Forum Changes

Posted by Zen Thu, 08 Nov 2007 11:26:00 GMT

The topics/page and replies/page settings have been removed and set to 25/page to alleviate server load during prime times—this change should give a slight speed boost to how fast things load on the site, as well as making way for better caching of dynamically-generated pages.

In the templates, user location, skype, and www icons have been removed. Those items can still be found in the user profile.

The user database back-end was partially converted to a relational database as part of the efforts to lower server-load. The change is also required for the following purposes:
  • to reduce penalties incurred from disk I/O operations, especially when admins need to track down smurves
  • to greatly speed up user-lookups in the admin interface
  • to support the upcoming user-to-user messaging feature
  • to support upcoming changes to the user-registration system to make it a lot less frustrating if the email/user name is not valid for any number of reasons (email/user already exists, username contains censored words, email banned, etc.)
  • to support the upcoming CRM system

Partially because other apps on HG are still using the old file-based user database format.

The registration sentinels have also have been balanced. They are now a little less aggressive, and more caching proxies operated by ISPs have been added to the white list.