I’m considering paying the subscription for this place but one thing is putting me off - the speed of the board. It seems to jam up frequently which is highly frustrating. Is anything being done to fix this problem?
Give me an example. How frequently, and for how long. Do you have dial-up access or cable or DSL?
There’s always gonna be a problem, but you should’ve been here in the old days. :eek:
DSL
It happens every day at least once so far. Doesnt happen on any other messageboards I use. tottally jams up and the page fails to load and I have to just go to another site for a while and try again later. Dont particularly want to pay for that privilege.
DSL
It happens every day at least once so far. Doesnt happen on any other messageboards I use. tottally jams up and the page fails to load and I have to just go to another site for a while and try again later. Dont particularly want to pay for that privilege.
*and it’s just happened again when trying to post this!!
I have cable at home and a fractional T1 at work and I have gotten quite a few time out errors in the last week or so. I got a bunch earlier today.
I’m getting lllooonnnggg intermittent pauses during most of my sessions, although it almost always comes back after a couple of minutes. I usually bring up another tab and check out other sites while I am waiting. It is beginning to get irritating.
I use a cable modem, and am usually on around 7’ish AM and 6’ish PM MST (I netsurf just before I go to work and not long after I get home).
Oops. That should just be MT, not MST (i.e. Mountain Daylight Time or Mountain Standard Time, as the case may be).
It has happened to me (Cable) many times this last week. Times out, and twice gave me a page that said something has happened we emailed the admin, and then logged me off. Not a huge deal though.
If the hamsters went on strike for better hours and better housing, you can find some scab rats willing to work for scraps. 
We’ve been through this far too many times. It’s nothing to do with individuals’ connections - it’s whether they happen to hit the board when it’s running at full capacity. I find the worst time to be mid-evening UK time. When I log on mid-morning, this place runs like a greyhound.
Future days - as far as I know, nothing is being done to tackle this. The situation is that the whole site is run by a newspaper, and the subscriptions are apparently only just covering costs as it is. For a new server to be bought, the money needs to come from somewhere, and there’s no business reason for the Chicago Reader to put money into something which is of no benefit to them.
It’s because you posted the same message twice, you weenie!!! 
Seriously, the powers that be are always concerned about this. It comes and goes, and it’s frustrating to old time posters and potential new members.
I’m not one of the chosen who can give you an answer, but you will get a better explanation before long. I’ve alerted the higher powers, who will try to explain it better than I can.
All I can suggest is, that this board is worth the money, it’s always been so, and always will be. It has glitches. It always will. But the content and the members are so good that you are getting a bargain. These things go in cycles. Bad this last week or so.
Very nicely put, Sammela, and thank you.
The server is often . . . well, overserved, to be honest with you. We’ve never really had excess capacity, or if we ever did, demand very quickly rose to outstrip supply . . . the last time we upgraded, in fact, with great fanfare, big spiffy new server, lots of capacity, whee! within 6 weeks we were right back where we started; demand just skyrocketed again.
At that point, Reader management chalked up buying new servers for us as a losing proposition.
So it’s make do with what capacity we have. It’s easier some times than others, but if you wanna play when everybody else does in those peak times, it’s gonna be slow and you’re gonna get timed out. Just a fact of life and we apologize.
Like Sam sez, though, the community is definitely worth the little bit of aggravation.
your humble TubaDiva
Besides the peak-time traffic jams, we tend to get a lot of guest traffic at the start of school years and just after Christmas. That’s when tens of thousands of people get new computers, and of course each one has a free AOL disc.
Good observation, Ask Nott . . . and that has great application now, Og knows.
your humble TubaDiva
Out of idle curiosity, have the “powers that be” given any thought to paying to have the board hosted on a different site with someone elses servers that are better equipped to handle the traffic as opposed to having their own server? If so, what is the difference in cost? I assume it is a bandwidth issue either way. However, I in no way claim to be anything close to knowledgeable about all this. Hence, the question. 
It seems a bit indifferent for the Chicago Reader to simply state that they don’t want to be bothered with it because it doesn’t benefit them. If that were actually the case, why wouldn’t they just make the economically smart business decision and shut the board down?
We ARE on someone else’s server; the Reader has moved the Straight Dope off the company server completely. This was done for several reasons, but primarily because the Dope ate all the bandwidth and they couldn’t do a damn thing at the Reader offices.
Now, are they willing to pony up bigger bucks for more pipe? The answer so far appears to be no. Since experience has taught them there is never enough to satisfy – any previous increases in bandwidth were swiftly eaten up to return to the same old story – they’ve stopped chasing.
your humble TubaDiva
That sounds like baloney. Bandwidth of these boards wouldn’t dramatically go up unless you got more paying subscribers. What is the monthly bandwidth that these boards use now?
Any increase in bandwidth to the site has simply meant demand rose to eat it all, and sometimes pretty damn quickly, too, like within a few weeks. People found with easier access to the board they stayed longer, wrote more posts, made more searches, did more stuff . . . tne usage numbers simply rise to whatever amount of capacity we have.
Management concluded from this that throwing more bandwidth at the situation was never going to fix anything, and here we are today.
I’d have to ask Jerry for usage numbers, I’ll send him an email.
your humble TubaDiva
Don’t forget about guests and lurkers. Not everyone who uses this board pays for it.
It does make sense that the faster the board is to read the more of it users will read. However, I’m surprised it would be that much more. Or that costs would be that significant, since nowadays people are paying to use these boards.
I wouldn’t expect a massive increase in lurkers that would happen without a massive number of new paying members.