If you have entered three hundred performances on BellBoard, or if you look after the records of a tower or a society, it is fair to ask what happens to them. This page sets out how the site is run, what protects it, and who stands behind it.
BellBoard is owned and managed by The Ringing World Ltd, a company that has been publishing continuously since 1911. It is not a personal project, and it does not rest on any one person’s continued goodwill. Richard Smith wrote BellBoard and remains its lead developer; work is done largely by volunteers, under the company’s management. The hosting infrastructure is currently sponsored by Mythic Beasts, to whom we are grateful.
BellBoard runs across a cluster of servers, currently five: three database servers and a web server, with a proxy in front of it. The database servers sit in different data centres, so a power failure or a network problem at one site does not take the record offline.
They are arranged in what is called a primary-replica setup. One server accepts new entries; copies of it handle the reading, which is the overwhelming majority of what the site does. That spreads the load, and it means that if the primary fails one of the copies can take over in seconds rather than hours.
Backups of the database and code are held by several different people, in several different places, and no single individual has access to all of them. That protects the record against a data centre failure and against the loss or actions of any one person.
Two things put real pressure on the site.
The first is ringing itself. On a coronation, a royal death or a national anniversary, thousands of bands ring within a few hours of each other and thousands of ringers try to submit at once.
The second, and in recent years by far the larger, is automated traffic. AI crawlers and bots now generate a volume of requests that dwarfs anything ringing produces, and they are indifferent to being asked to stop.
The usual answer to both is to put something in front of the site: a captcha, or a service that interposes a check between the visitor and the page. Many people find these intrusive, and they are particularly unwelcome on a site that ringers use quickly, on a phone, in a tower, with poor signal. Because the database servers carry the load between them, and thanks to the careful design of BellBoard, we have so far been able to stay open under attack without resorting to that.
The data does not exist only where we keep it. Over the years a good number of people have taken complete copies of the database for their own purposes. We make no claims about exactly what any of them holds – but as a matter of fact the record of change ringing is now distributed well beyond The Ringing World’s own control, matching the resilience in the past created by many libraries containing complete printed copies.
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BellBoard is linked to Dove’s Guide, the definitive record of the world’s rings of bells, curated by the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers.
When you enter a new BellBoard record and specify the location it was rung, BellBoard draws the details of the bells known to be at that location from Dove’s Guide.
BellBoard is built on the industry-standard LAMP stack: the Linux operating system, Apache web server, MariaDB database, and PHP programming language.
Since 2021 BellBoard’s code has been progressively modularised, and that work has produced the Kolombido libraries (kolombido.uk): a set of small, open-source PHP components handling low-level, general-purpose jobs such as generating HTML and building and manipulating SQL. Nothing in them is specific to ringing.
They exist because the available third-party libraries mostly carry large dependency chains, support only a narrow range of PHP versions, and are effectively all-or-nothing: adopting one means taking on its assumptions across a codebase, which is a substantial undertaking in a mature programme. The Kolombido libraries were written to be the opposite: deliberately lightweight, with no dependencies, working across a wide range of PHP versions, thoroughly unit tested, and they can be adopted a piece at a time.
The libraries are now in use in both BellBoard and Dove’s Guide, and may be of interest to anyone with responsibility for a PHP application.
