Oh ok, then we’re in agreement. I thought there was a slight element of sarcasm in your last post but I guess not. I don’t remember when Guin was sniping from the other side of the aisle but I don’t really need a cite for it.
And amazingly it always matches the general consensus of what everyone has been saying for dozens of posts. Wouldn’t it be nice if all of those content free posts didn’t add to the data storage issue.
Maybe I misread your post.
Were you saying that I was part of the problem, “…believing that the complaints only come from chronic malcontents, they’ll continue to miss the fucking point” ?
Maybe you were talking about someone else, or in general?
You might be able to change the connection timeout time in your browser. Increase it and while it won’t make the page load faster, it will be more patient and you won’t get error messages and have to re-try. I don’t remember how I did it in Firefox…maybe in “about:config”?
in general.
I’ve been a long time poster. for most of my history here, I was often (I believe) accused of being a mod suck up. I usually supported staff here.
the issue presented by this thread, however, marks a substantial shift in my position. there certainly are malcontents here.
but it would be a big mistake to believe that the only complaints come from those. I would generally suggest to folks that if long time supporters were beginning to suggest that stuff wasn’t okey dokey, the PTB should take a good long hard look.
frankly that’s been the case for more than a year. and I’ve not seen any change.
as long as I get 10 bucks (or so) worth, I will continue to be around. the line is getting closer, fwiw.
one would have thought that if an entity was loosing support from its base, that self reflection would perhaps start thinking that maybe their actions should change.
but then, I’ve always been an optomist.
I know you read most of the posts concerning this board and its’ operation. I know you as a poster that I value.
In another thread, Jerry the TechGod posts
So, the answer is, none of the mods/Admins can solve these problems. All we are are visible targets. Jerry invites you to email him. Will you get an answer? I don’t know. Will it help? I don’t know. Will continuing to berate mods/Admins for the problems of the board help? My answer would be–NO.
BTW, have you emailed Jerry with any of your concerns?
wrt the attitude, I guess the biggest thing for me was the thread that spawned this, specifically the exchange between catsix and Tuba.
That wasn;'t a Jerry issue.
my experience w/most of the mods have been more positive than negative.
Not really. Something Awful has, as of now, 43,730,890 posts on their vBulletin-based message board. Except for a couple of parody subforums, the posts are fairly intelligent; definitely not one-liners in IM-speak, but as close to SDMB quality as you can get with a predominantly twentysometing userbase.
Membership at the SA Forums is $5 for life, with additional fees for enhanced features like avatars and access to archived messages. At the SDMB, it’s $15 per year, or $7.50 for charter members.
As a message board admin, technical issues are always going going to rear their head. For a while last month, I went through hosting hell; the VPS host where my site was based was sold, taking my site offline for two days. I had to jump to three different VPS hosts before I cound one where there weren’t any problems. The site was on and off for a three week period. Still, through it all, the users were patient and supportive. However, I had a temporary forum set up for the times when the site was offline, and there is no membership fee. There are higher expectations from users when they pay for membership, though. I’m sure if I charged a membership fee on my site, users would be upset and playing armchair accountant, just like on the SDMB.
So she complains when there’s problems, and when there’s not problems she says things are going well. That seems kinda appropriate to me, I guess I’m missing your point here.
MySQL does not have this limit.
Note that I’m not commenting on the specific installation of the SDMB. There may very well be some quirk or difference which is limiting things. However, there is no limit that I know of in either MySQL or vBulletin which should be causing this under normal operation with proper sizing of partitions (as elmwood pointed out). I’m not second-guessing the SDMB tech people, just saying that this problem, whatever it may be, is one which larger sites, including free ones, have been able to deal with. And from a database standpoint, internal to my company we have a MySQL database which has more than a billion records in one table, and a single table size that would dwarf the entire SDMB, so I know the capability is there.
Someone please step in and correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s my understanding that the amount of text in each post is really negiligble in terms of space in the database. What really eats up space is the information used to index and reference each post.
In other words, 1,000 words in a single post will take up far less space than 1,000 words divided between four posts, because the information used to identify each individual post is stored too.
Did you mean “the latest production version of MySQL does not have this limit” or “The version of MySQL used by the SDMB does not have this limit”?
Well, I wouldn’t call it (the space taken up by the data vs. the indexes negligible). I would guess it’s at least a 25 - 30%, judging from the databases I’ve seen.
And it’s not just the nuber of the words that deterine the size of the index, it’s the length of the words. e.g. a post like this:
“OMG! WTF? LOL! xxx” would not be indexed at all, because the words are all to short.
In any case, let me add this:
I am pretty sure that in the past, the 2 GB limit came from some database limitation, not disk space, but I don’t have any cites. Whether or not this is the case now, I can’t say.
However, I would advise this:
If you think that the SDMB server is underpowered, and wish for it to be upgraded, mentioning it on this message board is probably not the most efficient way of making your concerns known to the people who have the power to make a change in the situation. If I cared about the subject, I would contact the Chicago Reader directly (e.g. organize a letter-writing campaign).
Is that a suggestion or permission? Curious because another board I’ve been a member of a while doesn’t really encourage such a thing (it’s a bannable offence, actually) … so an organized letter-writing campaign is not against the TOS here?
Oooh, am I a poster of value?!
I’ve e-mailed Jerry and got a prompt, polite reply.
I think the server is underpowered.
I regularly have two windows open, and the SDMB is always the slowest. Even when I was watching the recent World Chess Championship, it was quicker. (I would guess that site was getting a miilion hits per hour easy.)
I care about the subject, because this is an excellent board (and I pay for it).
I have to say that I am disappointed in your suggestion of a letter-writing campaign. Aren’t you Mods appointed with the approval of a Chicago reader representative? Can’t you summarise the feelings of the members to that person?
And what would be more effective? One person saying a thousand people are unhappy or a a thousand letters each saying that you are unhappy?
A new server was ordered the middle of last week and is probably in my office awaiting my return from vacation on Monday. The process is in place to improve the performance of the SDMB. The database limitation causing the need for deletion of old threads/posts will be addressed during the build of the new server. The deleted threads/posts may be brought back in some archived form at that time or possibly even further in the future but so there is no misunderstanding about my intent please note I just said “may”. I don’t want people to assume it’s a given because it isn’t.
Jerry
You have to get permission first.
Wonder if they’ll grant permission in this case?
Hooray for the new server. Enjoy the vacation. Here is one plea to try and bring back the old posts. Just to make people happy it would be well worth it when you get the chance.
Thank you for letting us know,
Jim