Q: Why is this board so slow?
A: Hey, man, the hamsters are doing the best they can, now back off!!!
It’s been much faster for me since we switched to pay. I haven’t lost a post in ages, and everything refreshes much faster now. Even searches clock right on through. It must have been the Gift Certificate for hamster chow that I included with my payment.
Otherwise, I’d have to agree with Giraffe. 
Hm…dunno. Maybe, just a thought you understand, but maybe deleting archives that are older than, say 24 months? Or putting them somewhere else so the bandwidth doesn’t get messed with everytime someone does a search and it goes back to 2000? Just my .02, o’course, but it sure would lighten the load…
I realize I’m treading on dangerous ground and the entirety of doperdom is about to descend harpy like on me, but damn! Do we REALLY need threads from 2000 if we aren’t able to resurrect them?
It’s been fine for me. I believe it serves users in order of join date. And if it doesn’t, it should.
With me it runs fine most of the time. Every once in awhile it seems to run into a wall.
Why?
I have no idea. But usually it speeds back up. But it’s no where near as bad as it used to be.
FWIW I’m on a dial up.
Count me in with the “vastly improved” crowd. When I first came I’d often wait minutes for a single page to load. Now I get antsy if it takes more than twenty seconds or so.
Oddly enough, it is always much faster for me to refresh the forum with GO at the bottom of a thread than it is to go BACK to it. Don’t know why, but I go with it.
It’s been a good upswing for me. Before tons of threads had double posts and people bitching about losing posts (I lost a few myself and double posted more then once) now I can’t say that I’ve seen that in awhile. Though I did lose one post about a month ago it’s so much better then before.
Too bad they won’t/can’t kick up the dough to really get this place humming though there are still noticable slow downs during the day.
I’m incredibly handsome and very old. Sometimes it loads fast; sometimes it loads slow. So I must conclude it discriminates on the basis of age.
One thing that is helpful is to post between 5:37 and 6:45 AM ET. The boad is pretty zippy then.
Really zippy for me now that it’s subscription. Of course, I’m hardly ever on in the afternoon, so that might have something to do with it.
Speedy for me, and faster than the other board I regularly post to, which often gives me “server too busy, come back again” And I pay to post there as well.
I’m on dialup also (complete with spyware and all kinds of other bullshit at the moment, but whatever). To be fair, I’ve never used a computer with a cable/high-speed/DSL/super-duper fast connection; it’s always been a plain ol’ dialup through a tiny little local ISP, but I have noticed a remarkable difference in the board’s performance. It tends to stop all together at about 4am CDT (well, between 3:30 and 4am, somewhere around that time) but other than that, I’ve got no complaints.
Also, as far as searching goes… I search every single time I log in, usually for posts I’ve made recently so that I can respond to any, umm, responses I may have gotten. I honestly never have problems with a search.
You can refine your searches by date, forum, number of posts, etc. y’know. If you’re looking for a thread that you know was posted like three months ago, but you’re not sure what thread it was in, set your search to 3 or 6 months ago and newer, search all forums. Then you don’t have to worry about all those old threads slowing you down. Alternatively, if you know who started the thread you’re looking for, you can search for only threads started by that poster, rather than every post they’ve ever made. Keywords help a lot, too.
This site has one of the easiest search engines I’ve ever used. I hope you don’t think I’m being “harpy like”, or whatever. I’m just trying to offer tips to make your (generic) time here easier and more enjoyable and whatnot. It’d be a damn shame to lose all those older threads just because people can’t be bothered to modify their searches though. Guy Stuff? Very Vaguely Creepy? No one could even begin to duplicate those threads, not to mention the threads that no one really wants to duplicate every time a newcomer asks about felching, squicking, Opal, munging, “in-jokes”, etc.
Merciless pruning. Every day we vote off the weakest link. Or the member with the most MPSIMS posts.
Oh, for the good old days of a twenty-second wait!
Aw, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Now, when I click to load a page, I have time to make a few phone calls, do some research, and write the next chapter for my client. When I’m done all that, the page might have loaded.
I’m getting necessary work done, in other words, which isn’t such a bad thing. But a twenty-second wait would still be nice!