DELETE FORUM GAMES ENTIRELY?!

It's a venting place for things that don't quite need a thread.

surskitty said:

... Relatedly, why is there a Grr thread and a Fwee thread? Isn't that what the entire board is for ...?

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For the little things that aren't really important enough to warrant their own thread, but you still want to bitch about. Or be happy about.

Like stubbing your toe or cutting your finger open or my friend having a fever and me worrying way too much about it. Or making an A on an exam or something.

Maybe my opinion doesn't count much, but I think we should keep the Grr thread. It's easier to vent in that thread; a lot of times I feel like posting an entire new thread isn't really necessary but I still want to talk about something; by posting it in the Grr thread, someone will still read it but it's not creating a huge mass of unimportant threads.

It's probably good to keep it -- if someone makes a new one and links it in my general direction I will sticky -- but I always feel like nobody's actually going to read it in that thread. ... Not that I feel like people tend to read my Coughing/Laughing Cupboard threads in general, but it seems to me like whatever you have to say would be drowned out. I tend to announce the really minor things in #tcod, though, so.

It's definitely one of the threads where if it exists, it'll need to be locked and restarted periodically, though. :/

surskitty said:

but I always feel like nobody's actually going to read it in that thread. ... Not that I feel like people tend to read my Coughing/Laughing Cupboard threads in general, but it seems to me like whatever you have to say would be drowned out.

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I read a lot of the posts in the Grr thread but I don't often respond to them; I know for me at least, I like to get my feelings out there but then I don't mind if they fade back into the thread because the things that I post there are usually not too important or something I really need advice for. I use it to rant, I guess, and to know that I'm not the only one that is having some kind of trouble with something. I make a new thread if I need someone to hear me a little more clearly.

The grr thread is essential. I personally look through every single post, and then wish good things upon the people who have posted there. Though I actually don't post in it much, I think that it's really important for people to be able to just state their small problems without having to make an oversized thread about it.

The fwee thread is the same way. Honestly, most people fwee about things that aren't big enough to go in a thread.

It also occurs to me that some threads in ASB (and possibly the Safari Zone? I don't know, I keep that one hidden), like banks and whatnot, also tend to hit massive sizes after a while. If Negrek doesn't see this on her own, I will probably also suggest that she consider locking/restarting those as well.

Only one SZ thread has gone over 1k posts, as far as I know, and I already locked it.

Given that registration and bank posts in ASB tend to actually be viewed again later ... it might be a good idea to split them every 1k posts.

Cloudsong said:

What about all of those bajillions of threads that are locked/dead in the forums games section?

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But this isn't the problem, those threads don't get read, do they? the forum has to send massive queries to the server when really large threads are read which makes the forum slow down, give us errors, and so on. if you go to the last page in a thread, the forum has to go through all the pages before it to skip to the last one (I think). Understandably, this gets to be really hard when there's a couple thousand replies to go through.

Dead or locked threads don't really do anything; they're not growing and they're not read frequently. But there'd be no harm in getting rid of old, locked threads that nobody reads anyway.

it'd be really great if we could have hack that just deletes the first pages of a thread as it grows - really, you don't need to know instructions to most of the forum games and they're nothing you couldn't intuit from reading a few posts anyway, so the first post really isn't necessary (or if it was, you could set it to leave the first post, and then delete everything up to like two pages before the last post). Nobody reads the old posts anyway. :/

And I don't just spam there for post count, either.

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this is probably not the best thing to say! you shouldn't post there for post count at all.

Deleting the first post of a thread deletes the entire thread under normal circumstances anyway, so afaik that's not an option if the idea is to keep the original thread intact.

Is it really that much extra work just to lock the threads manually? It's not like threads will be hitting the thousand-post mark every few days or anything, and if they're not doing any harm as long as they aren't being loaded repeatedly...

Kratos Aurion said:

It also occurs to me that some threads in ASB (and possibly the Safari Zone? I don't know, I keep that one hidden), like banks and whatnot, also tend to hit massive sizes after a while. If Negrek doesn't see this on her own, I will probably also suggest that she consider locking/restarting those as well.

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Bahhhh they were going to be locked and restarted soon anyway (God help me) so now we'll just have little temporary ones around in the interim, I guess. Suppose this is the last time I'll have to do it since it should take years for them to get back up to their current post levels, but my sense of aesthetics is twitching.

It seems kind of weird that we'd be getting such load problems for such (relatively) small threads... I mean, vBulletin is made to scale to *way* larger forum sizes than this, and large forums can easily accumulate threads with thousands of posts. Presumably the software should be able to handle this when run on a server with decent resources.

I mean, the whole idea of the move to Eevee's HQ was that we were having serious trouble with 500 errors and the old server wasn't big enough to support us, right? But it's been less than a year, the board's barely grown in that time, and we're having the same problems, as bad as they ever were. (I think. It's a bit hard to remember. Perhaps it was a bit worse.) I'm not against trying to cut down on long threads or anything, but to what extent is that going to help us in the long run? If there's some sort of internal issue that's causing the problem (I think the consensus is yes?) I don't know how long we can keep running from it by turning off the "people who've viewed this thread" and trying to cut down on long threads. (Indeed, I thought the last time we had this server error brouhaha it was determined that long threads don't actually matter as far as preventing server errors go.)

Alternatively, is the hosting that Eevee's HQ is giving us just *not that much better* than what the old IIS server could provide? That would explain things, obviously, but again I thought the idea of the move was to get us somewhere where we'd have more room to expand.

Negrek said:

Bahhhh they were going to be locked and restarted soon anyway (God help me) so now we'll just have little temporary ones around in the interim, I guess. Suppose this is the last time I'll have to do it since it should take years for them to get back up to their current post levels, but my sense of aesthetics is twitching.

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Merge the interim threads with the old ones when you don't need them any more? :P

No, the whole point is that the rules for those threads are going to change entirely, so it would be kind of weird to have stuff from the previous set mixed in there. Only reason I was planning to lock them in the first place.

Edit: Not that it would be such a heinous thing since you'll still get some of the same kind of posts, but it offends my aesthetic sensibilities. Offends.

I was under the impression that any "interim" threads would be exactly the same as the current ones, only without mile-high postcounts, but okay...?

Kratos Aurion said:

I was under the impression that any "interim" threads would be exactly the same as the current ones, only without mile-high postcounts, but okay...?

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Right, they will be. The ones that replace them won't.

Neither here nor there, though. Mostly I was just wondering (and ranting a little, oops) about whether we're going to keep having the same problem with errors whether we shove long threads under the rug or not.

Games forums are always dead zones of absolute crap, so I'd be in favour of deleting them wherever they arise. I didn't even create one for SomeComm and I've been pushing for GovTeen's to go away.