Board Game Arena

ChiefWhiteHalfoat wrote: ↑09 June 2026, 20:26 It's simple BGA. STOP ADDING NEW GAMES, put that time into reducing the technical debt that I'm sure has piled up.

Just for clarification:
Games are built by volunteers who may or may not get paid by a game's publisher.
Meanwhile, the site is maintained by BGA Staff.

I'm not a Premium member at the moment because of BGA not fixing bugs: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=209956 I have sent 2 e-mails about this and this bug affects tournament participants for almost 3 months now, very unprofessional for a big site like BGA!

Beside this the downtime yesterday and today really hurt European players who can mainly play in the evenings (like me). I agree with the increasing sound to reduce the number of new games (like 1 new game per week in stead of 3 per week and daily new games in two periods). New games cause more traffic and more server load, so BGA should really look which ones to release and which ones to keep for later. First focus on the basics:
1st Make sure there is enough staff to fix important bugs within a week
2nd Invest in stability of the servers

And only after 1st and 2nd are reached:
3rd Implement more new games to increase traffic, as long as the servers can handle this traffic

koningco wrote: ↑09 June 2026, 23:39 New games cause more traffic and more server load

This does not logically follow. If someone plays a new game, they don't have to add it on top of what they are already playing. They can Instead substitute the new game for something older they would have otherwise played. In fact, they probably do the latter because every person only has so much capacity in their BGA time budget. And that's assuming you play the new game at all, which isn't necessarily the case. I just looked at the last 10 releases and I've only played one of them.

There may be more traffic temporarily for that game, but that does not mean that aggregate traffic has to increase.

wdspider wrote: ↑09 June 2026, 23:32

ChiefWhiteHalfoat wrote: ↑09 June 2026, 20:26 It's simple BGA. STOP ADDING NEW GAMES, put that time into reducing the technical debt that I'm sure has piled up.

Just for clarification:
Games are built by volunteers who may or may not get paid by a game's publisher.
Meanwhile, the site is maintained by BGA Staff.

Sure, but ... doesn't adding new games take any BGA resources? Staff is taken up as they work with the volunteers and are involved in testing and deployment, load on servers increases, complexity of infrastructure increases .... I'm in the tech business, growth doesn't come for free and I'll put money on that there's a whole lot of tech debt and that it's starting to show.

While there are BGA staff who develop games, the vast majority of games today are developed by the community to the best of my knowledge. See relevant sections here:
https://boardgamearena.com/team

Now, what you could make an argument for is that the time spent on core BGA site UI changes (sometimes downgrades - cough - tournament pages, bug system) could be spent towards stability, only if the site code is the issue. It could also be hosting provider issues, communications infrastructure issues, or the budget limiting server volume/power/bandwidth, and/or the scalability of one of these things. Or who knows? Could be any number of things.

They always seem to bring it back online relatively fast, and the subscription cost is incredibly cheap, at least in the US. Cannot speak for other countries.

lefalaf wrote: ↑10 June 2026, 06:23 could be spent towards stability, only if the site code is the issue. It could also be hosting provider issues, communications infrastructure issues, or the budget limiting server volume/power/bandwidth, and/or the scalability of one of these things. Or who knows? Could be any number of things.

Maintaining a site is about all these things though, updating code to be scalable, improving redundancy, e.t.c. If your hosting provider has hours of downtime a month you look at switching.

I'm not saying any of this is easy but it is within the remit of BGA

Down again???

Apparently busted again. Not gonna lie, this is pretty nuts.

Unless significant improvement to this site's stability are made within the next few months, I will not be renewing my Premium membership.

Why did I get a penalty in rating because of the server crash?