Which is exactly what about half our members will do fairly soon.
Personally, I don’t mind the server dying every once and again. Lets me get shit done at work.
That said, it certainly bothers me if people I like are buggering off because of it (apparently Tuckerfan, for example), and I wouldn’t presume to think that just because my patience isn’t sorely tested by this that everyone else’s ought not to be either.
I think this is a great idea. We could plant a large flaming “t” in his yard, too. You know, “t” for “thanks!”
We actually have customers that pay that much. The largest PPV porn bill I’ve seen for one month was about $3000. And it wasn’t mine! 
Why do people complain?
Because it’s fuckign illogical as to why this board is so shitty with regards to performance.
I know of no other board on the internet that has such shitty service. NONE! And we PAY!
Really, the searching is pathetic, you can’t search for three letter words? Forget about searching for any three letter acronym like the CIA FBI, etc.
What it reeks of is incompetence. There’s a shitload of it going around because there are larger boards with more members and more traffic with more features that are free and fast. There’s simply no excuse and we are being hoodwinked here. Really? Ads AND paying? To run a board? It’s simply extortion. It costs nowhere near that much to run a board.
Ever notice that nobody has ever done any honest accounting about how the boards operate and how much it costs? Wonder why? Because they are making money hand over fist while we provide the content. Running a site is profitable people.
I have to admit, I’d rather have timeouts than no ability to search. I hadn’t realized until today just now much I’ve come to rely on the “New Posts” button. The board’s damn near useless for me without it.
I don’t know where to put this, so:
Sorry if I haven’t responded to anyone in any of the threads I’ve posted in. Usually, I search my own name to find those threads again. Now I have no idea where I’ve posted.
-JaJ
Go to Edit Options under Quick Links.
Change Default Thread Subscription Mode to No Email Notification.
This will auto subscribe you to any thread you post in and then you can click **User CP ** to see your recent threads.
Jim
I personally don’t think the solution to tech problems is to remove useful functionality. Especially when the first on every tech’s list should be “update the software”.
Thanks. But I still lost the ones from the last few days…
I know, I can’t help you with that one. Sorry.
I am still really angry about this. Which is one of the reasons I haven’t been posting so mcuh. But if you go under “User CP” one of the options is to “list subscriptions”. Which should take you back however long you need.
My most commonly used tool here was the New Post link. Hell, that was worth the cost of membership. I don’t have a lot of time now to read every page on the board, I don’t have the time to try to see what is going on NOW!! with the board. Get the search back at least for new posts, NOW!!!
I really am in doubt about my further subscription.
SSG Schwartz
Oh, fer fucks sake. Can an IT professional actually explain a few things?
Throwing money at the problem doesn’t work. Or, to be totally accurate, it works to a degree, then stops working. The average application, especially a database-centric application like this one, has grown way beyond the ability to just throw servers at it and performance will improve. You’re not just talking about installing more hamsters, you’re talking about creating load-balanced clusters with shared storage arrays and having a huge pipe to serve it all up. That’s expensive, complex, and difficult to maintain. Banks and other IT-centric businesses spend MILLIONS per year managing and updating their systems with staff in the dozens, and I’d think some of them don’t have the load this place has.
Let’s just talk about one cost briefly: I work for a storage company, and we charge for our large fault-tolerant high performance storage array (in either NAS or SAN, SATA or fibrechannel) on the order of $40 per GB, which is a bit lower than the industry average. So if every user has .5GB of data, which is not exactly beyond the realms of possibility for anyone who’s been here a while, you’ve already spent all the user fees for the first year just giving them storage for their threads and posts.
So you’ve paid for the storage, and you have nothing left for the servers to actually host the content, much less the people to run it and create those fault-tolerant load-balanced clusters of servers, manage and configure the data pipes to host it on the internet, renting or buying the space for the data center, paying for the power and air conditioning to run the server farm, or anything else. And don’t forget that this is all supported by the Chicago Reader, who has, y’know, a paying business to run which is more important to them than this little message board.
I don’t know how ‘free’ boards do it, but I’d imagine there is sponsorship, the data isn’t kept for as long, there’s less bandwidth, or there’s a metric buttload of ads.
I second Lobsang’s STFU - we’re paying a pittance for this service. It works most of the time, we don’t get lots of ads, and our information isn’t sold on to spammers and other fuckwits. And when it doesn’t work good people work hard to fix it. Don’t think for a minute your paltry $15 per year is going towards caviar and champagne dinners for the staff - it barely covers the cost of running this joint.
Yes it is. The people with the most posts are at what, about 30,000? Generously (ludicrously) assuming that’s 1,000 words per post, that comes to about 6K per post, making for about 175MB in plain text. Obviously there’s overhead, but I repeat, that is a massive overestimation of the worst case user. To pretend that the average is within even an order of magnitude of this is just crazy. Our average user has just over 100 posts. The average post is probably less than 200 words.
Taking a ballpark figure from this thread for database size per post (which will be an overestimation, since the quote given was for a db with a large number of custom avatars and attachments included, which ours does not), our board would be about 10GB. Is this really horrifying? No. Fer fuck’s sake indeed. If you’re going to put on techie airs, get it right, eh?
I happen to agree that there’s very little point speculating as to what the practicalities of running our board are, because it gets us nowhere. Perhaps you ought to rethink your ridiculous cost estimates before telling everyone to “STFU”, though.
I’m really glad I don’t buy storage from your company. :dubious:
You’re assuming a whole lot without any basis in reality. Do you really think that these posts are kept in plain text? How does one search plain text then? Or are you happy with the massive overhead of parsing and storing plain text?
I think an average of 1/2 of a GB per user is not out of line; I’m basing this on my experience with Oracle, SQL, and Exchange data storage arrays. And I love how you glibly ignore overhead; I picked the cheapest part of any enterprise solution (storage) as well as the easiest to maintain. You ignore all the really complex and difficult parts ‘as overhead’ because you know how much of a buffoon it will make you look if you even think about talking about any of that.
And where do you get the 100 average posts per user from, out of your ass like the rest of your information?
10gb? There’s over 10 years of data here. I think you’re hugely underrating the size of this database. Avatars don’t change, even if they’re custom, but the data does and this mb keeps all of it.
First, before casting oneself as the expert, know your subject. Next, prove someone wrong. You’ve done neither. So STFU.
Then why the power-whine if you agree?
So am I. You sound like one of the ‘experts’ I have to deal with who don’t know a fucking thing but do know that they can’t be wrong because they read it on the internets. My company doesn’t sell anything other than the enterprise-grade storage itself. I was referring to other boards where user information is a commodity they can and do spend by selling information to third parties.
You just wished .5GB into existence from nowhere, and you’re saying I’m pulling stuff out of my ass? I used reasoned estimations, quoting my figures and making explicit where I was making assumptions, with which you’re free to take issue. The point was that this was a worst-case scenario, and even if we double it to account for overhead we still don’t get to your ass-nugget number. Then I went and got actual data from a vBulletin source, and came up with another estimate which accords with my hand working to within a factor of two (the plain-text estimate gives ~5GB, the vBulletin data estimate 10GB). Neither of these are unmanageable numbers, and yet your only response has been to piss and moan about how many databases you’ve seen, as if all databases were created equal.
You made up a number out of whole cloth. You seem incapable of even the most basic sanity-checking, otherwise you’d have realised that it implied a database size measured in the tens of terabytes. That is fucking ridiculous. Seriously, I’m embarrassed for you. I’m perfectly aware that the people who think running this site is just a matter of buying a box from newegg and plugging it into a DSL connection are completely unrealistic. But your contention that our database is comparable in size to the Library of Congress is just dumb. At least the people who aren’t techies have the basic self-awareness to admit it.
No, I went to the front page and divided the total number of posts by the total number of users. I didn’t even have to use a calculator. Crazy, innit? Don’t worry though, I’ll be around all afternoon to explain basic maths to you.
I agreed there’s not much point speculating how much the site costs to run, largely on the basis that no-one’s listening (and thank fuck, with “experts” like you around). I still think you’re woefully wrong in your superciliously expressed estimate, and I think you’re being a dick in telling everyone else to “STFU”. I see you get to whinge about the nasty Frenchies pissing in your cheerios, but when someone else is unhappy with the service they’re getting, they should just suck it up. How odd.
Shit. Don’t blame me for any exodus! 
Nor is my leaving entirely determined by the board crap we’ve been experiencing, but it’s certainly a significant part of it.
We were told that when the board went P2P things would improve, and they slightly did, we’ve since been told, repeatedly that “improvements are coming” only to never have them arrive. 99% of the other boards I post to have waaaaaaay fewer problems than this one, and they’re free. So why should I stay here? Yeah, there’s some great folks here (of course, many of them are over at the free boards I go to), but there’s great folks on the other boards I go to as well. Will I be able to get the same level of insightful answers to my questions on those boards? In the case of some questions, the answer is yes. In cases where I won’t get those answers, it’s really not a big deal as I have the email addresses of those Dopers best able to give me the right answer. Might they object to me asking them if I’m not a Doper? Possibly, but I don’t think they’ll be too upset at the odd question from me every year or so. And if they do, well, then I guess I shouldn’t be too lazy to use Google, should I?
Besides, if all of us just “stick around” waiting for things to improve, Constipated Loathing will just keep dishing out the same promises of changing things and never do them. Maybe, just maybe, if enough of us make for the door at the end of our subscriptions, they’ll finally get their shit together. I doubt it, but stranger things have happened.
What Frenchies? Dammit, I can’t search!
Guess reading ain’t one of your strong suits. Oh well, should have known better
Oh, I missed this. Considering that I am looking, right now, at the “pagetext” field of a post entry in the “post” table of a vBulletin installation’s database, and I am seeing the exact same text that is entered by the users - yes, I really think the posts are kept in plain text. In fact I would go so far as to say that I know it for a fact. Why, what do you think they’re stored in, PDF?
Er, really easily? Like, about as easily as anything is possibly searchable?
Ah yes, the massive overheads of plain text; how the early computer scientists cursed its very name, waiting with bated breath for the arrival of compact formats like .doc, or even .tiff files.
Wait, what?
Oh, he was miffed a week or so ago because someone bumped in to him at a train station and a restaurant was full. You know, important stuff.