7 replies to this topic

[A banana in the tailpipe]

In the past few weeks posting on the forums has not only become a chore, but reminds me of the 14.4 BBS days. I'm not sure what is going wrong at PGI but your service is becoming second rate. Please do your best to correct this asap.

[Khan Warlock Kell]

I seem to have big issues with forum lag on the server. ill hit a link, quote, page, and the update can sometimes take several minutes. I don't know if its a server bandwidth issue or just the servers being slow. I have a large fast connection. and it only seems to be an issue with the forums here on a regular basis.

[Jestun]

Niko Snow, on 25 June 2013 - 08:12 PM, said:

What in particular do you feel is too retro?

The connection.

The speed, the reliability, etc.

I'd say it's like the 56k days, but while 56k was slow it was at least reliable.

:edit:

But it comes and goes. It's frequently but it's not consistently bad.

Edited by Jestun, 26 June 2013 - 04:56 AM.

[Bishop Steiner]

I notice, particularly in the evenings (USA time) like post 9pm EST, if you try to log on, or refresh or open a post, it can take minutes, or just go til your browser outright times out. And the same with the little notification or message boxes at the top.

Not sure how hard it can be, or data intensive to send text, but it is very annoying. Also the amount of times you go to post something, hit enter, and NOTHING happens.

I am currently living in Mexico, but was in Ohio, USA for the last year, using top speed cable modems, OVER WHICH i CAN REGULARLY DOWN LOAD WHOLE MOVIES OR ALBUMS IN MINUTES TO SECONDS, yet can't get a bloody forum post to open? So pretty sure it ain't my connection.

[Morang]

Niko Snow, on 25 June 2013 - 08:12 PM, said:

What in particular do you feel is too retro?

Search engine. It's almost nonexistent. We had adequate search engine back in close beta with today's standard option of searching subforums, searching in topic titles or message bodies, searching by author, showing results as topics or as messages ETC. What we have now is a placeholder.

[Jestun]

Morang, on 26 June 2013 - 12:37 PM, said:

Search engine. It's almost nonexistent. We had adequate search engine back in close beta with today's standard option of searching subforums, searching in topic titles or message bodies, searching by author, showing results as topics or as messages ETC. What we have now is a placeholder.

This is true, a better forum search with the option of displaying the results as posts or threads, etc as well as adding other optional criteria like date range, etc would be a welcome update.

[saintchuck]

Search, speed, mobile browsing.

It's been a major gripe forever.

Almost forgot, Dev Tracker.

Not really sure why I'm wasting time though. These have been brought up repeatedly and nothing has been done.

Edited by saintchuck, 27 June 2013 - 12:34 PM.

[jeffsw6]

Which thread is the one for the forum is incredibly slow during some times of the day?

My guess is the database underlying the forum has a scheduled backup sometime at night, and that is why the page loads take several minutes (literally) while at other times of the day, things are pretty snappy.

If the above explanation is correct, and I'm fairly sure it is, they would be better off just changing their backup schedule to once a week instead of once a day. Or learn how to setup a slave database that receives inserts/updates/deletes to maintain a near-real-time backup which could be deployed in the event of failure with even less data loss than a full day of posts.

I doubt this is a very big priority for them, though. If it was, they probably would have already done something about the bad forum performance.