Argh. I suppose this belongs in ATMB, but I’m too fucking annoyed to write a “fuck”-free post about it.
I should note that I’ve been away from SDMB for a while (lurking from time to time), so I’m not sure whether this is a problem that’s been discussed at length already, or not.
Has the board been “crashing” (for lack of a better term) for everyone else here too? I’ll be surfin’ along, and suddenly, everything at SDMB freezes up for some time.
I wrote a longish post for this thread, but when I clicked to submit it, I got a “this page cannot be displayed”. I opened other windows to see whether or not my message had gone through, but no SDMB pages would load. I copied my post to Wordpad in case, and I kept trying to backspace, and re-post. I was eventually able to open the Pit in another window, and I saw that my post hadn’t gone through. I immediately tried to post it again, but I couldn’t.
Frustrated, I walked away for a while to go take care of the garden. When I came back, I tried to post it again, only to see that UncleBeer had closed the thread. Though I’m glad that UB closed it, I still have to scream a little. Rather, I have to hit my “Caps lock” button, and pretend to scream… please humour me.
ARGH!!! FUCK!!! I WROTE THAT FUCKING POST WELL BEFORE UNCLEBEER CLOSED THE THREAD!!! WHY, OH WHY MUST THE SDBM GODS BE AGAINST ME???
K… That felt better. I still have the post on Wordpad. Maybe I can read it to myself, or something.
It’s happening all the time to me, too. Posts don’t go through, threads take for-e-ver to load, I can’t even get in about half of the time - you know, the usual. (And I have a high-speed connection, too - I can’t imagine surfing the Dope on dial-up.) And you know, the Fabulous Forums are just as bad since they went to vBulletin. I’m being forced to, you know, have a life again.:eek:
I’m on dial-up right now. I went upstairs to try the cable connection, but it was just as bad.
Besides, the cable’s only working half the time, here. There’s a strike going on, and some cable-company employees have been cutting wires everywhere in an act of sabotage.
You are not alone…:mad: Just be prepared for a whole bunch of posters to tell you that you are an ungrateful dork because: “It’s free, and if you don’t like it you can leave.”
'Twould appear that anything other than complete acceptance of the status quo is HIGH TREASON, if not actual (gasp) HERESY!
Well, it’s not like I’m criticizing the SDMB itself. I’m pointing out that it’s a shame that things are as they are now. I guess VB boards aren’t built to deal with a board as large as this one.
I was just annoyed at the post that could/should/would have been, but wasn’t.
i have noticed specifically that it freezes around 4:30 am EDT every day, as i work the night shift… right at the end of my shift, all my work done, and i can’t troll around the SDMB
4:30 am (1:30 for me, here on the left coast) begins the daily “housekeeping” shutdown. It lasts about 45 minutes ([old codger]Why, I can remember in those days, it was 20 minutes and not a second longer[/old codger]) so if you can hang on…or do what I do and open long threads ahead of time, in a separate window, and pull up all the pages so I can scroll through it, you’ll be okay, as long as you can wait to post.
I have, however experienced what Zaphod is talking about. There doesn’t seem to be a timetable, but there’s somewhat of a pattern to it. The board will run like silk, then out of nowhere, I’ll get a “Cannot find server”. I can usually get a thread up after no more than five tries. Sometimes it goes back to normal, sometimes threads load slowly for a while after that. Granted, the fact that some threads are dismissed after a sentence of the OP, some are skimmed, some are studied thoroughly, and that some of the ones studied thoroughly are multi-page, might skew my perception of how long this lasts and how often it occurs. Although I do notice it more (not necessarily experience it more) in MPSIMS, when I want to evaluate a large number of posts in a short time, to determine which ones interest me, and I end up waiting five minutes to find out what “The funniest damn thing that ever happened on a houseboat!” is all about.
Searches take up a LOT of resources. A lot of people do vanity searches, or search the whole board when they should search only a forum. I know that when I do IP lookups, it WILL make the board hang up for a while. Therefore I try to do that sort of thing when traffic is very light.
Believe me, it affects the staff, too. I wish I had an answer for you.
If, say, half of all the members donate 2 bucks each - ah - that would be roughly 24,000 bucks. I bet you can get lots of hamsters for that. Of course, we need it in writing, the money goes to the message boards - no gold fixtures or fancy shoes for Cecil.
Would it be helpful to put something in the FAQ, or maybe even in its own sticky in ATMB, about search etiquette? Or better yet, put it on the top of the Search page? Something like, “Searches vastly slow down the server, so if you do a search, please try to limit it as much as possible and only search one forum at a time” or something to that effect?
Well, it depends how you look at it. It sucks that members of the cable-company’s management have been so fucking unyielding in their attitude towards the union’s demands, that union members have been reduced to committing desperate criminal acts of sabotage. Right now, numerous employees have been living without pay for months, and (to my knowledge) the dispute’s showing no signs of being resolved any time in the near future.
From a more selfish point of view: it sucks that my TV’s cable usually goes dead right in the middle of a good show’s best scene.
Aside from the financial cost involved in switching over to satellite (or some other alternative to cable), I don’t know what the fuck keeps me so damn faithful to a near-monopoly-type company that’s almost as shitty in its dealings with its customers as it is in its dealings with its employees. Bleh.
