SyXx said...
I just think a subforum for Hep C treatment would work. I am with Allen, I ran forums with more than 20,000 users, so not as big as his. The more posts is what slows down the forums. Having 1 post to follow is better. I also know you can make a sub forum in here and that would clean things up and make it easier to track. Like I said in my post, I love following the threads it is just that all of the forum right now is bombarded with everyones Hep C treatment journey, so other posts could get buried fast.
It is nice to see everyone getting all this treatment now after hearing about it for the past year.
Thank's Sean for speaking up from your experience, being a Moderator is one thing but being the Administrator or SysAdmin for servers you know what works and what doesn't with large forums and this forum WILL grow and get large and since I joined I can already see the new users coming.
I think we could break into a sub-forum for treatments or even have subs for Hep A,B,C,D and also Alcoholic Cirrhosis, Non-Alcoholic Cirrhosis etc as some users may wish to just come and read info pertinent to their virus and thats fine.
This is just my personal thoughts and I have had alot of experience with this and what happens eventually is the server load gets massive and the site begins to crawl, Sean probably might know this but others might not but if you ever visit a forum and try to search for things really fast like lets say I search for "Allen" but make typos each time well usually after a few times you will get an error and it will say "I'm sorry you cannot make another search for XX seconds"
Now the reason this is done is simple, imagine myself if I was to program a robot using a hidden IP address(The address who says who I might be) and I have it visit the forum and if the forum didn't have this sort of protection well I could program my bot to have a list of say 10000 search terms and I use my robot to quickly keep searching and submitting...with no restrictions the server would keel over in under 10 minutes I can assure you. Automation like this is fairly simple to program and thats why forums have this security feature.
Ok, so I am not using a robot so then how does this apply? ok lets assume this forum globally spans to 100k users and one third of them are online some days or even 1000 users are doing searches and navigating the forums and submitting posts, well the previous posting restrictions no longer apply because its 1000 *unique* users hammering the server.
You can get a idea of how this can all cause a server to run very slow and eventually cause it to come crashing down.
I'm all for sub-forums and keeping single threads as I know from first hand experience what works to maintain server loads, the forum might seem all snappy and responsive now but I assure you it won't be forever if people continue joining at the rates we have had the past few months.
I'm also totally
open to whatever the owners of these forums decide to do but if they have never had large forums or knowledge of what can happen as the DB grows they need to at the very least consider this now before it gets too late.
Post Edited (AllenM) : 3/11/2014 11:50:56 AM (GMT-6)