Author Topic: The end of this board  (Read 35694 times)

Threesixty

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« Reply #25 on: 2001-09-15 07:30:00 »
Yeah...there are several boards here...but the same people post in all of them. (Actually I liked it better when there was only one) And what...there are maybe 15 new posts a day. But, Who knows how many people just read through.

[This message has been edited by Threesixty (edited September 15, 2001).]


eerrrr

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« Reply #26 on: 2001-09-15 13:28:00 »
Well TheDragonmaster's option sounds great to me. If we could host another UBB/phpBB/vBulletin on their server it would be cool. Plus all we'd have to do is register at their board (I'm already a regular member there anyway). You could put a section on the Terms and Conditions before someone presses 'Agree' when they register telling them they must register on the NextFF board too.

dagsverre

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« Reply #27 on: 2001-09-15 13:55:00 »
Actually I'd go with the other option. Putting a "Hosted by NextFF" banner at the bottom is simply common decency anyway. Though of course I'm not against registering at NextFF if more people go with that...

The SaiNt

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« Reply #28 on: 2001-09-15 14:04:00 »
I hope Qhimm doesn't kill me for this.   :)
Actually, I've discussed the option of using a php board rather than a cgi based board. Being the "poor" people we are, we came to a conclusion that phpBB is a good idea. Anyway, Qhimm was just waiting for 3Dstream to upgrade to the latest version of php.
 
Quote
Originally posted by ficedula
(BTW, SaiNt, that's not a criticism as such ... it's not YOUR fault people use large pictures for their sigs and avatars. Lots of good boards have just the same problem).
It's my fault really. I haven't imposed any form of rules yet. I can actually force sig & avatar sizes to be within a certain size   :)
Assuming that Qhimm converts this whole board to a php based board with the exact same features, you will notice that his board will "work" a whole lot faster. Why? Cause php generates pages a whole lot faster than cgi does. When phpBB2 comes out all of you can rejoice cause it supports gzip handling. That means it actually compresses all messages and decompresses them on request, so all you d/l is the compressed
text.   :wink: Just how much smaller are php based boards I hear you say? A lot smaller. The current backup of nextff's forums(a few days ago) information (this includes,usernames,posts,settings, etc) is only 299k.
With gzip enabled in version 2.0, the whole
database would only be 74.3k   :)
Easy for backup's eh?

eerrrr : I think you got TheDragonmaster(Alex) wrong, he meant that he is willing to provide us 2 options. The first option being a merger with nextff.net's forums, therefore requiring everyone to register there. The second option is to set up a whole new board there but with a basic requirement of including a banner at the bottom of the forum pages. As for that problem, I'll try to get TheDragonmaster(Alex) to not make a banner too large   :)

Just so all of you know, it is possible to merge the nextff forums database with the forums here. That way, one registration applies to both areas. And since each forum can have it's own themes, we have the option again like Russ [3dStream]'s idea. I wouldn't recommend it though cause if either Qhimm or I mess up while updating the database, everything will be lost.

Anyway, I've sent Qhimm the details for nextff.net & I'll discuss it with him for a while. He's not around at the moment, he'll be back this coming Monday. (Qhimm's really gonna kill me for saying so much) So, if the board here does get switched of for a while, you guys can come to forums.nextff.net and seek refuge for a while, until Qhimm gets things fixed. Don't worry, I'll open up a private forum for the Remake people  :)

[This message has been edited by The SaiNt (edited September 15, 2001).]


ficedula

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« Reply #29 on: 2001-09-15 14:49:00 »
 
Quote
As for that problem, I'll try to get TheDragonmaster(Alex) to not make a banner too large

That's not a problem. If its the same banner on each page then you've already got it in your browser cache (hopefully) ... it's when you have 200+ plus members, most of whom have sigs with images in them plus avatars ... *that* is slow.

Incidentally, I haven't noticed php based boards being any faster for me because of the overhead in getting the page from a server that's not particularly local anyway...I'm sure you're right and they are quicker, but I at least haven't noticed it.

The backup size thingummy is a big advantage tho.


Alhexx

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« Reply #30 on: 2001-09-15 15:12:00 »
As for cgi- or php-boards: I've got no idea 'bout this.

But Fice's right with the banner thingy. I don't like these pictures used in signatures. I think using an avatar is a quite fine thing, but I don't think that everybody has got to post a HUGE pic in every of his post.
On some boards over 50% of a topic are pix. That looks kinda 'strange' when someone posts three words and a huge signature pic.

As for the avatars: I think I like this board w/o avatars - it's one of those things that make this board 'personal'

- Alhexx

- edit -
(Why the heck have I posted 2 ' - Alhexx's  :-? )

[This message has been edited by Alhexx (edited September 15, 2001).]


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« Reply #31 on: 2001-09-15 21:15:00 »
Reznor007: Unfortunately, that probaby won't help us out much. YABB is also CGI.

Threesixty: Was there ever only one? I remember learning that there was a board or two before UBB, but when I first showed up, I *think* there were 2 or 3 forums here. General and Triple Triad Gold, or something like that.

dagsverre: I agree. If we're going to take up his offer, let's go with the second option.

The SaiNt: Incidentally, just how reliable is NextFF's host, anyway? A whois shows the host is  http://www.directnic.com" TARGET=_blank>DirectNIC

Their hosting plan (even the pay hosting) doesn't look particularly great for hosting something as *potentially* high traffic as this. Only 2 GB of bandwidth a month. If you've got the pay hosting plan, additional GBs transfer can be purchased for $6 each. Doesn't sound like much of a steal to me. I guess my real concern is whether we'll get all setup at NextFF and then suddenly disappear when bandwidth is exceeded.

ficedula: Yeah, that's the major problem. I suppose we *could* do as the  http://pub13.ezboard.com/bthesafehouse" TARGET=_blank>The Safehouse .
Here's their  http://www.thesafehouse.org/pages/shforum.htm" TARGET=_blank>rules

Not all of their rules apply, but the sigs/personal pic (avatars) rules are worth copying. They're quite possibly one of the biggest game forums (EverQuest) in existence. 20,000+ members, and the mods are awesome at what they do.

Quote
Signature rules:

-One of the great things about the Safehouse is all the GREAT sigs. But with all the sigs, threads can get bogged down, take forever to load and look really cluttered. We ask that you adhere to these guidelines:

--Sig MUST be under 15kb in size - this includes Flash, animated gifs, etc.
--Image dimensions should not exceed the standard ad bannersize.
--Images that distort the format of the forums (mainly personalicons) are not allowed.
--Only post your custom signature ONCE per thread. Simply uncheck the "Include custom signature" box when posting more than once in a thread.
--Personal photos MUST be under 15kb if no sig pic is used. If sig pic is used, the combined size of both pics must be no greater than 15kb in size.
--Don't post "test sigs", use the "Preview" checkbox to see how it looks.

It works pretty well. A lot of idiots come in with huge sigs with links to their boards and post something along the lines of "CUM 2 MY BOrD!11!", and the mods always just edit out whatever, say, "Your sig is too large. Combined sig+personal sig size must be smaller than 15KB. Please read the forum rules. Advertising is not allowed. Welcome to the Safehouse."
Then they post back with the same sig and whatever other rule breaking stuff they have, "GEZ WEL HOW WA SI GONa KNOw tHAt?", and again and the mods always just edit out whatever, say, "Your sig is still too large. Please only post sigs once per thread. Combined sig+personal sig size must be smaller than 15KB. Please read the forum rules. Thanks!"
The problem is that it usually goes on for another few posts before the hapless AOLer gets himself banned. They're very lenient about punishing minor offenses (even regulars forget about the sig once per post rule once in a while), but a lot of the lamers still manage to get themselves banned pretty quick. Hmm, I wonder what would happen if Joey went there.  :wink: How about it Joey? Maybe they'd treat you better than us.  :)

Anyway, the only problem is that it's a lot of work for the mods, checking sig+avatar sizes, editing posts but always sounding cheerful, and so forth.

Alhexx: I agree. Not having Avatars is part of the personality of this place.


Anyway, I rest my case. How would I ever be able to write anything this long if everyone had a sig+personal pic?  :D


The SaiNt

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« Reply #32 on: 2001-09-15 23:56:00 »
 
Quote
Originally posted by dagsverre
Actually I'd go with the other option. Putting a "Hosted by NextFF" banner at the bottom is simply common decency anyway. Though of course I'm not against registering at NextFF if more people go with that...
Must have missed your post earlier. I think you posted only minutes before me.
About your comment, agreed.

Quote
Originally posted by ficedula
That's not a problem. If its the same banner on each page then you've already got it in your browser cache (hopefully) ... it's when you have 200+ plus members, most of whom have sigs with images in them plus avatars ... *that* is slow.
True, it's most probably in your cache anyway. Anyway, we're forgetting something. The only reason this site isn't slow is cause Qhimm disabled next to everything on this board. He even disabled the usage of html, and we're stuck with with plain bbcode. Not that we need all the extra formatting stuff, but it really does hinder us occasionally. Avatars are rarely a problem since they are usually 64x64 or 60x60 unless some idiot linked his avatar to a 1MB image that got resized to 60x60. As for sigs, well yeah,  it tends to be a problem when you have people posting one-liners and having the biggest sigs in the world.
 
Quote
Originally posted by ficedula
Incidentally, I haven't noticed php based boards being any faster for me because of the overhead in getting the page from a server that's not particularly local anyway...I'm sure you're right and they are quicker, but I at least haven't noticed it.
:)
Do you really want to know why?
Let's get down to how things work since I'm pretty sure you'll understand.
Firstly, lets face the fact, no matter how fast php is, it isn't any faster than loading a pre-formatted html page.
That's cause with php you'll have to wait for the server to parse the data before providing output.
See, those second counts at the boards of nextff.net?
Those are the parsing times, not the loading times obviously.
Php is fast, so you will rarely see any parsing time that takes more than a second unless you have a really huge page.
As for why you don't see a difference compared to here (well, UBB in general) is because UBB stores everything as HTML pages, thus increasing the usage of storage space.
Ever notice that in all the old threads, your rank is still the old one though you know you're not that rank anymore?
That's because of the way UBB works.
As a side note, UBB stores the posts in the board in 2 files, one as a .CGI file and another as a .HTML file.
Everytime someone makes a post, the information is written to the .CGI file , it is parsed & converted into a HTML file.
Therefore, everytime you view the threads on a UBB board, you're actually just viewing a plain html file of the server.
This method is a pretty good method since it makes up for all the slow processing time that CGI makes.
So, what's the difference I here you say? Wouldn't a php board be slower since it actually parses every file even when I view it?
True, phpBB files take a "slightly" longer time to display compared to UBB since they have to parse the files first, but this is barely noticable because the parse time is rarely more than 0.5 seconds. It's usually about 0.19 seconds or something.
The big difference comes here. I'm pretty sure people like Srethron will notice this.  :)
The part that php boards really excel in is the parsing of data, for example, making posts & editing posts.
Try and make posts as long as Srethron's and you'll notice that you'll have to break it up a lot or all you're gonna get are timeouts.
Using php, all the information is written to the mySQL database directly, so what is sent is recieved directly. When you try to view the page, the information is pulled from the database and parsed on the fly.
With the above information, you can see that php based boards only show speed improvements when doing anything else that isn't viewing a preformatted html file. Nothing can beat that.
 
Quote
Originally posted by Srethron Askvelhtnod
Incidentally, just how reliable is NextFF's host, anyway? A whois shows the host is DirectNIC
Which did you check? nextff.net or nextff.com?
I'm not sure about nextff.com since I know it isn't on the main admin panel I go to. It's hosted somewhere else, so it could be where you say it is, DirectNIC. AFAIK, nextff.com is only a domain forwarder.
nextff.net is hosted by liquidweb.com and I've known them to be pretty reliable.
As for how much bandwidth we have, we have 30GB's of transfer a month available to the whole site.
I doubt you guys can generate enough traffic to kill even 2GB's / month using a php based board.
The current nextff.net board only generates traffic in MB's  :)
The stuff that will really kill the server are the main hosting of nextff's website which is loaded with graphics.
 
Quote
Originally posted by Srethron Askvelhtnod
Signature rules:
-One of the great things about the Safehouse is all the GREAT sigs. But with all the sigs, threads can get bogged down, take forever to load and look really cluttered. We ask that you adhere to these guidelines:

--Sig MUST be under 15kb in size - this includes Flash, animated gifs, etc.
--Image dimensions should not exceed the standard ad bannersize.
--Images that distort the format of the forums (mainly personalicons) are not allowed.
--Only post your custom signature ONCE per thread. Simply uncheck the "Include custom signature" box when posting more than once in a thread.
--Personal photos MUST be under 15kb if no sig pic is used. If sig pic is used, the combined size of both pics must be no greater than 15kb in size.
--Don't post "test sigs", use the "Preview" checkbox to see how it looks.

Most of these problems can be avoided by just disabling sigs. Even better, you can even make an option for the user that says "display sigs" on/off?
In case you might be interested, php can in fact check the filesizes of JPG's, GIF's & PNG's (Yeah, PNG's rule!). Not only that, php can actually overlay graphic files with other stuff. In other words, let's say you have a picture of a button. Php can write text, or draw shapes onto the picture on the fly before displaying it. What's more, php actually has "C" like abilities to use fread / fwrite functions to modify data files before displaying them. Cool, eh? I thought so too when I read through the php manual a fortnight ago.

One thing I found out about php based boards however is that since changes sort of take affect immediately everywhere, making a small mistake in the coding could get you errors all over the place. It works like shared functions / classes. Since everything is so fast, you can actually wipe out the whole SQL database pretty fast without even knowing it.  :) That's why I keep backups often, just in case I make some super huge mistake.


ficedula

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« Reply #33 on: 2001-09-16 00:09:00 »
You're right SaiNt - disabling sigs is the simplest option. Whichever option we end up with, a no sig board is pretty important ... Even with 15KB sigs, 20 people (happens on larger threads) generates 300KB of traffic which is over a minute of downloading on a modem .... plus it makes everything look so damn untidy!

I'm not *so* bothered about avatars because they are usually tiny and they don't affect formatting at all, but I'm happy enough with Qhimm's current settings of no image sigs or avatars.

So, erm, what are we going to do then? If I'm reading this correctly, both nextff and RPGRealms? are offering to give us a semi-separate message board ... it'd be part of their boards but maintained and run by Qhimm & his loyal cohorts of mods and admins  :wink: If either will let us set up the display (and did I mention no sigs?) then I can't say I've got much preference...


eerrrr

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« Reply #34 on: 2001-09-16 00:12:00 »
Yeah I guess you guys are right there. I got my facts mixed up too  :P. Putting a NextFF banner on the board would be cool, plus the guy who does the art is very good at Photoshop, so the banner would probably look really cool. So maybe he could make a banner which would match the theme of Qhimm's board (I dont think he's made a proper banner yet).


 

Quote
How would I ever be able to write anything this long if everyone had a sig+personal pic?

How can you write posts that long in the first place?  :-?


The SaiNt

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« Reply #35 on: 2001-09-16 01:00:00 »
Eh?
From what I've read above and what Qhimm has explained to me, is that rpgboards.com is gonna make us a subboard, so we exists like a catagory at rpgboards.com's boards.

Nextff however is offering Qhimm to be able to build the board himself. Nextff is basically providing him the space and Qhimm does the rest.

Although rpgboards.com's offer is more or less the same, there is one significant difference. Hosting with rpgboards.com, Qhimm does not get access to modify the main forum files, since "his" board will be a subsidary of the main board, making rpgboards.com's offer a level lower down a heirachial chart.

Correct me if I'm wrong though.  :wink:


leej32

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« Reply #36 on: 2001-09-16 05:22:00 »
I love Qhimm's site and I'd love to help you guys with the message board problem.
I can offer you a subdomain and some space at Loquarium.com. You can either move this board there or use a new board like phpBB (I can give you a MySQL database too).

The catch is that you need to put my pop-up sponsor at least once per browser session (we do pay money for the server ya know). The other thing is we have 15G bandwidth a month for the whole site, but I doubt a board is gonna take up much.

[This message has been edited by leej32 (edited September 16, 2001).]


halkun

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« Reply #37 on: 2001-09-16 05:45:00 »
I can live with popups. I'm going to be using mozilla soon and I can disable java's openwindow and filter the IPs

Caddberry

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« Reply #38 on: 2001-09-16 10:43:00 »
I will leave it up to you guys to figure out what the board is going to do.. i will really miss this board if it just goes away.. I am already registered at Nextffz board it seemed a cool place to go and register even if i am a silent observer but i doubt that will happen.. i like the way this board is.. its quick.. easy.. small.. and there are not alot of idiots running around.. *cough joey cough* LoL he he he

Sephiroth 3D

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« Reply #39 on: 2001-09-16 12:27:00 »
 
Quote
Originally Posted by Srethron Askvelhtnod
2) I don't think we have a signature feature (if there is, it's very obscure, as only Sephiroth 3D seems to use one, and even his *doesn't* have pictures)

Actually, we DO have the option for a sig, but Qhimm currently has it disabled. I keep mine in a txt file and paste it onto the end of all my messages. As for having no image: You're right. It's a load-time thing.

Sephiroth 3D

"One who seeks knowledge from another person, doesn't learn half as much as the one who seeks knowledge for himself." - Vincent Valentine, The Sephiroth Chronicals, Book 1: Resurrection

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Joey

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« Reply #40 on: 2001-09-17 05:17:00 »
Umm, let's disable some taxing features in the board and make a comparison with  http://www.gamingforce.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=4180" TARGET=_blank>this one . You'll realise something.........

Joey

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« Reply #41 on: 2001-09-17 10:32:00 »
If you're sad, try doing this with your mom's acessories. The skirt is actually a bathing cap. Just to cheer things up!!
 
http://achieve.utoronto.ca/tortoise/shinchan/ASHBALR1.GIF" border=0>

Qhimm

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« Reply #42 on: 2001-09-17 17:46:00 »
From my point of view, the banner solution through NextFF sounds good. One thing though, what kind of banner are we talking about? A banner for NextFF (I'll gladly put one in there, or make one myself to fit the new design - if their webmaster approves), or a commercial ad banner? Not too fond of those. Also, the banner size is important, if nothing else for me to adapt the design to accomodate it smoothly.

Anyway, things will work out nicely. This board will *not* go down until the new one is set up properly.


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« Reply #43 on: 2001-09-17 17:52:00 »
Glad to hear it, Qhimm!

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« Reply #44 on: 2001-09-17 22:45:00 »
All hail our fearless leader Qhimm!!! YaY

Anonymous

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« Reply #45 on: 2001-09-18 06:16:00 »
hey qhimm, are you going to transfer the threads?

Sephiroth 3D

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« Reply #46 on: 2001-09-18 10:22:00 »
Here's my question:

Is NextFF ready for the additional 240-odd members? They currently have only 44 members. That's a lot of signups, and a lot of people going to their sites to read these forums.

Sephiroth 3D

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The SaiNt

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« Reply #47 on: 2001-09-18 11:12:00 »
No problem, besides, we're allocating another board for Qhimm. Qhimm should be working on the new boards at the moment. He'll just convert everything over to this new board I think.

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« Reply #48 on: 2001-09-18 22:09:00 »
About transferring the member list: It depends, a lot of the members here are completely inactive, not a single post by them has been made. If I can, I'll probably only transfer those with, say, 10+ posts. Sound okay to everyone?

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« Reply #49 on: 2001-09-19 00:00:00 »
*Checks post count*

Yeah, sounds good to me!  How many active posters are there roughly?  75 or so (if that many?)