Server Map (mark 2) - as from January 2025

The forum is provided by customers of Great Western Railway (formerly First Great Western), and the views expressed are those of the individual posters concerned. The team behind the content of the forum is YOU - the 199 members, with your contributions and discussions, who have logged in this year (2024). Between you, you have posted 14,316 messages. You are backed up by 8 active moderators who help, advise and change member contributions, and 4 administrators ("moderators plus") who can move boards around and make significant further changes in addition to the moderator actions. The web site, code and structure is looked after by myself (Graham Ellis) on virtual servers located on the Internet.

The Coffee Shop forum was set up in 2007 and celebrates its 18th birthday next year. Between Christmas 2024 and New Year 2025 - always the quietest time on the forum - I have performed a major upgrade. I would characterise that as using most of the old components but adding new ones and to allow us to the forum forward into the next decade.

Here is a diagram showing how the forum was structured last week (pink background), and how it is structured as we start 2025 (green background):

"Mark 1" ran on a single server called "www.firstgreatwestern.info" using http (hypertext transfer protocol) version 1.1

"Mark 2" runs on a different server, and I have moved the name "www.firstgreatwestern.info" there. It now uses https (secure hypertext transfer protocol). The principal motivations for HTTPS are authentication of the accessed website and protection of the privacy and integrity of the exchanged data while it is in transit. In other words, it confirms who you are talking to and that the server is not pretending to be someone it isn't. Realistically, on just a public chat forum there are few secrets; the extra security, though, is strong enough to secure personal details, and our use of if from 2025 onwards will allow us to do more should we wish. It also provides a strong re-assurance to virus and security scanners that our site is "certified clean" - avoiding all sorts of user software suggesting we may be a dangerous site. And it also provides search engines such as Google with a re-assurance to rank us higher than they otherwise would.

The Mark 2 front server acts as a receptionist for the original server, which is still there though no longer visible in public. Requests are "proxied" on to it (the term is that it's a worker" by the receptionist and then the results are proxied back, so that the visitor to the web site does not see the software that's running there. Many of the ancillary services are transferring to the receptionist server so that it can serve other content, relieving the worker of some mundane work and allowing in to concentrate on forum content. Some data is also transferring to the receptionist to free up disc space for coming years on the worker. Should the forum get hugely busier, the proxy software allow for another worker to be added.

Coffee Shop members need not worry about what is done where - just talk to "www.firstgreatwestern.info" almost as you always have done (if you try http, it will switch you to https). But please bear in mind that with this major move-about there is lots to be tested and probably a number repairs made. Some of the older and more obscure stuff will be re-implemented in due course and a few items lost under the dust of time may not re-appear. Member's posts right back to the start are there - https://www.firstgreatwestern.info/r2.html (or https://www.greatwesternrailway.info/r2.html ) of 28th January 2007. And that should come out looking nice on a phone as well as a laptop.