User:Evan C/Railpage Australia

Railpage Australia is a website focusing on railways within Australia and Oceania.

Originally started in 1992 by David Bromage, it was among the first 100 web sites to be hosted in Australia.

The site is used by railway enthusiasts to find and exchange news, pictures and information relating to Australian trains and railway infrastructure. The site features a user photo database, discussion forums, a chat room and a railway news section.

The discussion forums are divided into separate sections, such as Australian based discussions, heritage interest groups, and overseas discussions.

It is considered by many in the enthusiast scene to be a sort of "hub" for Australian railways, a meeting point where those new to the scene can ask questions and network, and where enthusiasts can share their knowledge and keep up to date.

The site has its crtics however, some users allege that some posts have been edited or deleted by a few moderators who disagree with the line of arguement or for no apparent reason, while some users have critised the ill judged selection of certain moderators.

The Finger Service
Railpage started in 1992 as a cfingerd service on David Bromage's account on Monash University's general access unix server. Anybody could finger the account and view the indexpage, and further view the railpage. The name lives on.

The Web Service
The content of the finger service was translated to an experimental web site in July 1994. It is believed to have been the first Australian railway site on the World Wide Web. Early content included a repository of Australian railway timetables, inspired by a contemporary project in the United States.

In January 1994, Brian Evans suggested to David Bromage that Railpage (which at that point comprised static web pages) could be further developed. The two began to develop the site further, later transferring it to a dedicated server.

The site gained its own domain name (railpage.org.au) in January 1997.

The Forums
On January 11 2003, Railpage introduced an online forums service using the open source PhpBB forum software. As of June 2006, it is awaiting inclusion on the Big-boards.com index.

RP2
Assuming the role of Project Director, (which he still maintains today), Brian Evans proposed the website enter a new development phase, involving the introduction of a Content Management System (CMS). To date, the site had accumulated a significant number of unique URL's and was becoming increasingly harder to maintain. A solution to provide content owners with an ability to create and maintain content at the site became a priority.

Late in 2003, after several months of development and with the help of several developers and testers; RP2 was launched on Saturday 10th April 2004 at approximately 5pm. While at the time the portal structure was primitive and contained a number of bugs present in all Nuke releases - the portal offered a number of new services to users including an image gallery and news feeds.

RP2.1
As time continued, the development team grew to include Michael Greenhill, James Holt and Lionel Camilleri. Additionally, the RPDN (Railpage Developer Network) was established to allow the core developers to work with the extended development team comprised of key users and testers, as well as other willing parties. A sitewide re-themeing was conducted by Michael Greenhill and the rest of the development team and released to a mostly positive reception. The new theme was more compact and simple, and cut a lot of the baggage that PHP-Nuke often outputs.

Today
As of May 2006, the site routinely receives in excess of 1000 posts per day, 10,000 unique visitors, 100,000 hits, and serves well in excess of 300 gigabytes of data per month. As of August 2006, the site had reached 10,000 registered users and 550,000 posts.

SHAFT
Originally billed as the 2005 Summer Development Project which was later delayed significantly to an unknown point in the future due to time constraints, SHAFT (Acronym unknown) is due to bring a much enhanced user-interface, several new features and a number of code-tweaks.

Technical
Railpage has and continues to endure a significant amount of technical difficulties. The hardware Railpage runs on is old, and while it was capable of handling the load experienced in 2003; present load is far too much for the hardware resulting in numerous outages, some of which require human intervention.

Servers
Railpage Australia runs on three servers, codenamed Fang, Shaft and Icarus. Fang runs Redhat Linux 9 and handles the HTTP frontend tasks and mailer tasks. Shaft runs Fedora Core 2 and is responsible for holding the backend database to RP2, and also hosts a development-only copy of the RP2 code. Icarus is the dedicated Gallery server, and runs Fedora Core 4.

The servers are located in Melbourne, Australia at a central business district based data centre.

Software
Railpage Australia is based on PHP-Nuke, however as times wears on it bears less and less resemblance to the original release. Its codebase is PHP and the backend database runs MySQL.

Internet Capacity
Railpage Australia's Internet capacity is provided by Digital River Networks, a national telecommunications carrier. The servers are connected to a gigabit backbone and from there to the Internet directly and by way of peering through other direct connections including the Victorian Internet Exchange.

Collaborations
In December 2003, Railpage assisted the then Australian Geological Survey Organisation (now Geoscience Australia) and the Australasian Railway Association in the production of the Railways of Australia thematic map.