The state of the Anime Cel collecting community.

I already wrote my response in regard to the current state of cel collecting. I didn’t have the time to read the comments that followed until today.

I think it’s great that people are taking the initiative in creating an alternative to Rubberlsug. The one thing I think that you all don’t seem to consider is that Rubberslug is not just to show off your gallery, it’s become in a sense a record. A lot of collectors are not active anymore for various reasons, but the galleries are still there. I know a lot of you get annoyed by the fact, but I think it’s great that one can still look at the artwork and maybe also get a sense of the person who collected it.

Also I think participation, even from still active folks, might be difficult, especially if you expect them to create their own site etc. I for one can tell you that I don’t have the time and energy, and quite frankly the thought of my gallery going private doesn’t bother me as I know it should. It also seems that I’m not the only one as I’ve seen that happen with other galleries over the years. I guess you can call me irresponsible, lazy etc. there’s been a lot of name calling of late, but heck I don’t even have an Anime-Beta account, how crazy is that.

Regardless, I’m surprised that Jason hasn’t really responded to all of this. Everyone seems to quote things that he said years before, but I wonder what his thoughts are today. I think his input would be great right about now.

If Rubberslug's galleries should happen to disappear, many of these cels might never be seen again. It's not as simple as rescanning and reuploading if the files still exist. Some cels have deteriorated and others have been destroyed.

I want to echo your concern. It would be really horrible if all these images just so happen to disappear overnight. However, the Admins here do mention the following in the Info section of RS: http://www.rubberslug.com/resource/faq.aspx#6-5

In order to preserve all these images, I would hope that if RS ever decided to close it's door Jason would offer up the data to be transferred over to another platform. However, I would strongly encourage all of us to keep an offline copy of any scans you decide to do.

Hey y'all. I read through some of this and it would be awesome if something better existed (or this had someone with more time to devote to it).

The reality is that there isn't enough of a profit motive here to build it into anything bigger. If this were run as a business, it probably would have been wound down.

The good news is that it's in a relatively durable position. The data center isn't going anywhere anytime soon (half of RS is on Amazon, the other half would be moved if I had 1-2 weeks off to do it).

If I had to write this from scratch, it would be all on AWS because f- rackmount servers. I hope to never purchase another one for the rest of my life. It's like buying a jet turbine instead of buying a plane ticket.

I'd be happy to give/share the data to a qualified team, but it would have to be a *truly qualified* team or person. Not a dabbler... a software architect with serious historical MS chops who has copious free time or serious motivation. It would be a nontrivial transferral... think ASP.NET v2, NT2000, and MSSQL 2000. That's not a typo. Also, there are various bits of software from long-dead companies that we'd hope documentation can be found archived somewhere. It would take a few weekends and a lot of patience and no guarantee that it would be able to be moved without pulling the entire box out of the rack and shipping it.

Joe once described this as Battlestar Galactica and that's pretty apt. How many pieces of software do you use today that are essentially 10+ years old?

That's really the problem. There's no clear legacy path for this. I don't *need* to shut it down and I'm actually quite happy to share.

My in-theory migration plan would be something like.... virtualize the Rubberslug image or throw it in Docker, then spend the next 6-12 months, refactor the database into a more flexible document store, then refactor the code into a microservices architecture to decouple concerns, using various cloud services where possible for durability and availability. No idea how you'd make enough money to pay for this, but at that point you just connect your credit card to it and it'll run until the heat death of the sun.

Believe you are qualified for the task? E-mail me at jason{at}orchidflux and I'm happy to discuss!

This was what I meant Jason, when I suggested a "third party" take over. Maybe a team like Jimdo.

Again, I didn't mean you any disrespect, but the "Can't find Server" error messages I've been getting seriously freak me out, so I'm glad you posted here.