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.
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.
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.
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.
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.