Jun 16, 17 / Can 27, 01 14:46 UTC

Asgardia's Websites and associated infrastructure  

In order to ensure safe, reliable, and fast sharing of information, I think we need to discuss how Asgardia's websites are being made and hosted. The websites, both 'asgardia.space' and 'asgardia.com', are currently the primary and official form of communication between Asgardians, and as such ought to be optimized for access to the masses.

Currently there are several issues I have had with the sites, particularly loading times, responsiveness of the websites, accessibility of the user interfaces, and even this "Unlicensed Froala Editor" I am typing in now. The official government site (asgardia.space) also looks too similar to this more casual/open communication page (asgardia.com). While I have am only pointing out a few observations I've had, I wish to open this forum up for further discussion on these problems.

This also raises a few questions that I believe should be known to all, such as how are the websites being hosted, what steps are being taken to make sure the pages are accessible to all Asgardians, and what steps can be taken to improve the performance and accessibility of the collective websites. What do other Asgardians, as well as the current communication "team", think of these issues?

Jun 30, 18 / Leo 13, 02 10:43 UTC

It was surprising to me when I realized that Asgardia's website seems to be hosted at a traditional hosting service provider in the Netherlands rather than at one of the global public cloud service providers such as AWS, and I believe that this may contributed to performance issues reported by many Asgardians when the website was under heavy load or accessed from certain regions of the world.

I understand that hosting in the cloud would cost much more than it would be for traditional hosting providers especially when a global CDN is also deployed for improving response time for different regions of the world, but I believe that hosting in the cloud would become a must in the near future considering the global nature of the website and the gradual increase of traffic.

I am also wondering if there is any WAF technology deployed on the server itself or within the hosting provider since it is obvious that a cloud based WAF solution, such as CloudFlare, isn't being used.

And yes, there are many accessibility issues in the user interface, especially within the elections page.

Aug 1, 18 / Vir 17, 02 13:05 UTC

You're right, the official website lacks functionality for now because of server location. But improvements are to be implemented in the site content, construction and mechanics, too.

Just for instance: why there is no links at the 'National Symbols' section at the main page to pages describing the Flag, the Coat of Arms and the Anthem, their meaning, authors of design/music/text and legal introduction date and Decree No? This is normal option for any governmental website, you would agree.

Also major issue in popularizing the Asgardia state vision and projects is that the site is only present in English. Lots and lots of good, talented people would join our cause, but they simply are outside English speaking community. On the other hand, as the official languages of Asgardia are twelve, so I assume it compulsory for the main governmental resource to implement sections for all of these.

To be material, I'm offering my personal volunteering service to translate the official website to Russian. Also Ukrainian is available, but it is not the official language yet :) Please contact me anytime.

By the way, I wasn't able to locate interactive list of volunteering service requests/offers at the site. Is there one at all? Why there is no such link at the main page?