Get a lawyer. Duh.
Um, I do recall correctly that advocating legal against the SDMB et al. is a banable offense?
It’s over Johnny.
Your friend,Captain PutdownCMC fnord!
“Your internet penis is indeed large, Captain Putdown.”
The Dope usually runs a lot faster than the other boards I frequent. I dunno. It does tend to jam right at noon, in the eastern time zone. Then, come 5:00, crickets.
What I really don’t understand is Mr. Hildo’s preoccupation with the attitudes of members here. He has taken it upon himself to lecture us for a second time now. All this crap about us “pussyfooting around” - what the fuck is that? Why are you so invested in how other people behave?
I find your anger out of proportion and really, really suspicious.
My wife is a member of such forums, and I have to say that I find the whole idea of a banner add sized signature with animated animals and such, that’s bigger than 90% of the posts fucking stupid. So I’m glad we don’t have even that possibility here.
The board does time out for me every so often, but I’ve never met a site that didn’t.
Of course the other side is that as consumers we have every right to give feedback on our opinions and experiences. It’s just that constructive criticism is more useful.
All you people who say, “If you don’t like it, leave” in response to the OP, should just shut up or get the hell out. There will always be complaints on the dope. If the only response you have is, “Don’t like it? Leave.” then you’re part of the problem, not the solution. Go away.
(Didn’t care for the tone of my post? Sounded obnoxious, arrogant and stupid, did it? Hmm. There may be a lesson in there somewhere.)
It’s not in response to his complaint, it’s because of his tone.
Reminds me of a high school punk who tries to set other people up for fights.
Yeah, I’d like to say that this idea of, “If you don’t like it then leave” is pretty stupid. Just like, “America, love it or leave it.” I think we can all admit that it’s strange the service here is so bad, and that it doesn’t make sense. I like the community but I’d like to figure out a way to make it better. It’s a pretty idiotic mindset to have, really.
Hey, I want the board to get better. Is it so harmful to raise a few questions?
On edit: Jesus guys, you don’t need to go crazy about the pictures. I raised it not because I want them, but to demonstrate that other boards can handle images as well and not have problems. This is a very low-feature site, and it’s still slow. All I meant was that sites with loads of features go faster.
I agree, but at the opposite extreme from “If you don’t like it, leave” is “I don’t like it at all here and it’s a complete waste of my fucking money, waaah!” - people at that end of the scale would actually be better off leaving, unless [gasp] they don’t really mean what they say.
I use the boards every day, usually from a dial-up connection. In the past two months I have had one --ONE --instance of a page refusing to load, but the problem went when I closed the window and opened another. I don’t think the OP’s problems are with the servers.
Exactly. Come out of the shoot yelling and bitching, and you’ll get the same tossed right back at you. Rational, calm approach to the same subject will actually get a calm, rational response.
That said, see aforementioned “Door, ass…”
All I see is the same old waah waah waah with some preemptive insults of those who might disagree with him thrown in.
The part about lawyers on the board thinking about suing it was pretty funny, though.
I haven’t had the board time out on me in years! It can’t just be me…
For the record, I think the point about the board not allowing images was that use of avatars and other inline images usually takes more bandwidth and further degrades performance of the board. So disallowing them should be an advantage, yet we still experience some problems.
To me, the board is a bit more sluggish than most other boards I frequent. And the search restrictions are way more … restrictive.
Is it even possible for the problem to be with the board server or hardware if some people are having no problems at all? Wouldn’t everybody have to be affected if the problem were at the source?
- I had it time out yesterday a couple of times. I have a pretty fast conenction.
- I’ll deal with it.
- I don’t like the “Love it or leave it” philosophy either. I can still complain, although I don’t just because it’s not changing.
- There’s too much good about this board to leave, especially since someone else paid for my subscription.
- NO PICTURES! NO AVATARS! NO ONLINE IMAGES! PLEASE! There are lots and lots and lots and lots of other boards for that…I’m a member of some of them. I like my quiet peaceful board here.
I just became a paid member yesterday, although I’ve been browsing the SDMB for years. From my limited perspective, SDMB performance was shit a few years ago (routinely unable to access for hours at a time), but has been fine since. I get similar load-times and time-outs here relative to the other boards I frequent.
That said, let me add in as polite a way as possible, that there’s always room for improvement…
Well, to be fair, people in Australia are often posting at a time when the Board is not at its busiest. If you’re posting in the evening, then it’s the middle of the night over here, and i never have trouble getting on then either.
But, as someone else noted, noon Eastern here in the US is often a really slow time, and the past few days i’ve had quite a few timeouts. It gets rather frustrating.
I’m glad we don’t have avatars, but the fact that we don’t means that these Boards should be about as fast as they possibly can be, yet they often load slowly, and periodically time out.
Look, it doesn’t worry me that much, and i’m not going to cancel my membership because of it, but i’m extremely skeptical of some of the reasons we’ve been given. Board usage and the VBulletin software are frequently trotted out as limiting factors, yet there are plenty of busier, VBulletin-using boards that don’t have these problems. It’s a little odd, is all.
Why do we have deal with a dichotomy? Can’t we have the awesomeness that is the SDMB community AND have some machines that work consistently running this place?
I will continue to pay for my pleasure here, but it would be nice if those in charge would move us in to the 21st century. I don’t want avatars or other crap, I like this simple style (I even turn off sigs here) but the point should be made that sites with avatars run faster and more consistently than this place does.
I rarely have any problems with the board since the system upgrades, and when I do, it’s almost always during heavy use periods for our network at my end. For those who are comparing the performance to other boards, you need to ask yourself if those boards also have huge, frequently searched archives as well, as this is likely the main cause of any slowdowns at the SDMB end.
I have no real knowledge of the SDMB’s set up, but as someone who’s done web application programming in the past I’d bet you that the SDMB’s problems have nothing to do with bandwidth. The number one bottleneck in most web applications is the database, and the SDMB probably hits the database very hard. If there’s too much traffic, it’s going to puke occasionally. I seem to recall that the search function(which was not written by anyone affiliated with the SDMB) is especially hard on the database
Given that vBulletin is written in PHP, it’s also possible that the webserver is getting overloaded by requests.