What's with all those server errors lately?

[sgc_meltdown]

perhaps the fee would be to post in GD

I'm sure those pure blooded gentlemen have financial resources commensurate with their genetic superiority

 

[SuicideBunny]

oh fuck, yes. make people pay to use gd.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Question to DU:

If shit really hits the fan, you'll actually keep visitors from viewing this site rather than start fucking over the actual members, right?

Right?

 

[Jaesun]

Why does GD bother you so much SuicideBunny?

 

[SuicideBunny]

because it continuously spills over to the other boards and generally contributes to the decline of the whole site by cultivating certain retarded forms of behavior.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

Visitors doubling every six months? Really? I could understand that spike prior to the DA2 release but this shit is consistent? Are people really getting fed up with the decline, or what?

It's been consistent up until the errors starting getting prominent - at which point it plateaued and dropped a bit. Before then visitors have been increasing at about 40k per month. EG: Mar 2010 hit a max of 300k and we hit 600k in Mar 2011. Back in 09 figures are around 150k a month. So every 6 - 12 months there's been a doubling, usually hitting some kind of extreme max at some point, dropping back a bit, then building up so that extreme point becomes the norm and so it repeats.

If I assume the recent drop is due to the issues and that correcting them will result in more people hitting the server, I think I can assume we'll hit the 1M visitors a month mark not too long after things get back to working again (especially with the improvements and better forums).

Yeah, I just figured the DA2 spike would just finally fade away and we would be back to normal, visitor wise.

Except the DA2 spike has come after the Oblivion spike, which came after... some other spike before that. And each spike is getting substantially bigger.

Something Awful path of paid accounts.

It's your forum, if you want to kill it, it's your choice.

A lot of people complain about this but in the end, if given a choice between keeping the place online vs taking it offline, I'll choose to keep it online. Besides, any drop in users would help the server.

... And I figure we'd only lose the people who weren't really interested anyway as most would be grand-fathered in. I accept it would also change the nature of the forums because it'd make it a whole lot easier to actually ban all the retards and keep them out once and for all. The Codex could finally be a truly prestigious place.

But still, we're a long way off from that. Upgrade --> Experience More Problems --> Fund-Raisers Fail to Raise Enough --> Alternative Funding Methods.

 

[Haba]

I wonder why none of the bigger forums I frequent have fund raisers. Probably funded by international terrorism or something...

 

[made]

perhaps the fee would be to post in GD

I'm sure those pure blooded gentlemen have financial resources commensurate with their genetic superiority

You'd think that would be the sensible solution, but nooooo, we don't want to alienate our valuable GD-only posters.

You could even stagger the fees for maximum profit:

-Rage against niggers/spics/chinks - that will be 10 bux
-Deny the holocaust - that's another 10 bux for you
-Blog about your transformation from male->female/female->male/human->furry - fork over another 10

The possibilities are limitless.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Which forum software will take phpbb2's place?

Isn't the problem ultimately just that repeated MySQL queries on big databases are very intensive for servers? if so no matter the software used, the problem will remain.

Maybe a possibility would be to put older threads as a separate browsable archive so as to reduce strain.

 

[Haba]

Which forum software will take phpbb2's place?

Isn't the problem ultimately just that repeated MySQL queries on big databases are very intensive for servers? if so no matter the software used, the problem will remain.

Maybe a possibility would be to put older threads as a separate browsable archive so as to reduce strain.

RPGCodex

Our users have posted a total of 1,783,002 articles
We have 9,066 registered users

Forum X

Threads: 284,648
Posts: 2,320,394
Members: 660,939

There are currently 2921 users online. 900 members and 2021 guests.

Powered by vBulletin.

Search took 0.02 seconds.

Forum Y

Posts: 5,892,413
Users online: 3434 (977 members and 2457 guests).

Powered by vBulletin.

Search took 0.03 seconds.

I'm starting to see a pattern here...

 

[SuicideBunny]

perhaps the fee would be to post in GD

I'm sure those pure blooded gentlemen have financial resources commensurate with their genetic superiority

You'd think that would be the sensible solution, but nooooo, we don't want to alienate our valuable GD-only posters.

You could even stagger the fees for maximum profit:

-Rage against niggers/spics/chinks - that will be 10 bux
-Deny the holocaust - that's another 10 bux for you
-Blog about your transformation from male->female/female->male/human->furry - fork over another 10

The possibilities are limitless.

better:
charge a cumulative 0.01$ each gd post and a flat 3$ fee for registration.
only transfer patron accounts and delete all others upon transition, but announce it well in advance so people have enough time to cough up the dough.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Which forum software will take phpbb2's place?

Isn't the problem ultimately just that repeated MySQL queries on big databases are very intensive for servers? if so no matter the software used, the problem will remain.

Maybe a possibility would be to put older threads as a separate browsable archive so as to reduce strain.

RPGCodex

Our users have posted a total of 1,783,002 articles
We have 9,066 registered users

Forum X

Threads: 284,648
Posts: 2,320,394
Members: 660,939

There are currently 2921 users online. 900 members and 2021 guests.

Powered by vBulletin.

Search took 0.02 seconds.

Forum Y

Posts: 5,892,413
Users online: 3434 (977 members and 2457 guests).

Powered by vBulletin.

Search took 0.03 seconds.

I'm starting to see a pattern here...

Probably because these other sites benefit from dedicated hosting, and have more money to afford better servers and more bandwith.

 

[Taluntain]

I wonder why none of the bigger forums I frequent have fund raisers. Probably funded by international terrorism or something...

Because they probably have a) advertising that pays well, b) an audience that doesn't block all ads and c) actually clicks on them every now and then. No such luck here.

Incidentally, the search is much faster on the vB's on this box too. phpBB2 is just passe in every possible way. The new kids on the block are coming up with much better search solutions and we're looking into that.

 

[Phelot]

I just got guilted into clicking on an ad.

 

[SoupNazi]

I really don't think it's that. The Codex is a bunch of assholes, but I'm willing to bet that they click as much (or to word it better, as little) as any other forum member. Same with blocking the ads. Hell, I would say the Codex is pretty lucky when it comes to the members willing to say, raise over 700USD on a whim.

Isn't it more like you can't get the advertising that can actually pay for a site on here because of all the explicit content?

 

[Andhaira]

Here are the options for keeping the shit running:

-Start taking donations like the Wikipedia guy. Those who are obviously rich, like Crispy who recently bought a big truck, should be forced to donate or be banned.

-Take bribes from prestigious devs in order to write positive reviews of their crap.

-Write fanfic on beloved games and charge a premium for them.

 

[felipepepe]

Go for a solution, like Demonoid: Registrations are CLOSED.

Or at least make the foruns only available to registered users, no more stalkers. We always have like 200 guests all the time...

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

I wonder why none of the bigger forums I frequent have fund raisers. Probably funded by international terrorism or something...

Because they probably have a) advertising that pays well, b) an audience that doesn't block all ads and c) actually clicks on them every now and then. No such luck here.

Incidentally, the search is much faster on the vB's on this box too. phpBB2 is just passe in every possible way. The new kids on the block are coming up with much better search solutions and we're looking into that.

I seem to recall DU posting awhile ago about how very few reputable companies want to put their ads on a site as, um, unique, as the Codex.

So if the migration to phpbb3 is successful, will it be comparable to vBulletin or is vB just better? And I'm going to go ahead and guess if the phpbb3 migration fails, a vB migration or something is even less likely... Is there an option to do a clean break and put the phpbb2 Codex into read only mode or something and start fresh with new software, manually bringing over a few threads and forums?

 

[Taluntain]

I really don't think it's that. The Codex is a bunch of assholes, but I'm willing to bet that they click as much (or to word it better, as little) as any other forum member. Same with blocking the ads. Hell, I would say the Codex is pretty lucky when it comes to the members willing to say, raise over 700USD on a whim.

Isn't it more like you can't get the advertising that can actually pay for a site on here because of all the explicit content?

Actually, no, no they don't... independent gaming content is notoriously hard to monetize as it is, but the Codex members click on ads several times less often than members of say my own site. In the range of 100 clicks per 100.000 ad views. No, I'm not kidding. Some of it is due to the demographics, but I'm pretty sure that a large chunk of lost ad revenue is directly due to ad blocking. I mean, pretty much every time the subject of ads comes up, a bunch of members start advertising AdBlock. I can't find the numbers now (there was a recent survey), but the number of people using it is staggering. The aggressive way in which it's being pushed and recommended even by Mozilla makes it nearly impossible NOT to install it if you're looking at plug-ins for Firefox, for example.

Donation drives are different... we do maybe one per 1-2 years on average. Even if you raise $1000, if you split that by 12 or 24, it's not that much, right?

The tone of the site certainly isn't helping when it comes to attracting advertising providers either. But even the best ad providers don't pay jack if people don't click on ads. So it's pretty much catch-22 when it comes to ads here. We could have the best ad provider in the world and it wouldn't make much difference. You can't force people to click. And while people might click more if the ads were better (of course, this is relative and different for every user depending on their geo-location), we can't get better ads because people don't click on ads enough for the top providers to want to have Codex on board.

Btw, phpBB3 is just an interim step in the conversion, not the final destination.

 

[Mrowak]

Question: do you get any moneys for us clicking that small, inconspicuous GOG link in the top-right corner?

 

[Jaesun]

IIRC The Codex gets something only if you buy something at GOG while in that session when you click the link.

 

[Taluntain]

Maybe we should add some text under it... yea, all the GOG links on Codex are affiliated, meaning Codex gets a small commission for every* sale via a Codex GOG link.

* This is more theory than practice because there are a number of restrictions put in place by GOG to lower the number of paid affiliated sales, but that's the general idea.

 

[MetalCraze]

$5 per month for posting in /gd/

Do it. This will solve a lot of problems.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Taxing /gd/ actually sounds like a really gud idea. Would effectively keep off all the derpers that have 99% posts in gd that everyone keeps whining about (and rightly so, since this is not gdcodex)

 

[Jaesun]

All that would do is flood the other forums with gd morans.