrote? I understand what they mean myself, but to others, the English may slightly be kind of, "Broken."

I'm mainly pointing out the above for those out there who are, um, sticklers with grammar. It has nothing to do in how well someone speaks the English language.