2022 In Review!

FerrariFlunker · December 31, 2022, 7:40pm

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aloha.pk 2022 In Review!

This year has absolutely flown by, and has probably presented unique challenges for you, your friends, and family. Despite the chaos, aloha.pk has made an incredible amount of progress this year!

Our outstanding staff and amazing community members have been busy in multiple areas of our community, pushing aloha towards a bright future! We’ve written this post to review everything that’s been accomplished and shine a light on some of the things still in progress!

New Forum

It’s hard to believe that we’re nearing 1 year since we’ve moved from our original smf forum!

Our current site, with it’s improved technology, scalability, and customization, has allowed us to start building things for aloha that we would’ve only dreamed of in the past. We’ve made a lot of changes and updates to different aspects of the new forum throughout this year, and will continue to do so!

In 2023, we’re hoping to improve our mobile support, our left sidebar, and more! Keep an eye on our frontpage for updates

Transitioning to piqueserver

In case you don’t know what piqueserver is, feel free to check out https://www.piqueserver.org/!

For the past decade+, our AoS servers have run using a server implementation called PySnip. Even though piqueserver was available many many years ago, it always seemed out of reach for aloha. The amount of aloha’s infrastructure that was built around PySnip meant that transitioning to pique would be a lot of work.

The amount of work hasn’t gone down but we were finally in a spot this year where we could take it on! At the time of writing this, there isn’t an official date for when the transition will be complete, but the amount of work that’s been completed is impressive.

We’re improving a lot of the logic within our scripts while porting them to piqueserver, to make this transition even more worth it.
This will be a huge improvement for aloha AoS servers!

Discord Sync

One of the new features that we were able to create because of our new forum was our Discord Sync plugin! Basically, this plugin syncs your roles on our Discord server with the groups you’re a part of on the forum!

This provides better security for our Discord server, the ability for users to add their own roles, and keeps everything centralized to aloha and our Groups page: https://aloha.pk/g
We’re continuing to make updates/improvements to this plugin, https://github.com/aloha-pk/discourse-discord-sync, and will keep you updated on our frontpage

Read more about Discord Sync and how to connect your account here! https://aloha.pk/pub/discord-sync

AlohaCraft 1.18 and 1.19

The AlohaCraft server has gone through a ton of change within a year!

To begin with, the 1.18 update at the start of this year brought a new map to the server due to the massive terrain changes.
When the 1.19 update arrived, we expanded the world border to generate the new types of chunks.
There are now 78 AlohaCraft players!

The spawn, shopping district, and member’s creations are really taking shape! It’s worth noting that the map won’t be reset again for a long time.
View the dynmap here! https://aloha.pk/c/minecraft/alohacraft-dynmap

Developers and News Team

We added two essential groups to aloha.pk this year: @news-team and @developer!

News Team:
News Team members work together to suggest/draft/review and publish content to the aloha.pk frontpage and social media accounts! They’re the ones writing this very sentence you’re reading
There’s been a great stream of content posted to our frontpage, courtesy of the news team!

Developers:
One of our areas of improvement this year was creating more opportunity for members to contribute to the backend and technical side of aloha, while maintaining the same level of security. A large part of this was the creation of the developer group, who work closely with aloha.pk sysadmins on the technical aspects of our infrastructure. The extra knowledge and support has been fantastic!

Git Organization

Due to the explosion of technical projects that aloha started taking on this year, we created a git org to store all of our repos → https://github.com/aloha-pk!

Not only does this keep our code centralized and organized, but it also keeps everything secure. Github allows us to give more backend access to our @staff-admin and @developer groups, while also allowing us to share some things with the public.

The git org has played a huge part in our pique transition, forum development, and more!

AoS Modding Section

One of the areas of aloha that got some attention with our new forum was our AoS Modding section!

The new structure of this section allows for some awesome features, including:

a modding homepage with featured mods and easy traversal of the different mod types → https://aloha.pk/c/ace-of-spades/aos-modding
an easy-to-use mod submission process → https://aloha.pk/w/aos-modding-submission
#aos-modding-relay Discord channel

In 2023, we’re planning on porting all of the topics in the Modding->Incomplete category to fit within the new structure. If you have any mods, please consider submitting them!

AoS Server List/Stats

Another area that we’ve been working on improving is our AoS server list and stats leaderboard! There’s been multiple aspects of this project, with a few things already completed and others still in progress!

To begin with, our stats system was reworked to use an actual database program rather than everything being shoved into a .txt file. This improves performance, scalability, and is just a way better way of storing the data

The next thing we completed was updating our server list/stats homepage with a better interface and a theme to match our new forum! We then made it easily accessible directly from our forum → https://aloha.pk/c/ace-of-spades/stats

In 2023, we’re hoping to roll out some pretty sweet updates to our server-specific pages in the serverlist! We’re also in the early stages of discussing changes to how we track stats, so make sure to keep an eye on the frontpage for more updates!

Moving Hosts

To add onto everything happening in '22, we had a lot of expected/unexpected host moves and changes throughout the year. Our goal with these host changes were to improve server performance/security/cost, and each one takes quite a bit of time and effort.

In January, we completed our move into our current us-west location → https://aloha.pk/t/17765. We did see some improvements with the better hardware/networking, but still noticed some annoying lag on our servers. In April, we moved to a different machine within the same host center to see if that would make a difference, but it seemingly has not.

In June, we started exploring options on the east coast of the US by having community members run ping tests-> https://aloha.pk/t/20913, which led us to eventually opening up us-east test servers. Overall, we saw better performance on our us-east servers.

Our future plans for 2023 involve moving our AoS servers to a us-east location, which will likely correspond with when we complete our transition to piqueserver. An improved host with improved server software will hopefully mean an improved experience for our players

Donations and Contributions

The projects above are just a snippet of the day-to-day operations of aloha, and everything combined takes a ton of time, effort, and contributions. There are so, so many people who have/are contributing to aloha, and it’s impossible to list everyone without leaving someone out.
Thank you to all of these people, you are incredible

We can, however, list out the people who have helped with the cost aspect of aloha. Thank you to all of these '22 @backer members for your donations; it’s incredibly appreciated

@Nathan, @Hekima, @communist, @FerrariFlunker, @shywolf91, @noahgambles, @Hawkan, @NOX, @izzy

View donations history here → https://aloha.pk/pub/donations
Donate to aloha here → https://aloha.pk/s