Measures to handle forum size need to be taken

I would also miss the edit feature and Quick Reply, but hey, we'll adjust.

Thanks for keeping us informed Craven.

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Right. Never use New Topics, but New Posts and At a Glance are vital

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Just noticed this - I should make it a point to read the announcements more often. Bad on me.

A comment about elimination of quick reply. That could completely change the flavor of the site. It would likely completely ruin the "neverending whatever game" or the "insult chain thread", for example.

Just my 2-cents. Thanks for all the good work Craven.

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I don't get it. Why's that cj?

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Should I have been using quick reply for the word games?

Shocked

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ehBeth wrote:

Should I have been using quick reply for the word games?

ehbeth, you can see the Danforth, but you didn't notice the quick reply?

What are we going to do with you?

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I noticed it - I just don't use it.

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I live by the quick reply

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ehBeth wrote:

I noticed it - I just don't use it.

I only tease people that have cute personalities, btw.

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I wouldnt miss the quick reply ( im using it now. hehe )
And anything else that needs to be done to keep the site up do it!!! And thank you TONS for keeping up the effort to maintain this site!

I would have to throw my 2 cents into the jar as well about the 'new posts ' feature.... Shocked

that would be cutting off my life line. I love that feature.

As for using Google to search through A2k? I do that myself sometimes, but I will make an effort to do it ALL the time to help .

Thanks again for all your efforts and for telling everyone what to expect before hand. :-)

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Like ehBeth, I never use the quick reply. What's the benefit over "post a reply"?

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I've usually used quick reply and have to train myself for Post Reply.

My way.

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Letty wrote:

Like ehBeth, I never use the quick reply. What's the benefit over "post a reply"?

It's quick. It's right there, under the posts. It's the only way I ever post, except for those occasions when I know, ahead of time, that I'm going to add some special graphics or something like that.

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Ok, I'm trying the quick reply. Let's see if it's quicker. Thanks, Andy

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nonono

don't use the quick reply - it's one of the bad things for space use (isn't that why it has to go?)

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I hope nobody minds one of the "new guys" making some suggestions to save space, although I fear that some may be unpopular. I think that the following are "nice to have" features, but not essential to keep this message board going.

Eliminate older threads that are no longer active, even if they have been answered. Is someone really going to go back more than a year, or so, to read them? I doubt it.

Eliminate "SpellCheck". You can either put a dictionary next to your computer or use this web site.
http://www.spellcheck.net/

Eliminate "signatures". I don't feel that they add much. At least the avatars give the site some character.

Eliminate the "private messages" feature. If one doesn't want to communicate with your regular email address, use a web-based one like Hotmail.

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Reyn, your first suggest -- to eliminate older threads altogether -- will meet with fierce, not to say violent, resistance from many, many members. Old threads are considered invaluable research material, akin to a periodicals section in any good library. That suggestion is like suggesting that all newspaper files predating, say, 1950 at the New York Public Library be burned. We'd have no access to the NYTimes account of the end of WW II, the Sinking of the Lusitania, etc. etc. Most of the veteran members here do not consider A2K a "chat room" where old discussions are...well...just old. In fact to call it a chat room is considered an insult.

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Re: Measures to handle forum size need to be taken
Craven told us in the first post here what will be changing/likely to change.

I'm personally trying to use fewer of the tools/techniques that he's said are problem areas. Sort of in preparation of the changes, and partly in hopes that tiny measures will help him/the site til the changes can be made.

<probably not helping, but trying not to make things worse>

Craven de Kere wrote:

phpBB (the underlying base code for this site) is excellent but was not made to handle the size to which we have grown.

I have long been hacking away at their code and fixing certain issues but we are swiftly approaching the point where drastic action will need to be taken to keep the site online.

There are a number of ways I will need to approach it and I am announcing this here because it will likely result in some changes to the forum that you will notice.

Here are the first things I will be targeting:

1) Eliminating the test forum. The prune it does is a load issue and it is undesireable otherwise.

2) Eliminating or reducing the ability to edit posts. The editing of posts takes a long time because it is running some very load intensive queries on the wordmatch table (the data table that tracks words for the search feature).

Because of this the edit feature may be restricted by time (e.g. only editable within x minutes of the post) or turned off entirely (possibly temporary, untill a more fundamental rewrite can address it).

3) Crippling search. Searching itself is not a big problem, but maintaining the wordmatch table for the feature is. I do not yet know of any large phpBB site that got away with huge forums and threads and still maintained a fully functional search. We will try to do this with some alternate measures and temporary fixes as we do not want to turn off the search feature until absolutely necessary.

4) The new topics page will come down untill it is rewritten.

5) Thread views may cease to be counted or at least be modified in a way that would reduce the load at the expense of a slight reduction in accuracy (using a mathematical equation to update on a random basis but update by the random range. The net effect would be something like updating 3 views for every third view instead of opening the table to write each view).

6) The quick reply feature may be eliminated. This is unlikely but if it is done it will have the aim of reducing the quick one-liners and making people post more subtantially in exchange for less frequency.

7) Viewing who is online might be eliminated temporarily, this is because it can serve as a stopgap measure and be restored with no data loss while measures against searching would represent data loss for the wordmatch table.

My time is very limited these days and I do not know if I can do all of this myself.

If I do not find time for this to be done, I will have to hire someone to do this and may open donations again to cover this.

All of the above is still uncertain (except that some big changes are needed) and this is just a heads up that it is coming.

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As to viewing who is online - that never occurs to me, I figure people check in when they can.

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Merry Andrew wrote:

Most of the veteran members here do not consider A2K a "chat room" where old discussions are...well...just old. In fact to call it a chat room is considered an insult.

I certainly hope that I did not insinuate this, as this was not my intention.

I did read someone else's post that mentioned archiving the older posts. I wonder how well this would work? How would it save space?

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Measures to handle forum size need to be taken

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