Site slowness & Shoutbox
 

You may have noticed the site has been a bit slow lately. We're looking into it.

You may have also noticed that the shoutbox is missing as of right now. That's part of us looking into it. We're experimenting.

Thanks for your patience and understanding.

There's no rule saying the shoutbox has to return, is there?

Also might want to look into regulating the size of the photos in the threads. I was on a "similar" site to this one a while back and it was one of the problems they had - when a bunch of people were looking at the same threads at the same time and waiting for the pics to load and they were all different sizes, some being exceptionally large files. Regulated the pics to a site wide standard that was considerably smaller than what had been generally posted and the issue resolved itself.

Not that anyone asked me...

Thanks for the input. There are filesize limitations for attachments. If the photo is hosted on another site it doesn't make a difference.

Also, this problem has to do with CPU load as opposed to bandwidth.

I miss the shoutbox =(

/me echoes the question...

/me echoes the sentiment

Cmon phil, you're a jedi knight & a shaman on the shoutbox. You wouldn't want to give that up would you???

Folks, we have a perfectly good chat feature that does the exact same thing as the shoutbox. Let any staff member know if you need help accessing it in one of the several ways that have been made available, and there's a handy how-to here:

TFP Chat instructions and rules

Can't chat at work, heh. (During lunch breaks, of course!)

I like the shoutbox, however if it's pulling the site down, I guess I can give it up.

Does the java chat function (top nav bar of the menu) cause problems at work?

Well as it just took about 20 seconds for this page to load....I don't think the shoutbox was a primary culprit. It was quite fun while it lasted, and its unfortunate that it was removed...Oh well...evolution at work.

site seems alot faster for me today.. even on a laggy connection..

Then I stand corrected.

Didn't have a problem with it loading slower; I have DSL, which we acquired two months ago after years of cable and no discernable difference. I had noticed that sometimes saying something in the shoutbox took a while to get there.
It's a nice little feature-I don't chat any more-but if it's a thing of the past, then that's ok too for me, not for those that can't get chat at work. (then again, shouldn't y'all be working? ;))

I have Comcast cable and this site has been loading slower than a turtle stampede through peanut butter for me for the past two weeks. Opening threads would take at least 20 seconds.

We've got some short term fixes in mind, but we're still looking into long term solutions.

Heh, I didn't even notice the shoutbox was gone until I saw this thread...

likewise

the chat feature is useless to me at work

I never notice when things are moving slowly...


I'm wither hungover or drunk so things are always moving slowly.

But I like the Shoutbox.

Its like a FWB or something.

I come to the site, put my wang in the box, look at some threads, type some stupid "WEREWOLVES, ZOMBIES, ___" crap.

(sigh)

But WHAT KIND of peanut butter?

You've done this before, haven't you?

Yes, there is. You just don't know it.

YAY! The only box I get is Shoutbox.

I don't want to threadjack any worse than has already been done, but I feel the need to state my opinion that this is not entirely true. The shoutbox and IRC chat are two very different animals; the shoutbox, in particular, has a certain spontaneity that chat lacks, which is something that I like particularly.

I'm certainly more of a chat fan, but the Shoutbox has enabled some people to have an outlet. It's like blaming society's ills on a technology. Sometimes it's not about whether a technology should exist - it just does. People don't always decide on using the Shoutbox over IRC, they just do, and continue to. If it doesn't come back, then these folks won't have that outlet.

Not that I'm suggesting it was removed for any reason other than a system glitch.

You know, I never have been able to get the 'chat' to work. And I've tried no less than a hundred times.

Well, that's strange because it took me about 37 seconds...

Whenever I try it says "Can't connect to server" >.>

One reason why I dislike vBulletin is that even templates are stored in the database, so even loading a practically static page results in DB queries. If you are on a shared-hosting system, it's that much more stress on the server. In my experience, the majority of slow-downs with dynamic websites is a result of too many or too-intensive DB queries. Try throwing some microtime log statements around in the scripts and see what is returning slowly -- I bet it is database related.

Are you using the chat link across the tool bar at the top of the page or are you using something like xchat or mIRC?