#it's fine to say things like “ah i feel like xyz is really hard to pull off but you did a nice job!”

[blondiest]

btw dont use admiration / appreciation for my writing as a means of publicly putting down other authors. you're embarrassing both of us

[copperbadge]

Hey Sam, I remember reading a post or response from you about how to give to charities anonymously, but now that I’m searching, I’m finding a few different responses but still have questions. Any chance you could do a round up post? Wondering about the following:

1. How to give cash

2. How to give small amounts anonymously (e.g., if you can’t set up a DAF)

3. How to opt out of being sent branded junk if you can’t give anonymously, because it will end up in the garbage (seriously, no more pens, stickers or magnets please)

4. In giving anonymously, how important is the tax receipt? I only take the standard deduction on my taxes… is there a reason to bother with tracking the receipts?

Appreciate your help!

Ah yeah, it's rough knowing how to do some of these things. I've written about some of them, probably most of them, but disparately over several posts, so let me see if I can answer succinctly and all in one place.

How to give cash: You are pretty much confined to two options, giving cash to a staffer in person or mailing cash in an envelope. If you have access to the office of the nonprofit you may be able to swing by and drop the cash off, but it's not super convenient and often not possible. If you're at an event you can hand it in an envelope to a staffer, and that's really the only way my organization gets cash donations, but that requires you to be at the event. And technically I can't recommend mailing cash since the risk of theft is a real one. Giving cash is fine legally, but nonprofits often aren't thrilled with it because it can put their staff at risk and also there's, well, there's no way to track that donation to a person. But yeah, throw them dollars between two thick sheets of paper and mail that in with a note saying "This is for the XYZ organization" so they know they can accept it.

2. Giving small amounts anonymously: It depends on how you're defining 'small'; I have a DAF (for the readers: a Donor Advised Fund -- I talk a little about them here but I've never gone indepth) which has no minimum deposit or minimum monthly contribution, but they do have a minimum donation amount of $20. To me that's not especially large, but I know to many people it can be. Pretty much the only way to give an amount smaller than $20 anonymously is to give online through the nonprofit's website using a cash giftcard (like a Visa gift debit card), and just not give an address. If you custom-order checks you can sometimes order checks without a home address, or with the bank's address, and pay with one of those, but I've never tried that.

If you do use a DAF (and I can recommend Charityvest, they've been mine for several years now) you can always set up to pay small amounts into it and just have them send all that money in a lump sum once or twice a year. I pay in $75/mo and from that they pay out three $20 donations a month, and at the end of the year the extra $180 that has just sat there becomes a nice extra donation. Always bearing in mind of course that once you pay into a DAF that money is gone, you can't claw it back even if you haven't "donated" it yet -- just putting money in a DAF is considered a donation. Readers, if you're curious about DAFs I recommend googling, lots of banks have "what is a DAF" pages, but if you're not finding what you want to know do feel free to come ask me.

3. Opting out of swag when not giving anonymously: I'm tempted to just say "Ya can't" because it's hard, especially with larger orgs. Even if you opt out, often you'll still get mailings that are considered "stewardship" (maintaining a relationship) rather than "solicitation" (asking for giving) and swag counts as stewardship. You can always start with sending the org a letter saying "Please put me on a Do Not Contact list, I will continue to give but don't want to get your swag". If that doesn't work, start returning mailings -- if you get something from the org don't even open it, just write "return to sender -- no longer resident" and drop it in the mail. This is not guaranteed effective; some places will either just change the name to 'resident' or retry every so often just in case. You can call the org and ask to speak to "records" or "data", and then just be super up front: "I want to keep supporting you but I really don't want the swag, how do I get that turned off?" They can help, but if you give to another similar org, a lot of times orgs will do "list exchanges" where they swap mailing lists, and if the org does that and you're on the other org's list, you get put right back on the "ok to mail" list for the first org.

I will say, swag is very, very cheap and gets results, so you can also look at this as "well, it was wasted on me, but the five cents this pen cost will get them $1 from someone, so in accepting it, I am still helping them to gain donations." This depends on your tolerance for waste, of course, which I'll talk more about in a minute.

(I personally like getting magnets, because I put stickers over top of whatever's printed on the magnet, cut it out to the shape of the sticker, and behold! I have a cool magnet!)

4. Tax receipting: I'm not a CPA or a tax lawyer and I fucked this up the last time I talked about it, so take this with a grain of salt, but there is an "above and beyond" deduction -- after the standard deduction I believe you can deduct an additional up-to-$300 for charitable giving, and if you were to be audited you'd need receipts to prove that. (As I said, if you're planning on this, fact-check first, I am not a strong source for this information.) (Edited to add: comments informed me this is no longer the case, so I'm glad I added in the disclaimer :D) If you give via a DAF, no problem; the DAF tracks where and when and how much you gave, so I could use my DAF's records as "receipts". You can also, if you lost or didn't get a receipt, contact the org and ask them for your giving record for the year. Here's the problem -- if you are giving in a way that allows you to avoid giving your address, there may be no way to get those receipts, since you can't prove their record with your name on it is you. So if you want receipts but want to give semi-anonymously definitely make sure they have your email address. If you're giving $300 a year, you probably want to take that deduction; if you're giving $20 a year, probably it isn't worth it. But yeah, to get a receipt you generally have to give them enough information for them to identify you, but you don't need giving receipts if all you take is the standard deduction.

All in all, the options are -- give cash and get no receipt, give via DAF or using a giftcard and get receipts to your email, give with your address attached and just hope they honor your request to be removed from swag mailing, or give however you want, put up with the swag, and bear in mind that them sending you the pen or magnet or keychain wasn't much of a problem or cost for them and will get them money from someone.

Honestly, option four isn't the least irritating, but it's probably the least labor-intensive for you. But it really is a question of what you want from your relationship to the nonprofits you support, and how passionately you feel about the "waste" status of swag they send. Only you can determine where your tolerance point is between "having to put in so much effort not to get this stuff" and "having to throw this stuff in a landfill". It's a regrettable part of being a donor and building a relationship with a nonprofit, but we in the nonprofit field do appreciate your giving and your tolerance :) While there are some outlier bad-actors in the space, trust me, for most nonprofits, nothing we do is gratuitous. Almost all of us are on such a thin wire that if something costs us money and doesn't get us more money, it gets binned very quickly.

[deathcapyandex]

The Mundane In Macabre - c3

[the mundane in macabre - chapter three]

Chapter one(link), chapter two(link)

Helicopters are a frequent sight over the town of night vale, various kinds exist, though who owns the majority of them is still rather unknown.

The blue belong to the secret police, that much is known, however...

I saw another yellow one today. These helicopter sightings have been increasingly more frequent.

I haven't been listening to the community radio, so I'm kind of behind on the news.

This one though, it dropped a bunch of fliers, missing kid posters, I think the girl on this one was one of the kids that went missing and returned from a summer program at the library, that was some event she came out of I hope she's alright.

Oh but that girl I mentioned before that came to the store and bought a plant? She came back, said the flowers really made a difference in the office but were too short lived.

I finally got her name too! Kiyomi. A pretty name. Just like her, pretty.

She didn't really buy anything this time but she did ask some questions about my store. The usual, nothing major. Just "how long have you had this place running?" "What do you do other than care for and sell plants" "how do you make the medicine?" "Is anything cursed?" "Do you have a dark magic practitioner on your staff?" And "why don't you sell xyz items?".

I'm actually the only person running the apothecary, but maybe I should look into hiring some help with the nursery. Kiyomis pretty smart I'm glad they asked me about that, or I never would have thought about it.

Shouldn't be too hard to find someone to at least help out with plant care, maybe a weekend intern or something.

Ah hold on.. I just turned on the radio, apparently that girl from the flyer, Tamika, is not missing, she's fine, that's good to hear. Things don't feel right though...

Oh that's probably the nausea, lately the box under my desk has started humming, a weird buzzing noise that's kind of making me sick. I think I'll move it somewhere else, like a room in in less frequently. I won't move it outside or some porch pirate will steal it and those hooded figures won't get their property back for sure.

Though it's been a while since I've seen them, since they left it behind even.

The noise is pretty bothersome, I'm not sure I want to open it anymore, but I might just to see if I can get the noise to stop. I'll have to make up my mind soon or the noise might get worse, I'd rather not trigger a migraine for myself if I can help it.

I hope kiyomi becomes a regular, she's really nice and interesting to have around, always something clever or peculiarly interesting to say. She's sweet and funny..and pretty.

Who, some kid just dashed in and hid behind- huh, they're shaking their head at me frantically..oh! Never mind there's no kid here, and if there was they went out and have probably gone home by now, it's just me and the box behind the counter.

Kids are strange, I would know I used to be one...not that I can remember much of it though. But they are strange, always so full of energy and ideas.

Another yellow helicopter just flew overhead, they dropped more missing children posters. Theres more than just Tamika now, they're looking for a bunch of kids.

One looked familiar, not because there's a kid with that description hiding in my store, no there's no kids here at all just me.

Oh right, when I talked about some medication going missing, the pain pills, something else when missing again, almost an entire supply of some seeds are gone. Mostly herbs.

Not sure who wants to grow herbs all by themselves in the dessert, but I wish them luck, just wish they'd payed first.

Hopefully nothing else goes missing or has gone missing. I'll check soon, I have...a few things to take care of before I start closing up fir the day.

I might have found that intern afterall...

[meikuree]

fic writer interview

tagged by @lightdescending -- tysm, this was really fun and i enjoy elaborating on things about writing/the writing process!

putting this under a read more because of my trademark verbosity (AGAIN)

name: meikuree

fandoms: actively writing for snk, tempted to write for the locked tomb

two-shot: oh i've not intentionally done these! twenty years of snow accidentally fits the bill, but only because it's on an indefinite hiatus

most popular multi-chapter: of aubades, my pieck-centric ficlet series, by some metrics

actual worst part of writing: when I get stuck in a loop of perfectionism and excessive self-scrutiny and rewrite… and rewrite… and rewrite again. my solution to this is to send it to a friend and ask for them to tell me just one (1) nice thing about it and put me out of my misery, or do freewriting where the point is to write whatever immediately pops into my head. usually then I’ll bump into an epiphany in the middle about how to Make It Work.

alternatively: fic writing is at times such a solitary, obsessively recursive activity and that’s one tension I dislike/have to negotiate with, because part of why I like art is to share it with people or at the very least engage in some kind of reciprocal conversation about it. community in art is very important to me in general, and I try to cultivate it in my online presence in small ways!

how you choose your titles: i'm a fan of grabbing titles from poems and songs/song lyrics (like you!) -- and drawing them from regina spektor songs in particular, bc she’s by some metrics my all-time favourite musician and i’m very familiar with her discography

do you outline: usually, yes. i don’t confine myself to it, but at minimum I outline pivotal moments and turning points. my process tends to start with a compelling scene or character interaction popping into my head and then goes on with me thinking about how i can use it as a vehicle for communicating a certain concept/philosophical idea/insight about XYZ characters' relationships somehow. that becomes the core idea/endpoint I want to reach by the end in a fic, so then i'll outline the main emotional or introspective beats i want to carry across in service of that

ideas I probably won’t get around to but wouldn’t it be nice: wow, um... /gestures vaguely at my unending list of wips/ that said, one idea i'm tickled by is an obnoxious, utterly random M-rated pieck/lady tybur fic involving painplay and knifeplay, the plot for which is literally just… lara tybur stabs pieck with a knife, but make it sexy somehow… with a dash of political intrigue and a complicated ambiguous relationship where two women use each other in a decidedly callous but also self-aware and self-indulgent way. the idea for this just came from me going "ah yes... the inherent homoeroticism of being stabbed by another woman..." and wondering about ~scenarios enabled by being a titan shifter, when you can regenerate your wounds and such! (partial inspiration also came, I will admit, from the locked tomb fandom and its lesbian body horror influences)

callouts @ me: sensory details are one of my biggest weak points. i've been ironing it out through concerted practice, but when i first started out writing fic i tended to be more comfortable dealing with metaphor, introspection, and mental states than... writing about actual, corporeal things happening in corporeal textspace. it can create the impression while reading, I suspect, that the characters are stuck a lot in their own heads. one of my earliest and favourite ao3 comments i've gotten said in passing that i used "very little dialogue and description" and i'm still tickled by... how true it is as an MO. it also amuses me because it seems to parallel the same issue i had with essays i wrote at university, i think (!) -- my professors would tell me, “you have a great grasp on the theory but you need to include more concrete examples." and i'd go "what? i was supposed to use examples?? ?__? isn’t the point self-evident from the theory?” for me, shifts in relationship dynamics and the negotiation of one's worldview underlying an event ARE the plot! -- and everything else tends to become subservient to that when i write

the other thing, which is somewhat related to the above, is just... self-confidence! i can be very insecure about my writing style, as my partner and poor friends I’ve whinged to can attest. mainly because i always fear that reading it feels like wading through a thick, unappealing swampy bog of someone's thoughts. but i think the solution is to just take a grounded, balanced view, like: there are some things i do well, and some things i do not-as-well in writing, and that's fine! that's normal! and in the moment i can be very hard on myself, and wring my hands thinking OH MY GOD THE UTTER CRINGE OF ME WRITING ANY OF THIS but i find that somehow, i always end up enjoying rereading what i write.

best writing traits: the most consistent comment i get, i think, is that my writing is beautiful and poetic (and one time: "this is one of the most poetic things i've ever read." which -- ?!?!). I’ve also been told that i characterise people well or with nuance, and write about them sensitively and with depth. i'm grateful, always, to hear these bc these things constitute the one niche i CAN do, imo!

spicy tangential opinion: hm… from what I’ve observed, many fandoms have a tendency to flatten character motives and complexities into easy, tidy and dare i say, sometimes bizarre, labels and categories. it’s not surprising it happens, but sometimes there’s space for people (a big, vague, nonspecific ‘people’) to go beyond simplistic assumptions about characters and one-dimensional portrayals (and to give writers who achieve it their due! I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an incredibly well-written fic that was relatively undernoticed and gone, “why, fandom???”) sometimes you write to fix canon, and sometimes you write because it’s fanon that needs fixing instead.

tagging (no pressure): @ebbet @noxcounterspell @leksaa90 @minoan-ophidian @frumpkinspocketdimension @acerinky @rose-gardens @chocochipbiscuit @whiteasy @ochen @kallistoi  anyone else who wants to join in!

[softcoregamer]

DRAGON QUEST XI S: ECHOES OF AN ELUSIVE AGE - DEFINITIVE EDITION

I've never played a Dragon Quest game before, so all I had to go on with this game was the pretty looking graphics and charming character art by the Dragonball guy, which- combined with having a hankering for a JRPG, a genre I haven't played since probably the Digital Devil Saga games (minus an abandoned most-of-the-way-done playthrough of SMT3 and a partial of one of the Megadimension Neptunias) was enough to sell me on it. I'm having a tough time determining if it was worth it.

(spoilers)

The story starts off very weak. Your glowing hand marks you as the chosen one, you have to collect glowing orbs to defeat the dark lord. It's like the story of a generic videogame you'd see in the background of a movie. They do throw in a little novelty to keep you on your toes- you present yourself to the king and he throws you in the dungeon, you go back to your hometown and travel back in time for some reason- but I really never warmed to the setting. It's just a collection of cliches and cute gimmicks, like the town of people who speak in haikus, the town of people who speak in rhyming couplets (you're stuck with these people for the bulk of the exposition at the start of act 2, which is a nightmare) and the town of- ugh- Italians. There's no sense of these places being places. It's just a nice pleasant fairytale kingdom of the kind that's normally mentioned in Snow White or whatever as the place the handsome prince comes from, except here you spend dozens of hours trudging through it looking for glowing tree roots and orbs. The big problem in Gallopolis is that the sultan's son isn't brave enough for god's sake. Acts 2 and 3 pick things up, and there's some neat reveals- I like that the lil red star you've been seeing in the sky right from the start was the stain of the original hero's failure to slay the villain, literally hanging over the entire setting all this time. Also the annoying act 1 scene where you get handed the name of the villain and an orb quest in an exposition dump is retroactively improved by the fact that the exposition isn't quite correct. Act 3 reintroducing time travel and actually being thoughtful about it was welcome as well, but sadly that has the effect of making you redo story points you already did since, logically, you're back in time to where you haven't done them yet. Sometimes this comes across as getting a do-over to get a more positive outcome for something that previously ended more tragically, in keeping with the way time travel is explained in-universe as essentially reloading an earlier save (and, as revealed in the end, continuing in a separate save slot). The 8th party member's act 3 quest is a standout here. In reading discussion of the game I've seen people insist on referring to this character as 8, presumably to preserve the plot twist of his existence, so I guess I'll do it too. But more often than not, act 3 quests consist of just doing the same stuff as act 2 again, in a somewhat more curt manner. This sticks in the craw after so much of act 2 already consisted of just doing the same stuff as act 1 again. The party members aren't much better, for the most part. The first three people you meet all say "ah, you're the Luminary, I was sent to help you" and there isn't much to them beyond that for a long time. Sylvando has a lot of personality, which is probably partly why he's become the game's big meme character, but it gets grating and he is insanely trite. The Dark Lord takes over the world and purges the unclean, and Sylvando's overriding concern is that he wants people to laugh and smile more. It's like he takes advantage of the fact that I need him for his boat to get my goat by acting like a fucking teletubby. Things pick way up when you meet Rab, and the 8th party member is genuinely really good. Even the early-game party members end up having their moments (Erik's backstory was pretty fun) but the game really doesn't put its best foot forward with these characters. Not that it needs to; for the first few I was just glad to be getting some help in combat. The combat is excellent in this game, when it gets going. I played with the "draconian quest" tougher enemies mode on, and I turned it off right at the act 2 end boss. The difficulty curve flowed really well this way, with act 3 enemies not feeling noticeably less tough than "draconian" act 2 enemies. The abilities and spells you get are carefully balanced so that it's very difficult to put together a perfect 4-person party, you're always missing something. This means the fact that you can change your line-up midfight isn't just a nice quality of life feature, it's a potentially vital mechanic. They tread a fine line where sometimes needing to swap people out during the battle doesn't mean the characters themselves feel useless; everyone is capable of some extremely tough stuff. And on the other end of the scale, enemy damage is heavy enough that buffing your attack and using big-damage abilities vs healing or defending can be a properly difficult choice; a heavy hit or a big heal at the right time can turn the tide of an entire battle, as can your big hitter suddenly getting put to sleep or your healer getting knocked out. Again, this is all with the caveat that I had "draconian quest" on for the first 2/3 of the game, from what I've heard combat without it is insanely easy. My big gripe with the combat is that there's very little in the way of tooltips. What's this enemy's magic resistance? Does my Sap have a better chance of landing if I up my Magical Might, or does that just increase spell damage? Does Oomphle affect Quadraslash? If I increase my agility will it go up by enough that I can take my turn ahead of these enemies? Does agility even do that? Does using abilities and spells mean I go later in the turn order vs generic attacks and defending? You just have to guess at all this; the wiki has some info on enemy stats but I don't know where they're getting it from other than datamining. There's an entire bestiary with almost no useful information which is functionally just a model viewer for all 700+ enemies. The only way to know anything is to experiment, which I guess at least adds some purpose to combat when you've filled out the bestiary for an area but still have to grid encounters- which will be required at some point, because fighting is the only way you get xp and money. There is also too much RNG. Critical hits being rare and certain attacks having a chance to cause Confusion or whatever is fine (although I'd prefer for attacks which are labelled as having a chance to inflict status effects to actually inflict the status effect way more often than they do) but why the fuck does the resurrection spell have a 50% success rate? Under what possible circumstances would I be using that spell other than needing my dead teammate back right now? Same for all the abilities on the skill tree that say "doesn't connect very often, but when it does it can cause a critical hit" OK that "CAN" is telling me that this ability which doesn't often connect won't even necessarily crit if it does. Why would I choose this ability? To handicap myself? How is this going to help me defeat the Timewyrm? All that said, when the combat is good it's really good, and whenever I lose a fight I'm thinking "I can win that next time if I do XYZ". The 2D battles are much less fun because the pace is much slower and there are no cute animations to liven it up, but it's always satisfying when the "flash" of an enemy taking damage becomes the "flash" of them disappearing, and you know you have slayed yet another blob. Non-combat gameplay is a mixed bag. The early-game fun of running around looking for new enemies to fight and fill out the bestiary wears off hard once act 2 begins and everything is either a reskin or a glowing-eyes "vicious" version of something you've already fought, and many maps are fairly sparse with just the odd treasure chest and locked door to liven up your path to the next area. That said, there are also several areas and dungeons which make a minigame out of traversing them; the Eerie Eyrie and the Battleground were standouts for me. Especially the remixed version of Eerie Eyrie you go to later on, where you get a flying mount to ride around. Crafting is surprisingly involved, with a whole minigame around it and hundreds of recipes to find all over the place. In most cases you can just use money in lieu of ingredients, which means minimal farming is required to get a lot out of the system, and the recipes with ingredients that can't be bought feel special instead of bullshit. In terms of items and recipes there really is a deluge of content- there are recipe books all over the place, with new ones available even in the last couple of maps that open up in the entire game, and there's an undeniable cookie-clicker rush you get from getting better at crafting and taking something you could barely get to +1 all the way to +3. I play games like this as a magpie, accumulating items with nice pictures and effects that make me do a 😲 face, and DQ11 certainly delivers. This even extends to character advancement, with Hidden Goodies incentivizing picking skills you might not want otherwise, and entire new skill trees opening up as quest rewards.

Overall, DQ11 is a good combat system with loot and progression systems that are well-executed enough to feel rewarding after 100 hours, all wrapped up in a style and tone that is not up my alley at all. A good litmus test for how much you'd like the game is probably: watch this scene and if you think it's the most epic thing you've ever seen then Dragon Quest 11 is for you.

[pendulumprince]

Title: Intervention

Characters: Yuya Sakaki, Yuzu Hiragi, Shingo Sawatari, Serena, Yuri, Sora Shiunin, Yugo, Rin, Reiji Akaba, Noboru Gongenzaka, Yuto, Ruri Kurosaki, Yoko Sakaki

Pairings: Light Fruitshipping with a dash of Predatorshipping and Brashshipping

Summery: Yuya and Yuzu are willing to go to extremes to ensure they’ll never be separated again. The Lancers aren’t having it. 

Notes: My late birthday gift to cypsiman2. Warnings for my haphazard attempts at writing humor. 

“Ah ha! And who might this be?” Sawatari cried, sweeping his arm across the empty room. He wasn’t talking to himself, but to the person who had just knocked on the door. He hadn’t been expecting Yuya for another hour or so, but he didn’t put it past his rival to surprise him with an early arrival. (It’s what he liked best about Yuya—never a dull moment.) 

“Might it be my second-in-command? My protégé?” he continued, grabbing his duel disk. A true entertainment duelist always had to be prepared to defend the Sacred Philosophy of Egao, even against a fellow believer. “Yuya! You’ve come a hundred years too early if you think you can beat—“

A fist pounded on the door; Sawatari skidded to a stop. “It’s Serena!” the voice on the other side of the door barked. “Open up!”

Sawatari scowled. He was glad to have Serena back after her ill-conceived ascent into godhood, but he didn’t care for the way her yelling made his heart pound in such a delightfully confusing way. He opened the door, and was reminded of another drawback to Serena’s return—the overgrown parasite that now followed her everywhere. (Everyone insisted on calling it ‘Yuri’; Sawatari preferred to ignore it’s existence.) 

“Serena-chan!” Sawatari leaned up against the doorframe. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She grabbed him by the collar, and pulled him along. “Come.”

“W-what—?”

“We’re staging an intervention!” the parasite elaborated as it roughly grabbed him by the upper arm. “For some reason, Serena thought you might be able to help.” 

Sawatari tried to ignore the jagged nails digging spitefully into his skin.  He whipped his head in Serena’s direction. “’The hell do you mean, ‘an intervention’?!” he cried. “On who?!”

“Yuya.”

Sawatari’s heart leapt into his chest, and images from that time violently flashed before him. “Don’t tell me—“

The parasite laughed cruelly. “Serena,” it managed between giggles, “why are you friends with this moron?”

“Shut up, Yuri.” Serena turned to Sawatari. “I’ll remind you that even if Zarc were still in existence, his revival would require his pieces to become one again. And,” she gestured vaguely in the parasite’s direction, “that obviously has not happened.”

“Then what’s wrong with Yuya?!”

“You know, I always wondered what it’d be like to get kidnapped,” Sora mused as they sped down Maiami City’s main highway. “It was sort of interesting, but I’m ready to get off now.”

Yugo looked down at Sora, who laid face down across his lap, nestled between himself and Rin. He kept his arms on her shoulders as she drove, both to maintain his balance and to keep the other boy pinned. “I told you to shut up about that! We nabbed you fair and square!”

Sora rolled his eyes, tempted to remind him that as a former soldier of Academia, they’d only ‘kidnapped’ him because he allowed it to happen. He held his tongue, but only because he didn’t want to ruin the experience. “Can you at least take this hood off, then? Not being able to see is really annoying.”

Yugo sucked his teeth, and just when Sora accepted that it wasn’t going to happen, Yugo roughly yanked the black hood off from over his head. “Happy now?!”

“I’d be a lot happier if you let me off, or at least told me where we were going. Why all the drama?”

“You don’t need to know!”

“Maybe if you told him, he’d stop his incessant whining,” Rin suggested.

Yugo sucked his teeth. “Fine.” Sora felt the other boy’s chest expand as he took a deep breath. “We’re staging an intervention, and we need your help.”

“That’s all? Why didn’t you just say that? I have loads of experience intervening in things!” Had his hands not been bound behind his back, Sora would’ve counted off his credentials on his fingers. “I intervened in the Synchro and Standard Dimensions! I intervened in Heartland before that! When students tried escaping Academia, I would intervene on them, too. So tell me, who are we destroying?”

“We’re destroying…” Sora swore he heard Yugo’s voice crack. “We’re destroying Hiragi Yuzu.”

A hot, indignant fury rose in Sora’s chest. How dare Yuya’s idiot Synchro double try to blow Yuzu off the face of the planet? “Oh? And what makes you think I’d help with something like that?” he baited, silently begging Yugo to give him an excuse. 

Rin swung her arm around, backhanding Yugo. “We’re just going to talk to her,” she grated behind clenched teeth. “Yuzu’s gone down a… strange road. We need to stop her before it’s too late!”

Sora tried to think of what Rin could mean by ‘strange road’. Had Yuzu picked up on some strange Pendulum Dimension fashion trend? Had she discarded her real father in favor of the Professor? Was she trying to become an intangible force for good again? “What do you mean by that?”

Rin sighed. “You better brace yourself…”

“This absurd behavior has gone on long enough. You need to stop.”

Sawatari heard Reiji’s low voice rumbling through the halls of the Sakaki household. Serena and her parasite had filled him in on everything, but he needed to see it for himself. He was having a hard time picturing Yuya… Yuya and Yuzu—

“What do you mean?” Yuzu asked, her ever-melodic voice just a bit sunnier than usual. “This is fine.” 

“No, it is not fine!” Gongenzaka roared. “This is totally unhealthy!”

“Yuya,” it was Yuto speaking now, “I understand your feelings—better than anyone. But this… this isn’t right.”

“I agree. Think of your families!” Ruri—Yuzu’s XYZ double—spoke up. “Your mother can hardly stand to look at you, her disgust is so great. And your father! Poor Sakaki-sensei is so disturbed, he’s gone out into the woods ‘find himself’. Who knows when he’ll be back!” Her voice lowered. “And that isn’t even to speak of Hiragi-san’s reaction—“

“That’s not fair, you leave dad out of this!” Yuzu snapped, her chipper tone gone. 

Sawatari, still flanked by Serena and the parasite, walked into the living room. And when he saw that what the two of them told him was true, he only just managed to stifle his scream.

There they were: Yuzu and Yuya, as audacious as anyone could ever be, nestled together in one giant shirt.

“You haven’t managed to talk any sense into them yet?” the parasite drawled, an amused smirk creeping its way across his face. “Oh, you’re both so lucky you didn’t grow up in Academia. You would’ve been beaten senseless for such insolence.”

“Y-yuya…” Sawatari began, truly at a loss for words for the first time in his life. “How… how long has this been going on…?”

“Three days,” Reiji replied, his tone tight and his hand clenched into a white knuckled fist. “Three! Days!”

Sawatari was mortified. How had this been allowed to go on for three days? 

“Oh no, don’t stop there. Tell him what else has happened in those three days,” Serena didn’t wait for a response before listing off everything herself. “In three days, they’ve refused to walk a step apart! The looks we get in public range from fear to pity to outright disgust! Long past are the days when one could call themselves a Lancer with pride! It seems this entire city is just waiting for us to join in on the giant shirt orgy!”

Yuya took a deep breath. “Look, all of you—“

He was abruptly cut off by the roar of an engine, just outside the house. “Shit shit shitshitshitshit—!”

There was a loud crash. The lot of them ran back into the kitchen, to find that a d-wheel—foreign to the Pendulum Dimension, destructive and excessive in all ways—had crashed through the kitchen wall.

The parasite was the first to react, bursting into a violent fit of laughter. Yuto stomped his foot on the ground. “Damnit, Yugo!”

“It wasn’t me! It was Ri—holy shit, Rin was right! Yuya has trapped Yuzu in a giant shirt!” he slammed his helmet onto the floor and started towards the two of them. “Don’t worry, I’ll save—!”

Yuzu wasted no time kicking him in the groin. He collapsed onto the ground in a heap of pain.

“Please get a hold of yourself, Yugo,” Rin remarked dryly as she unbound Sora’s wrists. 

The former Academia soldier stood up a moment later, his eyes immediately honing in on his two former classmates. His normally expressive face went completely blank, and he shook his head slowly. “I thought they were lying to me. ‘Yuya and Yuzu would never do something so outrageous’, I told them. ‘My comrades have way more dignity than that’, I insisted.” He sighed heavily, and began to walk over to them. “Well, let’s get on with it, then. Take the shirt off.”

“Get away!” Yuya cried, and he and Yuzu backed away from him, together. “I’ll duel you all right now if it comes down to it! No one’s going to separate me and Yuzu ever again!”

“Oh, is that what this is about?” Yuri purred. “Don’t be such a baby. Serena and I have been separated until very recently, and look how I turned out—perfectly fine!”

“You’re not helping.” “My father has been taken care of, and Zarc is no longer a threat,” Reiji reasoned. “There is no reason to go to such an embarrassing extreme.”

“I still don’t see why everyone is so offended by this,” Yuzu complained, her voice edging dangerously close to a whine. “Why can’t you just leave us be?!”

“Because no comrade of mine is going to strut around town like… like this!” Serena spat. “If you can’t see reason, we’ll use force! Yuri, get them!”

Yuri spun around, a cold smile on his face. “Don’t you just love how masterful she is? I certainly do. I don’t know what I ever did without my little barbarian.”

Yuya and Yuzu turned to the door, and ran outside. Everyone chased after them—Yuri and Sora in the lead, Rin and Yugo starting at the rear before recovering their d-wheel, and everyone else in between. The shouting from the eventual ten-versus-two duel could be heard for miles. 

An hour or so later, Yoko returned from grocery shopping to find her home in an utter state of disarray. Garbage was strewn everywhere. A discarded shoe lay cast off on the far end of the living room. Several chairs had been flipped over. The fridge door was cast wide open; someone had obviously raided it. Yuya (and Yuzu, she remembered with a shudder) were nowhere to be found.

She thought nothing of it. Her husband went missing without a trace for a solid three years, and that fiasco eventually worked itself out. She had no doubt this one would as well.

As she began dinner, she idly wondered who was going to pay for the giant hole in her wall. 

[webdesignersolutions]

I’ve been a cPanel administrator for over 15 years. I remember when it came out in the late 90s and nobody wanted it. cPanel was riddled with bugs, extremely slow, and the last time they shook up the industry is when they dropped FreeBSD support entirely. Over the years, they’ve stripped features, integrated more of their own code, and all but lock you in to running certain things a certain way. cPanel is becoming the Easy Button for a lot of companies, and old people with money take notice (investors).

cPanel and its next biggest competitor Plesk is owned by the same group. For many small- to medium-sized businesses, DirectAdmin is one of the only big commercial alternatives left. Many aren’t prepared to roll their own control panel. I know I’m not, so I decided to make the switch immediately. Here are my takeaways from migrating out of cPanel in 8 hours.

— Lighter, Faster DirectAdmin flies. When you install cPanel, you’re entering a very committed relationship. DirectAdmin runs on top of things, not inside. It doesn’t want to change your core code. If DirectAdmin is having an issue, it’s not going to crash your whole operation. I often forget how reliant we are on these cPanel-specific RPMs.

— Install What You Need DirectAdmin doesn’t come with a lot out of the box. In fact, after the first 10 minutes I was already digging through manuals, searching the web and forums. There is a lot of OLD information for previous versions of DA you’ll come across. It was very confusing finding help on one issue, only to see it’s 5 years old and completely different, or now integrated natively.

For example, there is a lot of nifty third party plugins that are near-requirements for new DirectAdmin people (Web GUI Custombuild), and you have to sift through years’ old forum posts (or Google) to find the latest links, the newest information. I’m pretty sure I ran a few old instructions and broke everything, only to find out they’re finally including XYZ feature natively because of 3 years worth of hacks and forum posts… and because of the new influx of angry cPanel users like us. You might be used to being presented with a zillion new options to set up your server, but DirectAdmin is going to make you think about just what you need.

— Be Prepared To Edit As mentioned, DirectAdmin is light for a reason. Certain basic things in 2019 are going to require you to read, or know a little bit about the software before you dive in. SpamAssassin spam filtering, for example, has to be enabled. It’s not going to hold your hand like WHM for setting up SpamAssassin, DKIM/DMARC, etc. Some of DA’s features remind me of Webmin in a sense that because it runs on everything, you have to know a little something about the config files you’re working with. I hope some of these scripts get integrated to further “complete” DirectAdmin’s ease to use. I don’t mind third party scripts, but I feel safer knowing I can bug the DA developers for commercial support, and not have to hop on IRC and interrupt some freelancer god because your tasks rely on his/her easy button and it’s broken. To use DirectAdmin, you need to be a direct admin. This is going to thin out a lot of companies that don’t have an intermediate knowledge of how their server works.

— Migrating cpmove Backups Ah yes, the backups. I know there’s a lot of great cPanel migration coming in the latest DirectAdmin release (the reason I’m on Beta/RC). It’s looking like a smooth process, but it’s still going to require some work right now. We’ll need to still worry about basic things like username length differences, path updates if your sites are using certain directories, and if you’re using multiple hard drives or partitions, I believe you need to symlink them from /home to whereever they really live (CentOS). I know the first question I had about moving backups, is where do I put my other hard drives to work with DirectAdmin, and it seems like a manual trick right now rather than telling the web interface “Also install on /home2”. I just updated to the latest latest DirectAdmin beta and will be trying the new cPanel migration tool changes soon. I know migrating by hand isn’t an option for a lot of people, and third party support companies are about to become rich (I see you, Bob!).

— DirectAdmin Security This is where you really need to know what you’re doing. DirectAdmin installs a very basic setup – there’s no default SSL enabled so you’ll immediately need to change passwords after you set up your certificate, or LetsEncrypt, etc. I know LetsEncrypt is probably the first extra thing you’ll want to get running for your sites’ security, and even though it wasn’t as easy as cPanel, I did it without much fuss from a forum post and it appears to be working and updating just fine. You can also change the default DirectAdmin port, and I suggest that you include with new websites an alias or redirect for “/cpanel” to “:2222” or whatever port DA runs on for you.

— Addons I re-discovered Installatron (like Softlicious) and it works great with DirectAdmin for those one-click scripts. I think it also does auto-updating and the scripts are nearly all of what you probably have on other addons for cPanel. WordPress, Clientexec, all the goodies. They offer a 45-day trial and installation was a breeze. Again, throw some commands into your Terminal window and you’re off to the races. For other addons, you can always install them yourself (rootkit hunter, extra antivirus, etc.) if the addon doesn’t exist. Remember, DirectAdmin doesn’t want to marry your system. Addons make things easy, but you still need to be somewhat of a server administrator. I mean, it’s in the name… Direct Admin.

— Issues From Clients We immediately noticed a few things once the migration went live and DNS updated. Non-tech users have a lot of trouble with port numbers. Having them type an address and then say “Now add :2222 to the end of it and hit enter” over the phone is just impossible for old people. Plus, it sounds funny when you say it (tu tu tu tu). I’ve had them type 22, 222, one person used a semicolon (how nice of them!). Having an alias set up for those /cpanel habbits is a must. For /webmail, with Roundcube installed everything worked as expected. The Roundcube login (/webmail) is not mobile friendly, whereas the cPanel WebMail passthrough is.

The DirectAdmin (non-cPanel) interface is very confusing to new users, but the upcoming ‘Icons Grid’ theme from DirectAdmin and the ability to see all icons (Admin, Reseller, User) is going to change the game. If you saw the DA demo and ran away screaming, you need to come back and check this new theme. It’s literally going to change the way you think about DirectAdmin, and whatever is easy for my clients is easy for me. I don’t care about my interface, I care about theirs. This theme almost makes DirectAdmin a new product to my users. I’m so happy with this that I didn’t have to create one myself and maintain it.

DirectAdmin defaults the IMAP/Mail etc. settings to be mail.your-domain.com but even in the cPanel days I always used the exact domain for the clients who did not have complex mail setup or their own servers. As long as you LetsEncrypt all the subdomains you need (mail, ftp, etc.) and it’s a valid SSL certificate, and you have the server certificate properly set up too, your end-users’ email won’t see a big change. Extra email settings like enabling BlockCracking I wish was presented more out of the box, with more email security features (like cPanel), but I know everything cPanel does I can do myself by hand. The fewer DA email setup features are going to cause some head scratching for new migrations.

— Moving Forward Most of my cPanel licenses are through resellers like BuycPanel, and I know their prices should be a bit lower than direct, but rather than getting whacked with a giant bill, or having it out with my licensing reseller over these new prices, I’m moving forward with rolling out more DirectAdmin. The Wife grilled up for 4th of July and I ate food while doing test migrations. I’ve been living in DirectAdmin 24/7 since hearing about the hike at the end of June and I’m coming to terms with it. I will be writing a lot more notes to myself to keep DirectAdmin going and remembering what I did, like having to deal with CentOS firewall issues out of the box from one server provider’s image.

Since so much is still required to do by hand, or with a third party script some developer blessed you with for free, I feel like I need to buy a special note taking application. I hope the new influx of DirectAdmin users from this new pricing fiasco brings more native support to DA. Hire these amazing forum users, charge more than $29 per month because you know you’re going to get it, especially when Plesk brand switches licensing to match (Oakley is evil!), but give us more features. I’d pay $99/month per server just to get more people working on DirectAdmin. Just don’t become evil…

Submitted July 06, 2019 at 02:36PM by zeamp https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/c9z0eg/takeaways_from_migrating_cpanel_to_directadmin/?utm_source=ifttt

from Blogger http://webdesignersolutions1.blogspot.com/2019/07/takeaways-from-migrating-cpanel-to.html via IFTTT

[webdesignersolutions]

Takeaways From Migrating cPanel to DirectAdmin Overnight

I've been a cPanel administrator for over 15 years. I remember when it came out in the late 90s and nobody wanted it. cPanel was riddled with bugs, extremely slow, and the last time they shook up the industry is when they dropped FreeBSD support entirely. Over the years, they've stripped features, integrated more of their own code, and all but lock you in to running certain things a certain way. cPanel is becoming the Easy Button for a lot of companies, and old people with money take notice (investors).

cPanel and its next biggest competitor Plesk is owned by the same group. For many small- to medium-sized businesses, DirectAdmin is one of the only big commercial alternatives left. Many aren't prepared to roll their own control panel. I know I'm not, so I decided to make the switch immediately. Here are my takeaways from migrating out of cPanel in 8 hours.

-- Lighter, Faster DirectAdmin flies. When you install cPanel, you're entering a very committed relationship. DirectAdmin runs on top of things, not inside. It doesn't want to change your core code. If DirectAdmin is having an issue, it's not going to crash your whole operation. I often forget how reliant we are on these cPanel-specific RPMs.

-- Install What You Need DirectAdmin doesn't come with a lot out of the box. In fact, after the first 10 minutes I was already digging through manuals, searching the web and forums. There is a lot of OLD information for previous versions of DA you'll come across. It was very confusing finding help on one issue, only to see it's 5 years old and completely different, or now integrated natively.

For example, there is a lot of nifty third party plugins that are near-requirements for new DirectAdmin people (Web GUI Custombuild), and you have to sift through years' old forum posts (or Google) to find the latest links, the newest information. I'm pretty sure I ran a few old instructions and broke everything, only to find out they're finally including XYZ feature natively because of 3 years worth of hacks and forum posts... and because of the new influx of angry cPanel users like us. You might be used to being presented with a zillion new options to set up your server, but DirectAdmin is going to make you think about just what you need.

-- Be Prepared To Edit As mentioned, DirectAdmin is light for a reason. Certain basic things in 2019 are going to require you to read, or know a little bit about the software before you dive in. SpamAssassin spam filtering, for example, has to be enabled. It's not going to hold your hand like WHM for setting up SpamAssassin, DKIM/DMARC, etc. Some of DA's features remind me of Webmin in a sense that because it runs on everything, you have to know a little something about the config files you're working with. I hope some of these scripts get integrated to further "complete" DirectAdmin's ease to use. I don't mind third party scripts, but I feel safer knowing I can bug the DA developers for commercial support, and not have to hop on IRC and interrupt some freelancer god because your tasks rely on his/her easy button and it's broken. To use DirectAdmin, you need to be a direct admin. This is going to thin out a lot of companies that don't have an intermediate knowledge of how their server works.

-- Migrating cpmove Backups Ah yes, the backups. I know there's a lot of great cPanel migration coming in the latest DirectAdmin release (the reason I'm on Beta/RC). It's looking like a smooth process, but it's still going to require some work right now. We'll need to still worry about basic things like username length differences, path updates if your sites are using certain directories, and if you're using multiple hard drives or partitions, I believe you need to symlink them from /home to whereever they really live (CentOS). I know the first question I had about moving backups, is where do I put my other hard drives to work with DirectAdmin, and it seems like a manual trick right now rather than telling the web interface "Also install on /home2". I just updated to the latest latest DirectAdmin beta and will be trying the new cPanel migration tool changes soon. I know migrating by hand isn't an option for a lot of people, and third party support companies are about to become rich (I see you, Bob!).

-- DirectAdmin Security This is where you really need to know what you're doing. DirectAdmin installs a very basic setup - there's no default SSL enabled so you'll immediately need to change passwords after you set up your certificate, or LetsEncrypt, etc. I know LetsEncrypt is probably the first extra thing you'll want to get running for your sites' security, and even though it wasn't as easy as cPanel, I did it without much fuss from a forum post and it appears to be working and updating just fine. You can also change the default DirectAdmin port, and I suggest that you include with new websites an alias or redirect for "/cpanel" to ":2222" or whatever port DA runs on for you.

-- Addons I re-discovered Installatron (like Softlicious) and it works great with DirectAdmin for those one-click scripts. I think it also does auto-updating and the scripts are nearly all of what you probably have on other addons for cPanel. WordPress, Clientexec, all the goodies. They offer a 45-day trial and installation was a breeze. Again, throw some commands into your Terminal window and you're off to the races. For other addons, you can always install them yourself (rootkit hunter, extra antivirus, etc.) if the addon doesn't exist. Remember, DirectAdmin doesn't want to marry your system. Addons make things easy, but you still need to be somewhat of a server administrator. I mean, it's in the name... Direct Admin.

-- Issues From Clients We immediately noticed a few things once the migration went live and DNS updated. Non-tech users have a lot of trouble with port numbers. Having them type an address and then say "Now add :2222 to the end of it and hit enter" over the phone is just impossible for old people. Plus, it sounds funny when you say it (tu tu tu tu). I've had them type 22, 222, one person used a semicolon (how nice of them!). Having an alias set up for those /cpanel habbits is a must. For /webmail, with Roundcube installed everything worked as expected. The Roundcube login (/webmail) is not mobile friendly, whereas the cPanel WebMail passthrough is.

The DirectAdmin (non-cPanel) interface is very confusing to new users, but the upcoming 'Icons Grid' theme from DirectAdmin and the ability to see all icons (Admin, Reseller, User) is going to change the game. If you saw the DA demo and ran away screaming, you need to come back and check this new theme. It's literally going to change the way you think about DirectAdmin, and whatever is easy for my clients is easy for me. I don't care about my interface, I care about theirs. This theme almost makes DirectAdmin a new product to my users. I'm so happy with this that I didn't have to create one myself and maintain it.

DirectAdmin defaults the IMAP/Mail etc. settings to be mail.your-domain.com but even in the cPanel days I always used the exact domain for the clients who did not have complex mail setup or their own servers. As long as you LetsEncrypt all the subdomains you need (mail, ftp, etc.) and it's a valid SSL certificate, and you have the server certificate properly set up too, your end-users' email won't see a big change. Extra email settings like enabling BlockCracking I wish was presented more out of the box, with more email security features (like cPanel), but I know everything cPanel does I can do myself by hand. The fewer DA email setup features are going to cause some head scratching for new migrations.

-- Moving Forward Most of my cPanel licenses are through resellers like BuycPanel, and I know their prices should be a bit lower than direct, but rather than getting whacked with a giant bill, or having it out with my licensing reseller over these new prices, I'm moving forward with rolling out more DirectAdmin. The Wife grilled up for 4th of July and I ate food while doing test migrations. I've been living in DirectAdmin 24/7 since hearing about the hike at the end of June and I'm coming to terms with it. I will be writing a lot more notes to myself to keep DirectAdmin going and remembering what I did, like having to deal with CentOS firewall issues out of the box from one server provider's image.

Since so much is still required to do by hand, or with a third party script some developer blessed you with for free, I feel like I need to buy a special note taking application. I hope the new influx of DirectAdmin users from this new pricing fiasco brings more native support to DA. Hire these amazing forum users, charge more than $29 per month because you know you're going to get it, especially when Plesk brand switches licensing to match (Oakley is evil!), but give us more features. I'd pay $99/month per server just to get more people working on DirectAdmin. Just don't become evil...

Submitted July 06, 2019 at 02:36PM by zeamp https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/c9z0eg/takeaways_from_migrating_cpanel_to_directadmin/?utm_source=ifttt from Blogger http://webdesignersolutions1.blogspot.com/2019/07/takeaways-from-migrating-cpanel-to.html via IFTTT

[webdesignersolutions]

Takeaways From Migrating cPanel to DirectAdmin Overnight via /r/webhosting

Takeaways From Migrating cPanel to DirectAdmin Overnight

I've been a cPanel administrator for over 15 years. I remember when it came out in the late 90s and nobody wanted it. cPanel was riddled with bugs, extremely slow, and the last time they shook up the industry is when they dropped FreeBSD support entirely. Over the years, they've stripped features, integrated more of their own code, and all but lock you in to running certain things a certain way. cPanel is becoming the Easy Button for a lot of companies, and old people with money take notice (investors).

cPanel and its next biggest competitor Plesk is owned by the same group. For many small- to medium-sized businesses, DirectAdmin is one of the only big commercial alternatives left. Many aren't prepared to roll their own control panel. I know I'm not, so I decided to make the switch immediately. Here are my takeaways from migrating out of cPanel in 8 hours.

-- Lighter, Faster DirectAdmin flies. When you install cPanel, you're entering a very committed relationship. DirectAdmin runs on top of things, not inside. It doesn't want to change your core code. If DirectAdmin is having an issue, it's not going to crash your whole operation. I often forget how reliant we are on these cPanel-specific RPMs.

-- Install What You Need DirectAdmin doesn't come with a lot out of the box. In fact, after the first 10 minutes I was already digging through manuals, searching the web and forums. There is a lot of OLD information for previous versions of DA you'll come across. It was very confusing finding help on one issue, only to see it's 5 years old and completely different, or now integrated natively.

For example, there is a lot of nifty third party plugins that are near-requirements for new DirectAdmin people (Web GUI Custombuild), and you have to sift through years' old forum posts (or Google) to find the latest links, the newest information. I'm pretty sure I ran a few old instructions and broke everything, only to find out they're finally including XYZ feature natively because of 3 years worth of hacks and forum posts... and because of the new influx of angry cPanel users like us. You might be used to being presented with a zillion new options to set up your server, but DirectAdmin is going to make you think about just what you need.

-- Be Prepared To Edit As mentioned, DirectAdmin is light for a reason. Certain basic things in 2019 are going to require you to read, or know a little bit about the software before you dive in. SpamAssassin spam filtering, for example, has to be enabled. It's not going to hold your hand like WHM for setting up SpamAssassin, DKIM/DMARC, etc. Some of DA's features remind me of Webmin in a sense that because it runs on everything, you have to know a little something about the config files you're working with. I hope some of these scripts get integrated to further "complete" DirectAdmin's ease to use. I don't mind third party scripts, but I feel safer knowing I can bug the DA developers for commercial support, and not have to hop on IRC and interrupt some freelancer god because your tasks rely on his/her easy button and it's broken. To use DirectAdmin, you need to be a direct admin. This is going to thin out a lot of companies that don't have an intermediate knowledge of how their server works.

-- Migrating cpmove Backups Ah yes, the backups. I know there's a lot of great cPanel migration coming in the latest DirectAdmin release (the reason I'm on Beta/RC). It's looking like a smooth process, but it's still going to require some work right now. We'll need to still worry about basic things like username length differences, path updates if your sites are using certain directories, and if you're using multiple hard drives or partitions, I believe you need to symlink them from /home to whereever they really live (CentOS). I know the first question I had about moving backups, is where do I put my other hard drives to work with DirectAdmin, and it seems like a manual trick right now rather than telling the web interface "Also install on /home2". I just updated to the latest latest DirectAdmin beta and will be trying the new cPanel migration tool changes soon. I know migrating by hand isn't an option for a lot of people, and third party support companies are about to become rich (I see you, Bob!).

-- DirectAdmin Security This is where you really need to know what you're doing. DirectAdmin installs a very basic setup - there's no default SSL enabled so you'll immediately need to change passwords after you set up your certificate, or LetsEncrypt, etc. I know LetsEncrypt is probably the first extra thing you'll want to get running for your sites' security, and even though it wasn't as easy as cPanel, I did it without much fuss from a forum post and it appears to be working and updating just fine. You can also change the default DirectAdmin port, and I suggest that you include with new websites an alias or redirect for "/cpanel" to ":2222" or whatever port DA runs on for you.

-- Addons I re-discovered Installatron (like Softlicious) and it works great with DirectAdmin for those one-click scripts. I think it also does auto-updating and the scripts are nearly all of what you probably have on other addons for cPanel. WordPress, Clientexec, all the goodies. They offer a 45-day trial and installation was a breeze. Again, throw some commands into your Terminal window and you're off to the races. For other addons, you can always install them yourself (rootkit hunter, extra antivirus, etc.) if the addon doesn't exist. Remember, DirectAdmin doesn't want to marry your system. Addons make things easy, but you still need to be somewhat of a server administrator. I mean, it's in the name... Direct Admin.

-- Issues From Clients We immediately noticed a few things once the migration went live and DNS updated. Non-tech users have a lot of trouble with port numbers. Having them type an address and then say "Now add :2222 to the end of it and hit enter" over the phone is just impossible for old people. Plus, it sounds funny when you say it (tu tu tu tu). I've had them type 22, 222, one person used a semicolon (how nice of them!). Having an alias set up for those /cpanel habbits is a must. For /webmail, with Roundcube installed everything worked as expected. The Roundcube login (/webmail) is not mobile friendly, whereas the cPanel WebMail passthrough is.

The DirectAdmin (non-cPanel) interface is very confusing to new users, but the upcoming 'Icons Grid' theme from DirectAdmin and the ability to see all icons (Admin, Reseller, User) is going to change the game. If you saw the DA demo and ran away screaming, you need to come back and check this new theme. It's literally going to change the way you think about DirectAdmin, and whatever is easy for my clients is easy for me. I don't care about my interface, I care about theirs. This theme almost makes DirectAdmin a new product to my users. I'm so happy with this that I didn't have to create one myself and maintain it.

DirectAdmin defaults the IMAP/Mail etc. settings to be mail.your-domain.com but even in the cPanel days I always used the exact domain for the clients who did not have complex mail setup or their own servers. As long as you LetsEncrypt all the subdomains you need (mail, ftp, etc.) and it's a valid SSL certificate, and you have the server certificate properly set up too, your end-users' email won't see a big change. Extra email settings like enabling BlockCracking I wish was presented more out of the box, with more email security features (like cPanel), but I know everything cPanel does I can do myself by hand. The fewer DA email setup features are going to cause some head scratching for new migrations.

-- Moving Forward Most of my cPanel licenses are through resellers like BuycPanel, and I know their prices should be a bit lower than direct, but rather than getting whacked with a giant bill, or having it out with my licensing reseller over these new prices, I'm moving forward with rolling out more DirectAdmin. The Wife grilled up for 4th of July and I ate food while doing test migrations. I've been living in DirectAdmin 24/7 since hearing about the hike at the end of June and I'm coming to terms with it. I will be writing a lot more notes to myself to keep DirectAdmin going and remembering what I did, like having to deal with CentOS firewall issues out of the box from one server provider's image.

Since so much is still required to do by hand, or with a third party script some developer blessed you with for free, I feel like I need to buy a special note taking application. I hope the new influx of DirectAdmin users from this new pricing fiasco brings more native support to DA. Hire these amazing forum users, charge more than $29 per month because you know you're going to get it, especially when Plesk brand switches licensing to match (Oakley is evil!), but give us more features. I'd pay $99/month per server just to get more people working on DirectAdmin. Just don't become evil...

Submitted July 06, 2019 at 02:36PM by zeamp via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/c9z0eg/takeaways_from_migrating_cpanel_to_directadmin/?utm_source=ifttt