Scheduled Site Upgrade

[TickleTheater]

This is just a notification that the site will be down temporarily sometime this upcoming weekend for upgrades.

On a side note we are still accepting submissions for our logo as discussed in our previous news posting.

Update Status

 

[MistressValerie1]

Thanks for the info.

I hope that you'll be able to do something about the forum speed at that time. The pages have been loading so slowly that the forum is becoming unusable (60-90 seconds per page view, 90+ seconds to respond to a thread with Quick Reply). I love the Theater, but the speed is becoming a real issue for me.

Best regards,

 

[Hektik1]

It took me 30 seconds to get to the TT, view the reply, and post this message. Check your modem :weird:

 

[TickleTheater]

It does it in spurts, I suspect heavy search-engine crawling or something similar in nature.

 

[TickleTheater]

Yep, just as I thought it's bots (called spiders) that crawl through websites to index them for their search engine. I've created a text file that politely tells them to go away on their next sweep. If not, then I'll get down and dirty with manual IP blocking schemes. Silly AOL...

 

[Celtic_Emperor]

Thanks for the heads up.

 

[Hektik1]

....Okay, I see what you mean, I experienced it.

 

[amywood]

Yep, just as I thought it's bots (called spiders)

Along with the bots, I've wondered why some of the pages are so large. This page (before this post was added) is 67k bytes and others can be over 100k yet the actual amount of text is much less. At a 56k modem speed, it would take about 20 seconds to load a 100k page but you almost never are able to run that fast so it takes longer. There seems to be alot of "extra stuff" with each page, not including signature jpegs, avatars, etc.

Thanks for the great fourm.

 

[MistressValerie1]

Interesting observation, Amywood! I have my account set to block sigs, plus I run a banner-ad blocker, yet I find that pages load slower when I'm logged in (sigs gone) than when I'm just browsing the forum as a Guest.

Nevertheless, it seems to be running slightly faster on my last couple of posts since the bots have been eliminated. Still, I have not had any other vB board run as slowly as TT. Typical page load times for me are around 10 seconds at comparable boards.

Thanks TT, and thanks everyone for your input,

 

[TickleTheater]

UPDATE -- August 22nd
Unfortunately due to some currently minor, but potentially troublesome problems with our server we are moving yet again. I know we've done the server dance more than a few times, but it cannot be helped.

The first problem being that we have had someone (for what reason I have no idea...) try to use a hacker script tool to comprise our server, so right there the OS needs to be reloaded again to be on the safe side.

Now recently we've had spambots visit our forum and register a bunch of phony accounts. That problems requires us to implement image verification on our registration forms, but requires a feature called GD which can only be enabled after recompiling PHP itself.

Finally, we can all agree we have had a good share of "lag" browsing the site from time to time. This next server the site is moving to will (with all hopes...) be to a dual xeon processor setup. That would significantly decrease our server load and speed up site browsing quite a bit.

As you can imagine this is becoming quite costly, and if you would like to donate some funds it would definitely be most appreciated. Feel free to PM. :cyclopes:

 

[nessonite1]

What a hassel!! I know I say it a lot but I feel the need once again to thank you for all the hard work you do to keep this forum running. Don't think it is unapreciated! 🙂
Things are looking up for me sort of so hopefully soon I'll be able to make a contribution!