While pretty much everything posted in the OP is pretty spot on, the act of posting it can alienate people.
The comment about Nigel and roger dominating most of the board isn't entirely fair or accurate. The do have a disproportionately higher post count then others, but it hasn't changed. Not in years. What has happened is there has been a decline in the frequency others would post. If you click on the stats button on the front page you can see that the amount of new posts and the amount of new threads per month has declined steadily for almost a year now.
New people don't stay long, the people who were here have left or cut down on their posting, the simple fact of the matter is we need fresh blood for fresh ideas. In the past we've gotten members from place like MW, COG or the like, but with the recent T2 fiasco, all we've gotten are a couple of braindead bozo's who think they are trolling us.
I've been meaning to get some technology based discussion going because over the last year that is what my focus has been on entirely, I'll see if I can wrangle stuff over the next while.
9. The board loading issues, search functions, etc. This place hangs a dozen times a day, the page load time is outrageous, and half the time it times out. Apparently, this only happens on the American side of the Atlantic, but it's gotten so fucking bad that I - the greatest PD junkie in its history - often leave for a weekend because I get really sick of timeouts and lost responses. There has to be some solution for this...Trip & Faust, I've been asking around, and it's not just me. Also, the search function thing...I know it's fucking bolluxed to hell and gone, but is there any way we can restore it or fix it?
You think we haven't been working on this. TWO Years we have been doing our best to find sources of downtime.
Problem: The site is inherently unstable, prone to lagging or timing out.
Diagnosis: The database is too big to be used on a live forum, specifically the messages column. Certain features place more of a strain on the site then others, some have been identified, many more have not. The site operates optimally with no extra resources being needed when these glitches are not occurring.
Treatment: Any of the features that cause a systemic CRASH of the site such as the search function have been disabled, the feature could be re enabled but any time a person searches the site WILL go down. Over the next couple of weeks I will be watching for these queries and see if they can be modified so that they don't instantly hog all the resources, otherwise they can be disabled.
Quick fix: The problem is the size of the messages table, if we keep throwing large amounts of data overboard all features including search will resume functioning appropriately. The downside is that it means ejecting large segments of data from the forum.
I want to avoid quick fix so I will continue trying to find specific queries that cause these lags. But for the next two weeks I want to see can just the forum function when all other services have been disabled. So if anything doesn't work for the next two weeks such as the WIKI or the like, please don't freak out.