Currently, we have to wait 60 seconds between posts. Supposedly, this is to keep us from overloading the server.
As of the time of this post, we have 4,366 active members. At any given time, I would think it reasonable that we have probably 20% posting, the rest lurking. That’s 972 people putting new content on the board over a 24 hour period.
I don’t care if the board’s server is 10 years old and we are two (or more) generations behind on the board software. We simply don’t generate enough transaction volume to overload the server. So why do we need to wait 60 seconds between posts?
I suggest that we try cutting it down to 30 seconds. If that works ok, then cut down to 15, then down to 10, etc., until we find a much more reasonable delay. I think that would be a number very close to 0, if not 0.
The 60 second rule is for flood control, not server load. It’s a security feature. As far as I am aware, there’s no plan to change it any time soon, and I don’t see any compelling reason to suggest it to the admins.
How often do you really need to make more than one post per minute? The only time it is generally an issue for folks is when they report a post, since the report itself also generates a post. As long as you put your “reported” post in the thread first and then report it, it’s not an issue.
It happens to me once in a while, that I’ll want to post a quick one-line reply in one thread less than a minute after posting something in another thread (or in the same thread, in response to a different post). But it’s usually no great hardship to have to wait a few seconds.
There have also been a few times when I would have accidentally double-posted if it hadn’t been for the 60-second rule.
But both of these circumstances have been quite rare, in my experience.
I might be wrong about this, but I have a vague memory that the reason we have a 60-second delay is the result of one or more Denial of Service attacks during the Board’s early days when the Internet was even more of a lawless jungle than it is now.
It’s a problem in Thread Games. Short & sweet is the rule there & the 60 second thing is pretty much the reason why I don’t play there so much any more.
I guess we can’t discuss any sort of delay in ATMB without someone bringing up the search delay.
Anyway, yes, the search delay was one of several things done to ease the server load way back when. What many people don’t seem to realize is how recently we’ve had complaints related to server load.
That said, those complaints have mostly died down in the last year or so, and with all of the changes that have been done around here in the past few months, it’s hard to say if server load is still an issue or not.
We’ve made a lot of changes around here recently, with some fairly major changes as recently as last week. Changing the search delay right now would probably not be a smart thing to do, since we would have no way of knowing if any resulting problems were the result of the delay change or the other work that was done. Once things have stabilized a bit and we have some solid run time on our current configuration, then I’ll be happy to discuss changing the search delay with the admins.
The problem is that it would make it easy for someone who’s just mildly peeved (suppose people were really mean to him or her in a Pit thread…) to DDoS the entire board. Literally all they’d have to do is rig up some kind of macro to click the ‘search’ button over and over. If there were 0 seconds of delay, this might actually be enough to noticeably slow the board down.
So it might go ok for a while until someone somewhere gets bored and decides to DDoS, and we’re back to a long delay again.
I personally would rather the delay was per user and based on a quota. Like some counter that resets periodically of the last hour’s worth of searches or something. Do more than say 20 searches in an hour? You are subject to the 60 second rule. But this would require coding changes to the board the we aren’t paying engineer_comp_geek enough to make, if the source is even open.
Even when I was posting a lot more than I do these days, I never found the 60 seconds between posts to be much of a problem. Same as with Thudlow Boink,
But I’ll admit that the 120 seconds between searches does manage to annoy me periodically.
It isn’t that I want to do a lot of searches, so much as that there are enough fields that it isn’t that hard to screw one of them up. And then you’re stuck with a pile of useless search results and have to wait 120 seconds before fixing your search.
So if at some later point that’s convenient with respect to the workings of this board, the admins could try shortening that delay to 60 seconds on an experimental basis, I for one would regard it as a kindness. If the experiment is a failure, then we go back to 120, but at least we tried.
Is it really that much of an inconvenience in the first place? I would find it difficult to submit a post, read another message, think about a response, and submit a response to that all within a 60 second period of time. Perhaps I’m just pokey.
