If the community desires certain features enabled then the day-to-day administrators are the ones to petition. I rarely make decisions about features or at least believe I’m not the decision maker. There may be a misunderstanding going on between the day-to-day admins and myself in that they are waiting for me to say they can turn on features and I’ve been assuming they can turn on any features they want. If a feature causes a performance problem (unlikely for most features) then I’ll tell them why we need to turn it back off.
That said in the past I’ve been a bit gruff in my response to them when I’ve had to turn a feature back off so we’ve probably arrived at an unspoken impasse where I think it’s fine for them to turn on whatever they want and they think they can’t turn anything on. In the first few weeks after the upgrade I also told the day-to-day admins to not mess around with features because I was also doing things and I didn’t want us to bump into each other. So I’ll take responsibility for not going back to them later and saying they could turn on features. I had just assumed that after the performance had stabilized last fall that they could do anything they wanted but it looks like I dropped the ball. Finally, I don’t know exactly why it’s become “common knowledge” that most features can’t be turned on due to performance reasons. From my perspective there are only a small number of features that could cause a performance issue and I think we can turn them on and see what happens anyway. If they don’t work we’ll turn them back off. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had problems with certain features in the past. We have but we’re now in some cases two, three, or even four pieces of hardware and one to two major version levels of vBulletin away from those previous times. Conditions have changed so we can change too.
Now to address your question about the upgrade. Here’s where I believe we stand. It’s basically finished except for issues with search which I’ve been working on the past couple of days. Features however can be turned on or off at will and do not need to wait for some upgrade “complete” moment.
Two things I’ve done recently in the search area are:
- Increase the amount of resources available to search by 400%. From my limited testing this has reduced the “fatal error” search result frequency. That “fatal error” was vBulletin reaching a limit on the resources it was willing to provide for a search. Now it’s much higher. I’ve noted that multiple word searches or single common word searches that in the past were returning the error are now completing successfully. This change has been in place since Saturday.
While it won’t eliminate the possibility that a search can consume so many resources that it returns an error the frequency of those errors should have been lessened with Saturday’s change. There will still be cases where search fails due to resource constraints and we do need such limits. If we don’t have them then those just reading and posting to the message board (instead of searching) are affected by the smaller number of people doing resource intensive searches.
- The message board has been opened up to the Google search index spider. This has been ongoing since Friday. I’m not sure if Google will ever be able to completely index the message board and it will probably be months before it’s even mostly indexed but the process has started. As time goes on I’ll start letting other search engine spiders in as well but right now I’m focusing just on Google.