Short story; abuse ensued, mods clamped down.
I would like to see them back, that was an awesome feature.
So after re-skinning the message board on Saturday in order to fix Quick Reply and the navigation bar drop downs the board has ground to a halt twice in the last 24 hours. So for the time being we’re back on the old skin. No doubt a decision that won’t be completely popular but it’s more important to have the board available with less functionality than not available with more functionality.
Hmm, I’m pretty sure I experienced several board lockups before you reskinned, so I’m not so certain it is related. It seems to me something changed when you took the boards offline last week.
That’s a possibility as well. I wasn’t paying very close attention to message board performance last week due to non Straight Dope issues so I don’t know how it was performing the last few days. I started focusing on it Saturday morning again and I have seen it lock up twice for over an hour since then. Something that was not occurring two weeks ago. It could be related to search engine indexing (which I enabled on Thursday) or something completely different.
We’ll run with the old skin for the next few days and if I see it locking up for any extended period of time that makes it less likely the re-skinning is the problem. Since the upgrade it’s still been locking up occasionally for a few minutes here and there but I’ve only experienced hour long lockups in the first few days after the upgrade and then after I re-skinned it this weekend.
I vote the the spiders are locking us up. Back when google ads started, and google search engine indexing was temporarily allowed, the board locked up hourly, easing up after 10 to 15 minutes.
This is the same thing that happened Thursday night, wreaking havoc during the Vice-Presidential debate thread. At about 10 of the hour (7:50 and 8:50 Central), the board slowed down tremendously for 10-15 minutes.
They should be able to see when the Googlebot is feeding, and see if the times its slow are the same as it is indexing. Then again if he just allowed it then the deepbot is probably active but once the entire board is indexed only freshbot should be indexing (for the most part) so it shouldn’t be that bad.
If it’s the search engine spiders we’re on the old skin again (with a few small modifications) so I suspect we’ll know after Monday afternoon.
So old skin, new skin, same problems with message board lock ups. The new skin with Quick Reply and navigation bar drop downs has been reapplied. Search engine indexing has temporarily been turned off to see what effect that will have.
Just reporting that I’m getting a similar error on search attempts:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 24 bytes) in /home/straightdope/boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/includes/class_core.php on line 3278
Hey Jerry, is there any reason why we couldn’t get that wonderful Forum Jump dropdown duplicated at the top of the forum display as well as at the bottom?
Request seconded.
Looking at my User CP I see that my renewal is $14.95 per year.
It was half that. Am I missing something?
And I’m still a Member instead of a Charter Member.
As am I.
Jerry is aware of the situation.
I guess he’s working on getting the board up to speed and has some time before Charter memberships are due to renew.
And I am still a guest instead of a charter member.
Has search gotten more restrictive since the upgrade? I could have sworn before that if you did a search that had no results, you were allowed to revise your query without having to wait the 5 minutes to try again. Now it’s making me wait the full five minutes regardless.
I don’t remember any grace period on failed searches.
Yes, our previous setup did not start the 5-minute wait after a search that returned no results. I assume this is another item on Jerry’s list.
I don’t know when this happened or if anyone else has commented before, but THANK YOU for changing it so the text “Straight Dope Message Board” comes after the name of the thread in the browser window’s title bar, instead of after. My browser’s collection of thread bookmarks up until now have mostly identical names starting with “Straight Dope Message Board” followed by maybe the first twenty letters of the thread name.