Ideas how to develop the forum software further?

zippyd: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

 

Boss: Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnkkk youuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!!!! i hate those damn things.

 

zippyd: Seriously, I appreciate the suggestion -- I've actually developed more than enough forums for various companies and have developed such things (emoticons) for other companies, but I can't personally stand them And again, they would slow down the page loading times as well, even when they would be like 512 bytes, but when you got 100 on one page, that makes 50kb extra to load per page, which is a pain for modem users.

And also, I'm sorta old skool person, I began my "Net career" as a sysop on AmiExpress board back in 1991, I'd personally prefer a text-only, fixed-width font command line site Unfortunately such thing doesn't exactly go well with mainstream users, so that's why aD is graphical, although we try to aim to keep it simple while trying to make it look nice

But as always, suggestions are appreciated, but this one (emoticons) will get turned down, unfortunately

 

just use the "report offensive post" funtion and it will be seen, just make sure you state why. or PM the link and reason to a mod.

 

mryoda: Thanks. The pop thingy I've wondered, but decided so far not to implement it. Reasoning: it would roughly double the html pages (main index of the forums and the forum_view.cfm pages) and I still prefer to keep the site fast even for modem users (I'm on 8/1, so I can't really tell the diff, but . The "last post by" is a different matter -- that would involve a new join to the SQL query to pull out the member nick for the person who made the post, thus slowing down that query as well. Only a matter of probably 5 milliseconds, but that adds up quite nicely when you have 400,000+ page loads for the forums a day

Anyway, I wish you luck with the development. I've been toying with an idea to release the forum software either as an open source or a LGPL'd shareware (free for personal sites, $50 - $250 for commercial sites). I have only two probs with that at the moment -- the codebase is still, despite quite a lot of "neutralizing" work, very afterdawn-centric. And I simply don't have time that it would need to make the installers, code documentation (true coders never doc their code ;-), project maintenance, etc.

Anyway, I'm always into CF chat, so if you got anything interesting going on, gimme a PM. After all, as my "day job", I do CF code and db designs for various companies.

To all: Thanks for all the suggestions. We've received tons of good ideas, etc and will evaluate all the suggestions within spring 2005 and will start developing them with the typical timeline (read: when I have time .

 

mryoda: Actually, at the moment, the CPU cycles are a major headache to us -- I've reported this in various threads and our loyal users know it: our system has been on its knees during the peak hours pretty much every day after Christmas 2004. The problem is really the database box -- 2GHz Dual Xeon can't really cope with the fact that we get

a) 400,000+ forum page loads a day
b) additional 400,000+ heavily dynamic page impressions (main site) a day
c) the forum database contains almost million posts and our user db contains over 260,000 users

Out of five boxes, only two are used for CFMX and one for db. Other two are for downloads (about 2TB a month only for software downloads..), log analysis, ad serving, etc.

Anyway, we've just received few quotes from various hosting companies and will move our cluster to seven server setup (that has load-balanced database setup) -- in addition to having two additional nodes, the new setup will also replace our P4 webservers with either Dual Xeon 3GHz boxes or Dual Opterons.

So, as a summary -- no, probably the 5ms wouldn't kill the system, but I'm reluctant to add any further load to the db until we get the current hardware mess sorted out that was "caused" (well, not like I'm complaining by a recent traffic boost. We have been forced even to take down the forum search engine and temporarily replace it with Google.

But yup, the page number viewing makes sense and I'll add it to my to-do list. And the "last post by XXX" will most likely get added too, but as said, only after we get more oomph to the db

 

What do you think about change DVD-R for advanced users to DVD-R for advanced questions?

 

mryoda: Oh no, there are several huge FuseTalk-based forums out there, so I don't think we would even rank within the top 10 largest CF-based forums. But obviously the aim is to "get there" Granted, we could easily boost the number of posts by removing few restrictions like the one where newbies can't reply to old threads, etc. But then again, I prefer to keep the content more accurate rather than toy with posting figures.

And yes, the "take me to last page/my post after replying" is on our to-do list. Will get added there once our higher priority stuff (server upgrade, etc) gets done.

flip: Would the naming convention make much difference to the content of the forum?