LouisWu interview 12/11/06

Ducain · #1

LouisWu (owner of Bungie.org) has been around the Bungie online
community since...well, for a long time. I thought it would interesting
to send him a series of questions that were all focused on the running
of a large fansite, and he agreed (he's cool like that). The HIH admin
staff got together and came up with some interesting questions, though
I have to admit it ended up being quite a few of them. Cheers to Louis
for wading through them all.

*********************************** ********************

These questions are from Shdw Shinobi (shady creature)

1. How did your passion for running a fan site get sparked? (How did you get interested in doing this?)

LW: Hmm... I think at the very start, it was simply that I saw a need for
a central repository for Marathon files, I had some basic web skills
(gimme a break, it was 1995, NOBODY was a wizard yet), and I had some
time. It grew from there.

By the time bungie.org was founded (4 years later), I understood the
rush that could come from fan feedback. Wasn't too hard to psych
myself up for the work. :)

2. Did you do something special to have some many people come to your site daily?

LW: I think the only really special thing I do is update regularly. After
that, it's just a matter of making sure that folks get recognized for
their work, in a timely fashion.

3. What tips would you have for new webmasters interested in starting a fan site (doesn't have to be halo related)?

LW: I answered this once, a while back - I'm pretty sure my answer still
holds. Find a niche. Unless you're starting a fansite for a brand-new
community (say, for example, Halo Wars), you're probably going to find
yourself in competition for eyeballs with folks who've been in the
game a lot longer than you; unless you offer something they're not
offering, you're simply not going to get off the ground. Look around
for a specialty that (first and foremost) interests you (without this,
it doesn't MATTER how many eyeballs you get; you'll burn out pretty
quick and quit anyway), and (second but still pretty important) hasn't
been covered, or hasn't been covered to a level you think you're
<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>capable of. Start an art-specific site, maybe - or a blog that you
update regularly. Comics are great if you've got the creativity to
keep them funny over time... many folks who start comic sites discover
that they've run out of stuff to say after a dozen or two dozen
comics, and then where do you go?

Find a niche. And update regularly.

4. Do you ever wish you hadn't decided to run a fansite?

LW: Rarely... but yes. There are times when real life wants a lot from me,
and the website feels like an anchor. If I simply step away from it to
focus on something else, it'll be even worse when I get back to it -
the content doesn't stop pouring in just because I haven't updated for
a while. (Check out our misc art queue for proof of this - I sometimes
neglect that for a couple of MONTHS, and people STILL send stuff in at
the rate of about 1 a day or so.)

These questions are from me (15 degrees down bubble)

1. Is Bungie.org the first fansite you've owned/managed?

LW: No. The Marathon HyperArchive NorthWest was the first - opened in
early March 1995. It was a filesite, archiving fan creations for the
game Marathon.

2. After years of working with a large fansite, what is it that keeps you going? In other words, are there certain aspects of running the site that give you the desire to continue, or is it something you even think about?

LW: It's mostly the community itself. I'm amazed by what folks are capable
of; there are some really, really talented people out there who are
willing to put together really cool stuff that pays tribute to the
game Halo, or to Bungie directly. There are many, many more people who
might not have a huge talent, but have serious enthusiasm - and
providing them an outlet for their enthusiasm keeps the community
vibrant. I've met some really, really neat people doing this. I think
<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>that's what keeps me at it.

3. A fansite evolves over time, and even though HBO has retained its
appearance over the years, what things are different about running HBO
now, in contrast to the way it was years ago?

LW: When we started, it was all about Bungie - what they were doing, what
they were saying, what we could expect next. It was all news; there
was a trickle of fan art, no fan music, certainly no fan fiction. We
had lots of people speculating on the forum, and it was sort of like a
bunch of people at camp, around a campfire at night, just talking...
it was fun. As time went on, interests solidified; it became clear
what sorts of things people wanted to discuss, or create, and the site
evolved to accomodate these interests. (Tricks, Story, separate
sections for various types of fan creations, etc) More time went by,
and it became clear what sections couldn't be handled any more - but
there was always someone there to pick up the slack, if there was any.
(I guess the biggest example would be the Trick section - it became
really clear right after Halo 2 was released that there was no way I'd
be able to keep up with the Tricking community as I did with Halo -
but there was High Impact Halo, ready and willing to welcome the
tricksters to a new and vibrant home.)

4. What would you say is the most time consuming part of running a
fansite like HBO?

LW: Keeping up on the daily submissions, I guess. In the old days, I
actually went around to gaming sites, other fansites, whatever - I
had a list of a couple of dozen places I visited every day, looking
for new Halo tidbits. There's no time for that any more - but luckily,
we're big enough that there's no need for it, either; if something
shows up on the web, chances are good we'll get an email or a forum
post. Collating all of these - writing up the news bits, sometimes
doing followup research to flesh out a news post, reading the forum
<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>(every post, every day - still) - this is what takes the most time.

5. As a treat for the geeks of the community (myself included), could you give us a breakdown of the hardware and software required to keep a battleship like Bungie.org afloat? How many servers are you currently using, what software is used (I'm guessing mostly php/MySQL), how much bandwidth do you chew through each month, what is the traffic like these days, and how much of B.org still lives at your house? Man...that's a long question.

LW: Hmm. Let's see - in Dallas, there are 5 dedicated servers handling
large files - movies, the Marathon-based trilogyrelease website, the
Marathon Archives, and source.bungie.org. They have an allotment of
1.5 terabytes/month each, and each sits on a 100Mbit pipe - on an
average month, we use 85+% of our allowable bandwidth, and we hit
peaks of 80 or 90Mbit right after a large release. All five boxes have
Intel processors, and run FreeBSD 4 or 5, all 5 run PHP and MySQL, and
all 5 use Apache2 webservers. A year or two ago, HBO-generated links
were eating several terabytes per month of the bandwidth at
mythica.org, as well - but Brian has grown to cover so many different
sites now, and offers such extensive services to these sites, that I
don't upload movies there any more. (Turns out it's okay - bandwidth
needs have dropped a bit since mid-2005, though I'm sure they'll pick
up again as Halo 3 gets close...)

In Miami, there are two machines - <SCRIPT></SCRIPT>halo.bungie.org (a rack-mounted
Macintosh G4 running OS9, with Webstar 4.5 providing the webservice,
and MGI - a mac-based server-side language - doing the dynamic stuff),
and nikon.bungie.org (a beefy Intel-based box running FreeBSD 4, with
PHP/MySQL/Apache2 doing the serving). The mac is only there because a
bunch of stuff is still written in MGI; I haven't had time to rewrite
it in PHP. I love Macs... but OS9 is NOT a good web serving platform
any more. :( As soon as all the legacy code has been rewritten, the
mac will be retired, and nikon.bungie.org will becomehalo.bungie.org.
These boxes sit on a 100Mbit switch, as well, but I've got an
unlimited 5Mbit bandwidth limit. (That means I can burst to 100Mbit,
but at the end of the month, my average bandwidth use has to be 5Mbit
or less. I usually cut it pretty close.)

Here in Connecticut, I have a T1 connection to the internet - it used
to be considered 'superfast', but now your average cable connection
beats it by a lot. (It still has a respectable UPLOAD capacity - even
if you've got a 6Mbit Comcast connection, chances are your upload is
limited to 384Kbps - that's a fraction of my 1544Kbps. Most of the
rest of bungie.org is housed here - the main site, plus the
marathon.bungie.org portal (and most of the subsites),
myth.bungie.org<SCRIPT></SCRIPT> , pid.bungie.org, oni.bungie.org, and a few critical
pieces of HBO - the Story page, the Tricks section, and the forum.
(There are also a lot of PAYING clients using this line - yes, b.org
eats a significant chunk of my T1, but there's enough left over to
provide (usually) snappy service to a sizeable number of small sites,
and if one of those sites has larger files they need to be able to
serve, well, there's always space on the Dallas boxes.)

6. Is there any aspect/part of running HBO that you are particularly proud of? To put it another way, when you think about HBO, what makes you think, "That's really cool. We did that right."?

LW: I think the MPRRS is a pretty impressive tool. Cybrfrk did most of the
coding for it (this is unusual; almost everything else here was built
by me), but I'm still pretty involved in the management (and new
design ideas). It's down right now, but it'll be back soon, and
considerably better than before - which is saying something.

I'm also pretty proud of the Gallery pages; I think we highlight some
amazing artists, and, for some of them at least, the feedback they get
BECAUSE of the gallery pages inspires them to create new stuff. I love
that. :)

7. It looks like there will be Halo related games being produced for some time, and so there will be no shortage of fansite material, and that being the case, do you have any particular future plans for HBO, or is it simply a matter of keeping one virtual foot in front of the other?

LW: Heh. At this point, it's a matter of keeping one virtual foot in front
<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>of the other. :) Anything that gets offloaded to other companies
(HaloWars, for example) won't be covered in detail by HBO - we're
halo.BUNGIE.org, after all, not HALO.org. That said, we WILL mention
major developments in these projects, as we've done for, say, Stubbs
the Zombie in the past.

8. Ok, I've got to ask it: do you have any plans of upgrading/changing the HBO forum software? Many of us have come to love its clean look and simple layout, but are you ever tempted to look into something newer?

LW: I love WebBBS for its layout, and thread-based worldview. I hate
WebBBS for its perl roots, and disk-based post storage. (The main
reason I have to keep archiving posts every few months is because perl
slows to a crawl once the post count gets above 25 or 30,000, since
every post it has to access is a separate file on-disk.) What I'd love
is a forum that allowed me to keep the best while tossing the worst.
However, it also needs (and this has proven to be the dealbreaker in
most cases) an ability to access existing posts - all three quarters
of a million of them.

Phorum looks promising - in fact, with the help of the developer, I
was able to get an import script that would convert WebBBS posts to
phorum posts, and was able to further modify it to keep track of
enough original information that old links could still be made to
work. It all needs some tweaking, though, and I haven't found the time
to actually DO that tweaking; hopefully, that'll change in the
not-too-distant future.

If you're asking, will I ever switch to something like phpBB, or
vBulletin... I'd have to say probably 'no'. The biggest downside with
that style of forum (in my opinion) is the huge amount of excess
<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>baggage that people are allowed to add to posts; signatures, smileys,
avatars, and the like. Sure, folks find it fun to personalize their
experience. And sure, everyone wants a way to make themselves stand
out from the crowd. But HBO's always been about the content - it's one
reason I've never really upgraded the LOOK of the site. The philosophy
is that the interface should NOT be important, past its ability to
deliver you the content we have to offer - if you're noticing that
interface, I screwed up. (If you're noticing a LACK of an interface,
as is the case with lots of people who write and offer to upgrade our
look for us... I'm okay with that. :) That means you're conditioned to
look for bells and whistles, and their absence bugs you. That says
it's working the way it SHOULD work. :) )

Plus, nobody's ever written a WebBBS-to-phpBB or WebBBS-to-vBulletin
import script, that I know of... and I'm NOT willing to lose our old
resources.

<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>
These questions are from Mr. Sprout (cool sounding british dude)

1. HBO has been hugely popular and is significantly more recognised than other bungie.org subdomains such as marathon.bungie.org or myth.bungie.org. Were you prepared for running a fansite on such a popular game? If Bungie started another series of games which turned out to be as popular as the Halo series, would you continue to run community fansites for them too?

<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>LW: I'm pretty sure that the time I put into the Marathon HyperArchive
NorthWest back in 1995 and 1996 was almost as much as I put into
halo.bungie.org these days - I had to test every map that was
submitted to us, so that I could write a mini-review of it. In a lot
of cases, I actually FIXED map bugs before releasing the map (though I
never took any credit for that). I don't have to do stuff like that
for HBO. I think when Bungie's next game comes out, if it looks like
I'm not going to be able to handle the load, I'll find people who can
help. (Bungie.org will certainly cover whatever comes next - the only
real question is who will be doing the work. :) )

2. How does your family react to having 'the man of the house' as such an important figure in the Halo community? Do they help out with the running of HBO at all or generally leave you to your own devices, occasionally pushing bits of food under the door?

<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>LW: They don't help at all with the running of the site. I'm also pretty
careful not to let the running of the site interfere with family
activities; my wife tolerates bungie.org, but only because she gets me
when she needs me.

Apparently, my connection to Bungie has helped make one of my sons
pretty popular at his school, though, so it's all good.

These questions are from Phantom (Lobster Herder of the East)

1. How much would you say it takes to finance the HBO servers monthly?

LW: More than the cost of your average Seattleite's caffeine habit, but
less than the US national debt.

2. Why have you disguised the PHP page extension with an HTML page extension?

<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>LW: 'Disguised'? You make it sound like I'm trying to fool someone. php
processes html pages on our servers for one simple reason - I hate
having to remember to change the extension to get php capability.
Nearly every page has SOME php code on it; why NOT simply have the
default extension be processed by the php engine?

3. How much space have you taken up in terms of file storage since HBO went public?

LW: Interesting question. I don't think there's an easy way to tell,
because some files are duplicated on multiple servers, and not
everything is neatly stored... but a rough estimate would be somewhere
between 20 and 30 gb right now.

4. After years of experience, what guidance can you offer to curators of high traffic websites?

LW: Be sure you have backups. Be sure you have a way to swap out hardware,
in case of failure. Find a bunch of people you trust - not necessarily
for day-to-day tasks, but people who can be there when you can't.

Be sure you have backups.

<SCRIPT></SCRIPT>
5. Do you ever plan to change the format/template of HBO? If not, has past experiences affected this decision?

LW: It's possible, someday, that I'll change the template. As I mentioned
in an earlier question, though, the idea behind HBO's interface is
that it's there only as much as it's needed to provide you access to
the content - and no more. You're not supposed to even NOTICE it -
it's not a design that's intended to win awards, or make people go
'wow, I need to use that!' HBO is, and always has been, all about the
content. For a site like this one, web design is just eye candy - and
distracting eye candy, at that.

*********************************** *************************

Cool stuff, and much thanks to LouisWu for taking the time (probably a bunch of it) to answer all these. :)

-Duke

BigGruntyThirst · #2

O.o That was a good interview. LW has got something nailed down right in his ol' head.

vshields ash · #3

Quote:

Originally Posted by BigGruntyThirst

O.o That was a good interview. LW has got something nailed down right in his ol' head.

he mentioned map testing/fixing. he didn't mention, he has actually replicated stunts, to save folks the cost of mailing tape...etc.
i heven't seen him play, but from what i can glean, he can do most any stunt we can.

i had the golden gun vid, and he managed to get through the door in relatively few tries. a very good sign he's no sloach at stunts ;)

quite a man, the Fabulous Wu :)

ash
( i owe him a lot ;)

TheMaker420 · #4

Louis Wu is a great guy, he is one of the nicest people you will ever meet. Wu deserves everything he has today. <3 ya Wu.

BNSbaby! · #5

I like Wu. Wu, is coo........ l

amaroq · #6

Quote:

LW: Apparently, my connection to Bungie has helped make one of my sons pretty popular at his school, though, so it's all good.

lol... that's awesome.

Clayster · #7

Yeah, I liked the part about his family and such, thats kinda cool for your kid though.. haha

Prowlaz · #8

Quote:

Originally Posted by amaroq

lol... that's awesome.

lucky basardskie has every halo fan at his school giving him their lunch money...

that makes me want to tear...... *tears*

*kisses Wu's feet*

Nofirefrog · #9

No one asked Wu about the Wii?

I guess that's not what this was about. Great interview. But it makes me wonder... where's Taso? :D

Nofirefrog

azzucips · #10

Quote:

Originally Posted by vshields ash

i had the golden gun vid, and he managed to get through the door in relatively few tries. a very good sign he's no sloach at stunts ;)

what's the golden gun

KORHAL · #11

Well well well. One of my biggest idols has finally been interviewed ^.^ I only wish I could've asked him a few things myself.

LouisWu, thanks for putting up with me way back when, and for today's days.

KORHAL

iCorpsey · #12

Cool Interview.

Spuff · #13

That's pretty awesome. I wish everyone at school loved me since I have a connection with Volition. *sighs* I guess Saints Row just isn't as cool as Halo 2. Haha.

Btw - this got a news post on Bungie.net in case no one noticed lol.

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