In closing this thread, TubaDiva felt that the search function was misused.
I’m curious, but isn’t it more likely that Bill H just had a script that directly requested each of the 15,000 user profiles and then stripped the data from those (I really hope he didn’t do it by hand)?
No searches used (note: I am not saying it wasn’t a wasteful use of server bandwidth, just perhaps not in the way that Tuba first thought).
I’m posting this here because I’m not arguing with TubaDiva’s actions (which would go in the Pit) but rather because I am seeking clarification about how the board was used and functioned in this case.
But I will admit that my first thought on opening the thread was umbbah! (the sound children make when they know a cohort is about to get in trouble.)
I apologize if this has been discussed elsewhere and I didn’t see it.
We don’t want people running scripts on our system.
We don’t want people doing anything to the board that would potentially deny access to other people. What’s most important to us (and should be to you, too)is that as many people as possible have good access to the board whenever they come to visit.
We’re now seriously considering removing the post count altogether. People put too much attention and attachment to it, it’s just a friggin’ number and should never be more important than what you say and do on this board.
I like it. The only downside is, there will be some minor squalling in the Pit if implemented–whither post parties, you heartless fascists??! And possibly some passive resistance of people tracking their own post counts by hand in siglines and such, but more power to em, I suppose.
I just wanted to clarify that I wasn’t in any way trying to defend running scripts against the server.
As far as removing post counts, that sounds fine to me. But would we be able to find them in our profiles? I don’t attach any great significance to them but I do find it personally interesting to keep an eye on my own post count.
I hope we don’t remove the post count, for two reasons. First, numbers fascinate me. Second, more and more features are removed because people keep abusing the system. Would a proclaimation stating “No post count parties - ever” help things? It would be easy to do that.
That having been said, it is crystal clear that the SDMB staff is doing the best that they possibly can in a declining situation of overloaded CPUs and saturated bandwidth. If removing features is what it takes to keep the Board viable, then I support it completely. It’s just sad, is all.
Or maybe addfour thousand to Ike’s, just to piss handy off.
If you remove post counts, then some people will flaunt their registration dates. If you remove those too, we’ll have Post Your User Number! threads. The search for status symbols is a way of like amongst certain folks–if they can’t have one, they’ll find another. Doesn’t anybody remember the Sneeches?
We would be removing the view, not the count itself.
For the time being, we’re going to leave it as is, but we really do want to discourage stuff like post parties and count padding and all those other sorts of things that waste time and bandwidth. It’s hard enough to cover the board as it is, we have so much truly meaningful content to see, why clutter the landscape with extraneous crap?
It should always be about the content, what you say is much more important than how many times you might be saying it. Some of us were fortunate enough to get here sooner than others, but that’s no sign of anything except for luck, it’s not a judge of character, for example.
How about we get JDavis to just sort of drop the server in the bathtub over the weekend (“butterfingers!”) and then everybody has to re-register and start from scratch.
To begin, I want to say that I am in favor of anything the techies can come up with that will make the Board run faster. If they decide that it would help to have us all pray to the Server Gods for 15 minutes a day, I would do that.
But…
Every time a discussion starts that deals with load on the server, everyone slams Post Count Parties as a major waste of System Resources.
I just did a quick check (speaking of wasting system resources) and Threads related to Post Counts totaled only 2 of the 150 Threads on the first 3 pages of MPSIMS. That’s only 1.33%, and it goes all the way back to 07-24-2001 at 05:54 AM.
It seems to me that quite a bit of the traffic on the Board has little or nothing to do with “Fighting Ignorance;” most of ATMB, all of IMHO and MPMIMS and 99% of the Pit exist for purely social reasons.
I’m not saying this is bad… I’m just pointing out that the “silly” drain on the server is really not about Post Parties or Post Count Padding - it’s due to the social nature of the Board, which is precisely what keeps so many people here. Sure, everyone shows up for the first time with a question or two, but most people who stick around do so because it’s fun, and not only to have their Ignorace Eradicated.
I’m not a big fan of Post Count Parties, probably because back when I broke 1,000 and threw one, nobody showed up (Damn you… damn you all!), and I’m certainly not here to defend them. I just think it’s important to be precise.
The overload on the server is not attributable to only one or two specific kinds of “silly” post. The drain on the server is due to the fact that, as of this post, there are 1,366,452 posts in 73,910 different threads on the SDMB.
That’s a whole bunch, and by the time I type this line, that number is out of date - I just hit refresh on the Board’s main page in my other window, and the total is now 1,366,476… that’s 24 more posts in roughly 15 seconds. That works out to 1.6 posts per second. Wow.
Anyway, I’m gonna wrap this ramble up… In short - I don’t believe Post Parties are to blame. If it will lighten the load on the server to remove Post Counts because the CGI won’t have to hit the database to check totals every time a thread loads, then it’s a great idea to remove them from the Post Display. But, if you’re hoping that removing Post Counts will lessen the total number of “silly” threads, you’re simply sticking your finger in the dike, and there are much, much bigger holes to fill.
