The board has to do most of those things anyway to determine where the first unread post is. I guess it’s plausible, but I don’t see how anyone could have predicted it.
Was that seriously the cause? That is insane. Well, thanks for fixing it Jerry the Tech God. Hard to believe that such a small dot could cause so much pain.
In truth, what happened is that the hampsters got distracted by the appearance of the new icon, and kept stopping to look at it.
Good lord, I thought the site had crashed…I couldn’t get anything to work. The boards would just go to “time out” and that’d be the end of it.
I noticed the bullet holes the few times I got on (still couldn’t navigate though)
If the slowdown is a result then forget it. I know what threads I’m in anyway.
It’d been a good time for a “damned hamsters” smiley
However, the dot does not appear to cause a slowdown on other boards. Perhaps this is a known problem in the release of the software run here? Perhaps the SDMB is running near capacity and this was merely the final straw - easily fixable with a hardware upgrade.
Browsing other boards, I have found that the dot significantly enhances their usability.
Yes and no. Determining first unread post is a bit less server intensive, since it needs to only look at posts until it finds the first one that was posted after the time you last logged in (don’t tell me you don’t log in, because as soon as you open the SDMB page, your cookie logs you in). On top of that, adding the second database query to implement the dots effectively doubles the server load when loading a thread-list page.
And yes, qts the server is operationg at near capacity. A hardware upgrade was performed several months ago and any capacity gain was quickly used up, and I wouldn’t hold my breath for another. What we got is what we got.
I have a cunning workaround; I have been marking the black dots myself with a magic marker.
Hmmmm… I wonder if we could turn off that feature and speed things up even more.
Actually, it probably would assuming the board software allows turning that off as a feature. Personally, I never use that feature anyway. Too bad they won’t let me at the board software, I could guarantee a 50% minimum performance gain.
Hahahaha!
I took the liberty of emailling vBulletin directly, and got a response almost instantly:
Oh well. Apologies for having been the cause of so much disruption.
BURN HIM!
Perhaps one of the mods is stalking you, Happy.
Thanks for my biggest laugh of the day.
As for the dot…If you can’t remember what thread you posted to…you have deeper problems.
… said the guy who posts 3 times a day … 
That was the problem?
That was what kept me off the boards for a day?
Maybe I was was forced into an anal-retentive mindset by my education, but I don’t think “let’s try it and see what happens” is a good approach for doing anything. I like to have some general idea of the possible consequences beforehand.
I’m glad you put that grinny thing in there, buddy, because otherwise I’d take you seriously.
I don’t care how good you are, I’d rather have the people who own it maintain it, thankyouverymuch.
Even if they’re goining to do seat-of-the-pants experiments once in a while.
**And now, famous last words:
*Let’s see… what does this button do? ***
Yeah? I don’t remember hearing you complain when they put in the quick-reply box, or tested polls, or turned off default Email Notification. Nothing was ruined by this; it was a harmless experiment.