Open the BBQ Pit (7 minutes…but only 1 timeout! Yippee!)
Start this thread (2 minutes)
WHAT THE FUCK?! For the last 2 hours I’ve basically been relegated to spectator, as EVERY FUCKING MOUSE CLICK INVOLVES AN AGONIZING, MULT-MINUTE DELAY. (That’s on those few miracle clicks that don’t timeout.) Christ on a crutch, you’d think the SDMB were being downloaded in entirety by every single fucking poster. How am I going to hit “Submit” and watch the cuntbiting servers, which are CLEARLY circa 1982, timeout on me FIVE MOTHERFUCKING TIMES IN A ROW? Do I keep submitting? Do I end up with 5 duplicate posts? DO I NEED THIS FUCKING AGGRAVATION IN MY SHIT-EATING LIFE?
More than happy to contribute, but sadly they don’t take contributions.
If I’m wrong, does anybody have the info on where to send it?
Ahhhh, seems to be better now. Of course, maintenance starts in about 10 minutes, so lucky me.
Running a message board which is being brutally poked, prodded, and generally bent over into Party Position by bazillions of simultaneous users might be a wee bit more difficult than you imagine. Try to read during off-peak times and exercise patience at all times.
It has taken me a while to train myself to this routine, but now whenever I post, I follow these rules:
select all the text in the reply box and copy it to the clipboard before I hit the Preview button, in case the preview times out.
if the Preview times out, you should be able to just reload the page and hope it works the second time, but having the copied data on the clipboard helps out in the rare occasion where the page won’t reload and you have to wait until later, or when it reloads but doesn’t have your text in it.
once I’m done, do the same thing before hitting the Submit button, except:
if the Submit times out, do not reload the page or attempt to resubmit it. Paste the text into a notepad window or somewhere you can save it, then attempt to get back and re-view the thread (by, for example, going back to the forum and clicking on the link to that thread). Keep trying this until you actually see the thread where your post should be and verify that your post is missing before pasting your saved response back in and trying again. Nine times out of ten, even if the Submit failed to generate the proper “thank you for posting” page, it actually did get submitted to the server (the server just wasn’t quite up to serving up the response just then). I usually right-click links to threads and “open in new window” so I can easily open the thread again if the reply fails, since hitting “back” in the reply window generally is just as slow as submitting the post in the first place.
It requires patience, but it’s nearly foolproof. Enjoy.
You see, when you don’t pay for something, it’s kinda tacky to complain about it later. It’s like busting up your sister for getting you the orange sweater instead of the maroon one for Christmas.
Oh yeah, one other thing. Shut your piehole. We’ve been dealing with this for years, with very few people griping about it. The people who do are invariably newbes like you. If you would just quit your griping and go away, it would be faster, and that would be better for me. So take a hike, or shut up.
But within an hour, it’s quite often getting very slow. I used to try going on the boards at 5 am or 10 pm to avoid the terrible slowness, but I’ve been having difficulties with slow boards even then.
Believe it or not, the board is lots faster now than it was before the big crash a year or so ago.
I agree it’s a little tacky to look a gift horse in the mouth, but what the heck - the BBQ Pit is the right place to complain about stuff. And I agree it’s annoying.
Well I rarely if ever give out about the slowness but it’s a real pain in the balls.
I’ve offered to pay money on several occasions, as has nearly every one else. We were told we couldn’t give them money. There was talk about a paid membership, which I’m willing to pay, but I haven’t heard anything about that for a while.
I’ve seen Dopers offer equipment, their own time etc. to help the place. All knocked back IIRC
I’ve read no guarantee that the money made from buying a Cecil t-shirt etc. will actually help the SDMB in any way other than to keep the Reader in business a bit longer.
[/venting over]
That all said I basically agree with you that the OP should just shut the fuck up
I don’t get the whining about the slowness. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been year for years, but the board still seems majorly speedy to me, considering what it used to be like. Sure, I have to refresh every once in a while, but that’s no great hardship. Maybe you should consider doing what I do and multi-tasking. I almost never just read the SDMB, I’m surfing some other page or checking my e-mail or watching TV or whatever. That way I have something to turn my attention to during the occasional really long wait.
One question I have is this: If you don’t UN-check the little box that asks if you want an email notification when someone replies in a thread you’ve posted on then SOMETHING is taking up time and resources e-mailing you.
I personally don’t want to be emailed everytime someone responds to a thread I posted in but SOMETIMES I forget to un-check that box only later to unsubscribe after finding tons of emails from that thread.
My question is why don’t they reverse that option, meaning that if you DID want to be notified THEN you check the box? Wouldn’t that be more efficient?
I’m not complaining or anything, just wondering.
Rooves: Huh? When I open a thread or reply, the “notify me by e-mail” option is ALWAYS un-checked, I HAVE to opt-in. Maybe it’s something you can set in your user profile?
On the Board in general: Count me with those who say this is nothing compared to what things were like back in the Bad Old Days.
Ah, kids these days…when I was a pup we had to walk to school in the snow in our barefeet - both ways. And this server was so slow that you could cook a turkey dinner if you dared refresh. Dopers back then were a hardier folk - used the deprevation, server outages, lost posts, and five minute refresh times. Those of us that survived became hardened to these minor issues we have now.
