XNALara

Ouch XD

Nah, I've noticed it too Mick, though usually I think it's my ISP. At times I fucking love my internet connection as it's capable of being super fast, but when it degrades, it usually degrades BAD . Also, the fact that my dad likes to download porn and lots of it usually doesn't help very much .

Wait, so thePWA is your dad?

No, but if I had internet access at work like thePWA does, I'd probably be downloading porn too lol.

After reading up, PHPBB 3 is indeed fast. So I don't think it's that.

I've written some custom code, but nothing that should really make the forum run slow since it only runs at registration. It's capable of handling a million members and millions of posts, so I don't think it's that.

I've added only one mod, the chat mod, which is a piece of shit, and it could be a problem, but probably not a major one. I could try disabling it for a few days if you like.

We are using this ArtyBlack style, which makes heavy use of CSS border features that could lag some web browsers but nothing to the extent of 30 seconds.

Yahoo! could be throttling the web site, as before this place hosted an XNALara forum, it was getting probably less than a dozen hits per day. Now, it's probably at 1,000 page loads per day (I'll check later on to see and let you guys know). It's possible a 100 times increase in traffic has probably garnered some attention from Yahoo!

So my conclusion is it's probably something on Yahoo!'s end. In the upcoming months I'll look around different forums to see what webhosts are best for medium-sized forums, and if you guys want, you guys can look too and suggest a new webhost, provided that it's no more than $100 - $200 per year, the going rate for most decent web hosts offering unlimited plans. As long as I can copy the databases over (MySQL 5), all should be good and it shouldn't take more than one day to transfer over all the forum data.

I've worked with phpbb3 boards on free / low cost hosting solutions, and even with low traffic they've had serious performance issues at times. I've never quite investigated as to whether or not it has code / web host, but suspicion has usually been web host.

I've only had performance here take a hit once in a while, but not enough for me to think anything of it.

DNS vote: Personally I wouldn't mind seeing xnalara.org or something to that effect. But I'm cool w/ the choice regardless since the community matters more than the name.

Yeah, it all depends on you guys... if you guys want to remain kind of underground and quiet, we can keep the name. If you guys want to grow the community, it would probably be best to change the name so that the site would rank up on google when you type in "xnalara." I'm fine with either decision, and the poll will come up when the lease is up.

I checked Yahoo!'s page statistics now only to find out it doesn't keep track of PHP pages, only HTML pages. So now I added coded to the main index page to force Yahoo! to track it. In the next few days I'll let you know what kind of traffic we're generating.

EDIT: Pretty funny, back in August before this was an XNALara site there was only less than 20 hits per day. In the 10 minutes I've had the tracking up we've already well surpassed that .

wow. It would be interesting to see what's driving it.


Here's my thoughts from past experiences w/ forum communities. Things can go one of two ways, 1 - things stay small, but eventually get boring due to lack of common interest/over familiarity/etc or 2 - The community gets crushed under the weight of its own popularity from attracting too many interweb personz.

There might be a lot of hidden talent out there that may yet want to be part of the community, but as we all know there is also a lot of shenanigans that don't bring positive attention to the craft. If people are up for driving community it will take some effort on our admin/mods/core members to set the tone regularly, so things don't bottom out.

Just some food for thought.