As some maybe have experienced, we have been experiencing a noticeable forum slowdown since November last year. This happens every year as the number of "active" members grows. In the past the best approach was to get lots of memory and fast servers. However we started to realize that hardware alone might not solve the slowdown this time.
Fred and Dave are looking for a better and future proof solution and are working on it.
In the meantime we have some temporary measures to improve the forum speed. Some maybe already noticed some changes. One of these temporarily measures we have to take is to ask our members to avoid creating threads asking for members to post many images on it. We had to unstick them.
Example: Post your best shots, Show us your digital darkroom etc...
I have always found this forum far far slower than any of the others I use, at times it is slightly faster but on the whole it has always been slow since I first joined it. I look forward to improved speed to bring it inline with the other sites I visit as the speed here is the one thing that stops me spending as much time here as I do on others
Id even be willing to pay a yearly membership fee to be a "Site Supporter" in addition to the image upload fee!
Fred deserves to make some money off this to cover the growth... funding a small community is quite different than covering the expenses of one like this.
I belong to christianforums.com and they operate by asking for donations, and also selling a "site supporter" status membership. Works well for them.
(I put this in a separate thread, but I think it is worth repeating here)
Fred and Mods,
We all love your site!
As a data driven website developer I see a couple of improvements that I would make to increase performance.
1) Show more items per page in the forums. Most photo people are using high res monitors, so increase the lines per screen by 50%. This will save you a lot of postbacks. Make'em scroll a bit. This is far better than waiting for the next page. Easy change!!
2) The search page
As currently configured, people are doing full body searches across all forums. Very bad indeed!
a) Default the search to searching the topic, not the body of the messages. Make sure that there is a good index on the topic. This is usually what people want anyway, searching the body gives a lot of irrelevant hits. Another easy change!
b) Default the forum line on the search page to "Please select a forum". I have accidentally searched all forums many times. Nobody really wants to search all forums.
3) Increase the time before an item is archived. Instead of a few days, maybe make it a month. If older photos are taking excessive space, don't archive the thread, but do archive the photo. Replace older photos with a link that requests the photo.
Malcolm Stitt wrote:
1) Show more items per page in the forums. Most photo people are using high res monitors, so increase the lines per screen by 50%. This will save you a lot of postbacks. Make'em scroll a bit. This is far better than waiting for the next page. Easy change!!
Great site----its hard for me to believe that there is not some answer to the problem we are all experiencing. I am sure that most people here would be willing to do whatever is necessary (including paying a fee) to get this site performing up to snuff. I bought several plug-ins----and would make a generous donation too. I just need to know that these major problems are going to be addressed in a timely fashion.
Bob Skorney wrote:
Thats a double edged sword. Yes...it would generate cash, for a hardwear upgrade, but it would also put more of a demand on the servers.
Correct me if Im wrong.
yeah, but the cash could build a much faster environment... figure 1000 people @ $45 is $45000... thats alot of cash to deal with 1000 users posting pics. So the cash would overcome the added burden.
regarding members paying money to help get the site speed improved...
Im all for donating $$, but as I have mentioned before, I would be much more willing to donate (as would others I imagine) if there were a promise of improved site performance.
Step 1 would be to research how much $$ it will take to improve the speed. Lets say it would cost $XX.
So then you start a donation drive, where the goal is to reach $XX. Each day/week you get to see how much closer you are. Once $XX is reached, then the planned upgrades are done.
I have a feeling that with a promise of improved performance, it would not take long to reach the $XX, whatever the amount was.
Having been a member for a year and a half, and seeing site performance steadily decline, I am scared to donate blindly, only to watch performance continue to lag for months and months to come. But if I knew my $$ were going to the specific goal of speeding up the site, I would donate in a heartbeat.
I dont mean to sound unappreciative for all of Fred's hard work (hey, i have even bought a few plugins). I just think people would be much much more willing to donate if there was an actual goal in sight.
I think there is a fundamental problem that happening with the website... I have no idea what it is but its gotten very bad over the last month or so... I buy Fred's software and like the forum because of the lack of ads... Make it fasty again and then ask for donations and I'll help... I don't want a subscription, I run my own server, so I don't need jpg space... At the minute am looking more at robgalbraith.com forum, which is maga fast a loading... But maybe its a sign that I should stop looking at forums so much and get on with photography...
