I’ve rarely whined in the past about the performance of things here, and when I did, I always made suggestions of how to improve it, including offering to host it myself.
But now I’m a paying customer. Granted it’s less than $5, but that wasn’t my choice. I would’ve paid 3 or 4 times that amount. The pricing was set by the Chicago Reader, and I would hope that whoever made the decision took into account appropriate costs to counter those revenues.
So now it’s a real business with revenue. Can we please beef it up? Does it require another machine? a faster pipe? better software? I don’t know, but those who are there should.
Please please make this better. “Charity” is no longer an excuse. This is a real business; please deliver a higher quality product.
The timeouts and ultra long access times and the hung up pages that all used to bug the f**k out of me aren’t happening anymore. At least, not to me.
Is there a spell check option for posting in vB? If so, I could sure use it. The quick reply would be nice to have back. And searches that can look for anything, from any time period, regardless of word length would be nice.
Both your first two options are available on the current release of vBulletin. I think the over-three-letter minimum word length on searches is a unchangeable minimum, but can’t be certain. There are oodles of other bells and whistles that the SDMB, in its quest for maximum bandwith for content, has decided to forego.
I know many people are happy with the performance, and that’s wonderful. But it’s slow for me, with occasional losses of screens. And I’m computer savvy enough to be certain it’s not at my end.
I don’t know if they administrators could change it from their control panel–maybe I’ll hop over to the vB website later tomorrow and find out–but if they really wanted to change it, the tech people could alter the search script. I don’t think that would be such a good idea, though, since it would probably cause too much of a server load during searches.
Maybe they could make it a perk for those who donate, say, an extra $10 a year.
I think you’re joking there, Q.E.D. …aren’t you? …but that’s not the first time I’ve heard suggestions of extra payments for extra perks. Obviously it’s none of my business how this board is run but to creare different levels of membership purely on how much money you can stump up in subscriptions doesn’t seem to me the right way to go.
If vBulletin ran on Oracle, and the CR had a good fast database server, it might be feasible. Sadly, the CR doesn’t have good fast DB servers, and I don’t think I’d be able to con my employer into giving one up. (They go for around $200,00-300,000 each) Also, it runs on MySQL, which doesn’t have quite the same “bulletproof” strength as Oracle.
The reason it matters what sort of DB server it’s running on, and what precise kind of DB it’s using is that to search on three-letter words means you need to index three letter words. And the result of that will be WAY more words to keep track of, and a significant performance hit.
Of the 117 words above, 20 of them are three letters, and 64 are four or more letters, so in this wildly unscientific sample, indexing and searching 3-letter words would increase the load by about 33%
Not being able to search for three-letter words may be a pain, but it seems to be a more than acceptable limitation with regards to system performance.
Speaking of performance, whether the CR did some DB tuning to make things run smoother, or there was a hardware upgrade, or just the new version of vBulletin was enough, there has been a significant and perceptible increase in responsiveness. Since the upgrade, I haven’t had the hamsters eat a single post, and other than the “crunch time” during the day, performance is often approaching “zippy” Count me as happy with it.
Yeah, mostly. Hence the grinny guy. I don’t think I’d be for major perks, like the ability to edit posts; but minor ones, such as the ability to search for three-character strings wouldn’t irk me so much. That sort of thing could be shared, too. By that I mean if, for example, I had that ability, if someone else needed to find a thread containing, say, the word “poo”, I’d be more than happy to search it out for them. This is one of those “case by case” things, I think. Like you, though, overall I’d probably prefer there weren’t any second-level perks.
The problem with including smaller words in the search wouldn’t come at the time of search, but in the indexing necessary before any searches could be made. Once you’ve got the words in the index, it shouldn’t be too hard to search for them, so if you’re going to enable it for anybody, you might as well enable it for everyone.
gotpasswords, I note that in your sample text there, most of your three-letter words are common ones, especially “the” and “and”, which wouldn’t be indexed anyway. I only saw two three-letter words there which might reasonably be indexed, “ran” and “con”. And while “and” and “the” and their ilk are not partucularly useful search terms, and therefore reasonable to exclude, there are a number of other 3-letter words which are meaningful; “OSX” (the current Mac operating system) comes to mind off the top of my head.
[ul][li]You can please some of the people all of the time.[/li][li]You can please most of the people most of the time.[/li][li]Some people you will never please.[/ul][/li] [sup]My apologies to Abe.[/sup]
