possible changes coming to the luchadb

Short version: I’m thinking of taking the luchadb – the sprawling database of lucha libre events, results, and video links – and moving off to it’s own separate domain. It would be the same site, more or less, but in a new place. I haven’t committed to doing this yet. It’s close enough that I’m mentioning it here just in case any one had any comments

Longer version: I’ve had problems with this website overrunning it’s memory limit and crashing for years. I assumed it was just because I have a lot of stuff hosted on the same account. Both this entire thecubsfan.com domain and the entire luchawiki.org domain are on the same hosting server, and were under one user account. That’s definitely part of the problem, and will be an issue if/until I decide to throw more money at the memory issues.

In early March, I discovered another big part of the problem is there was malware hidden in my site. As best I can tell, it never affected anyone’s password by my own servers ones, using the hosting computer to do things. I’m not even totally clear what things: the code was intentionally scrambled and mostly loaded other websites. Maybe spam, maybe DNS attacks, I’m not sure. I’m thinking I must’ve just been too slow on a WordPress or wiki software update and that’s all that it took.

What I am sure of is that is that it was a pain to get the malware out. That too is partly because I had so much stuff under one account. It was about 65 GB of files. Some of those are large MP3 files, some of them are tiny thumbnail images or pages, and it added up to a lot of places to hide malicious code. I tried looking for the malware myself, I had my hosting try, and I paid a third party company to look at the files and do the same, and we’d keep running into the same problem. There was so much to scan thru that we couldn’t keep it all clean at once, with the malware sneaking back in to clean areas before we get it out of the unscanned sections. The outside company convinced me it was just way too much to have all the sites on the same account, and they were right. Once I moved the luchawiki over to it’s own walled off section, it didn’t take long to finally get both sites clean. Everything’s been working fine for about a week now.

I wouldn’t have spent a month plus on this problem if I just had split the websites up under separate accounts to begin with which makes me think I ought to do more of it. If I moved the “luchadb” – the comprehensive results/wrestlers/videos database – onto it’s own domain, then those large amount of files won’t be subject to any problem caused by missing WordPress patch. It’d also have the side effect of making it appear the slightest bit professional if the links were all “luchadb.com/” rather than “thecubsfan.com/cmll/events/whatever”. My problem is it’s entirely not professional as it is. It it’s 100% code I wrote myself, cobbled together with whatever idea I had at that moment and no great overarching plans. It’s going to take a fair bit of work to just move it elsewhere, because it was never written with the forethought it might need to be moved. Moving it also might might cause old links to stop working, though I can set up some general redirects. I’m not sure if the difference really matters to anyone beyond myself, and I’ve long put off this idea thinking the time wasn’t worth the effort it would take. The malware bit has me thinking maybe it’s worth the effort not.

I’m mentioning this now just in case the couple dozen of you who actually use it on a regular basis have some thoughts about why I should or shouldn’t do it. I’ve done some testing around with the idea on luchadb.com account now, and I think I’ll be able to do make the move, at the price of a couple weeks of working on that instead of the other things I might be doing (so maybe less weird posters for that whlie.) I’m not going to start thinking hard about until I finish up with the 1998 laguna data mining, which may be a week or so still off.

And if I can get get luchadb.com to work, and I don’t hate moving things around and setting up redirects by then, the next thing on the roadmap would be to finally move this blog to be really located under luchablog.com. But that’s a ways down the road.