Forum Speed

[Quillan]

Nobody has bothered to really mention this since the server move but I have to say it is a lot quicker than it was (even from a moderators view). I know we do still appear to have a few other problems but they are getting less so I just wanted to show my appreciation to Tim and his crew for working so hard to get things sorted out. I am sure the forum is only a small part of his job but he (and his team) seem to have spent quite a bit of time sorting things for us.

So well done Tim and his team.

[Will]

I do agree Quillan.

On a dialup connection rather than broadband the improvement is not so noticeable, and it still seems a bit slower than our forum or TF for example.

But yesterday I was looking at some chicken forums (don't ask) and the clunkiness of some of those (not to mention the sensitivity of the users) put Living France into perspective.

[Teamedup]

I'm sure that this will be a great help to many posters, slow boards have driven me crazy in the past.

I really haven't had any problems as we have ADSL and apart from that silly 'server problems' screen not coming up now, for me at least, I haven't noticed any difference.

[Coco]

Well I'm glad Bill pointed out that LF is still a lot slower that TF.  IT IS!!!  I think I used to make about -50 posts a week on the old site and have only made about 50 since August (THANK GOD I can hear a lot of people sigh!!!) but the sole reason is the slowness of the site.  I look at tF because it's faster but can't be bothered to contribute because I still believe this to be the best site.  I long for the day we get a fifth computer in the village and we can therefore get broadband via satellite - until then, due to the slowness, I shall have to remain mainly an observer!!

[I1]

If you run over ADSL, this site is still slower than others (people seem to be mentioning TF which is quite a lot faster). This site (LF) is variable. On occasions it takes 6 seconds to load the main page (can be faster sometimes), but it has taken in excess of 20 seconds to load a page.

However, Total France is a very busy active site so the speed difference cannot be in the server loading. Also, as Archant IT keep telling us, their “compile once run many times” is far more efficient” than scripted based forums (despite the fact that others are faster).

One thing that will increase the loading on the LF servers is the forum software functionality. For example, when I get an e-mail notification about a post to a thread that is more than one page, I click the link in the e-mail then have to use the “Last Page …” link to get to the post (or scroll through pages if there have been several posts and I cannot know where the first of my unread posts is). This requiring several pages to be generated, sent to my browser, etc.

As we are mentioning other forums, I have pretty well moved across to TF now as basically “It Works”, is active, friendly, fast, well run, etc. In addition, the forum software systems support users and assist in communications such that you don’t notice them (whereas here you are always fighting difficult, low functionality, un-reliable software). From reading through some TF posts, I am not alone in moving to that forum. OK, TF software may not meet Archant’s IT groups desires, but users want something different (something fast, reliable, etc.) and if Archant IT wont provide what the users want, then the users will go somewhere that does provide it.

I actually think the LF users deserve medals for “sticking-in-there”. Problems have been going on for many months now, yet people are tolerating things they would never accept in other aspects of life.

[Russethouse]

Moderators hat off

>>For example, when I get an e-mail notification about a post to a thread that is more than one page, I click the link in the e-mail then have to use the “Last Page …” link to get to the post (or scroll through pages if there have been several posts and I cannot know where the first of my unread posts is). This requiring several pages to be generated, sent to my browser, etc.<<<

I read your comment regarding this before and find that it happens with every other forum I visit.

Each forum has a 'feel' and despite you suggesting this forum is dying (several weeks ago) the amount of posts and members continue to grow.

The fact that >>>people are tolerating things they would never accept in other aspects of life<<< surely shows how much they value the facility.??

[I1]

Quote: “…“Last Page …” link to get to the post (or scroll through pages if there have been several posts and I cannot know where the first of my unread posts is). This requiring several pages to be generated, sent to my browser, etc.<<<

I read your comment regarding this before and find that it happens with every other forum I visit”

Russethouse: If one takes the example of phpBB (as used by e.g. Total France mentioned in an earlier post), the e-mail link takes you to the post the mail is notifying you about. Not only the correct page, but also the scroll position in that page for the post. As it does not e-mail “flood”, the single e-mail notification you get takes you to the point that you last read the post to, so you can continue reading the new posts. (But phpBB does not “fit-in” with Archant IT Group’s capabilities)

I am critical of the way this forum is being organised. Certainly, my impression is that these is less activity. By that I mean fewer posts (certainly in those areas of the forum of interest to me) and fewer responses to those posts. Fine, web traffic may be increasing but there can be other reasons for that.

I am aware that some people do not like me being critical. However, I believe that if something is wrong, one should say it. Note that my criticisms are not sitting just throwing critical comments. I have spent some time assisting sorting out forum software failures (e.g. with non-IE browsers being unable to access Control Panel, PM areas, etc.), I have assisted in compiling lists of shortcomings for the developers (something people are often paid for in IT), in logging problems and failures (to assist in identifying the causes of the problems), I have been making suggestions about how things can be improved, etc.

In the course of a (too) long IT career, I have seen many IT project failures and have come to appreciate the underlying indications and causes that can contribute to such failures. IT project failures are in nobodies interest.

The fact that I still respond here indicates that I really do wish this forum to succeed. Such forums are invaluable. I really don’t want it to fade away – hence my strong desire that the functionality issues get sorted-out and quickly. I have far better things to do with my time that just make comments of software functionality and my comments are not just “mud slinging”. Please, please can somebody somewhere do something about the quality of this forum software so everybody can get back to the real idea behind such forums.

[Baz]

I am finding it quite tedious to continually  hear about about the shortcomings of this site. It is plainly obvious that Archant are trying to sort things out but the continual criticisms are not IMO helpful to all and sundry. Both Tim and James I think are  taking the problems seriously and in the course of time I am sure they will rectify them. I think praise should be passed to them for their patience as I am sure they have other jobs to do for the company. Let's not forget that the site is free and continue to give our support as a sign of our appreciation for their time and efforts.

May I suggest that to remove this negative mood any comments regarding the technical problems should be directed to Tim or James by PM and not continually voiced here.

Baz

[Russethouse]

Actually TF seems to be 'down' at present, in fact I have never had an email notification of a post from them despite ticking the box, I really don't consider this to be a big enough deal to worry about. However other Phpbb (or yabb)boards I use certainly have not behaved in that way, may be Finlay has customised their software in some way. (or maybe I have rogue browser )

Quillan started the thread because there have been a lot of complaints, Tim has worked hard and addressed the issues he can for the present. I think most of us have noticed an improvement, praise where praise is due.

[Miki]

Baz,

With respect, it is only because some members have been very vocal, that things did actually got a move on, regarding the continued and ongoing improvements to the site.

If nothing had been said, nothing would have got done, simple. You may say it is now getting boring but it is a fine line that we are on now, say nothing, it stops as it is, keep nudging them and it will in the end be a "grand forum" again.

I think Tim would agree and it is pretty simple to understand his reluctance to have done anything until he was being "attacked" by disgruntled members, that were finally cheesed off with the way it had gone badly and sadly downhill. For the most part, he may well have thought all was hunky dory with the site and members as nothing much was being said against it.

The same thing happened with the signatures a  while back. I notice that some still do not use a signature but were among the most vociferous in defence of allowing them to be used, which shows some members care for others rights and not just their own.

May I suggest that Il is simply trying to push poor old Tim (I know, not so much of the old ) for the sake of all of us and if what he says is true (and I don't doubt his knowledge for a moment) then he knows a fair bit about these things.

Boring well yes, but sadly maybe, that is what makes up 50% of life unfortunately, I have to admit I am not too keen on persistent groans but in this case, it doesn't matter much to me as I can't flipping understand most of what is being said about what is wrong with the site anyway

Keep going Tim, it'll be right mate............

 

[I1]

Quote “I am finding it quite tedious to continually hear about about the shortcomings of this site.”

Then stop reading these threads !!!

Quote: “It is plainly obvious that Archant are trying to sort things out”

The problems could have been resolved many months ago were it not for Archant IT selecting a specific platform to run the forums on and being unprepared to change that when it became clear it was not working.

Quote: “but the continual criticisms are not IMO helpful to all and sundry.”

Unless somebody says that something is wrong, those running the site will not know and the faults will not be rectified. There is nothing worse in life than people being **** off and keeping quite.

Quote “Both Tim and James I think are taking the problems seriously and in the course of time I am sure they will rectify them.”

We are told they are working closely with the forum software developers but still we can be given no indications as to what issues will be addressed nor when these will be addressed (at least all I have seen is a link to the forum developers own forum that say nothing about planned enhancements and fixes and nothing about schedules. In IT terms this is not working closely with the developers. I’m sure they are taking it seriously, but are the forum software developers and others ? Failure to keep users informed is another classic failure that increases frustrations and aggravation in IT systems. Any IT manager should know this.

Quote “I think praise should be passed to them for their patience as I am sure they have other jobs to do for the company. Let's not forget that the site is free and continue to give our support as a sign of our appreciation for their time and efforts.”

True it is free. However, I would have thought it in Archant’s (and in particular LF’s) interest to operate a credible set of forums. As stated by somebody in an earlier post, this entire situation must be highly embarrassing to Archant’s credibility. Running a forum should take very little work, particularly when you have external moderators to assist in the management. It is only when poor software run on inappropriate platforms cause unending problems that it takes such a lot of work.

Quote: “Actually TF seems to be 'down' at present, in fact I have never had an email notification of a post from them despite ticking the box, I really don't consider this to be a big enough deal to worry about. However other Phpbb (or yabb)boards I use certainly have not behaved in that way, may be Finlay has customised their software in some way. (or maybe I have rogue browser).”

E-mail notification positioning on actual message is standard phpBB functionality. I would try checking your registered e-mail address or, if you are an AOL user there are issues with receiving mail from non-AOL addresses (nothing to do with forums, just AOL and your account settings). I have never had any problems with phpBB e-mail notifications (our company also runs a phpBB forum and never had any problems there either) – but this is getting a bit off topic.

My apologies if I’m being a bit abrupt (and will no doubt get loads of nasty responses) but as I mentioned earlier, such problems are totally avoidable and I find it frustrating that they are not being avoided. I hope I have not insulted anybody in the above (as that was certainly not my intention) but rather I wish to address the points raised by some preceding posts.

[Russethouse]

Miki, I agree with some of what you say, but Tim has made improvements and will continue to do so - to keep criticising must make him feel he's p***ing against the wind

If there is something new going wrong, then fair enough, as far as I can see thats not the case. We know the project is ongoing, so nothing wrong in showing a bit of appreciation for what has been achieved so far. (Its something to do with motivation isn't it? )

[Quillan]

"We are told they are working closely with the forum software developers but still we can be given no indications as to what issues will be addressed nor when these will be addressed (at least all I have seen is a link to the forum developers own forum that say nothing about planned enhancements and fixes and nothing about schedules. In IT terms this is not working closely with the developers. I’m sure they are taking it seriously, but are the forum software developers and others ? Failure to keep users informed is another classic failure that increases frustrations and aggravation in IT systems. Any IT manager should know this."

We don't want to bore people with postings about upgrades and patches so any discussion is carried out in the moderators forum which is part of this site but private (you can't see it or access it). You were told that the software was being moved recently and that the forum was going down for further work, there was little point in saying anything else as to 80% of the forum members it would make no sense. I notice even TF (as an example mentioed by yourself) does not keep people informed the way you describe.

Secondly the this forum and others run by Archant are free services and only cater for a small amount of the IT business of the company so for technical staff to spend hours, days, weeks on this problem continiously is not on, they do it when they can, bit like Forum Admin.

[I1]

Quote: “I notice even TF (as an example mentioed by yourself) does not keep people informed the way you describe.”

TF was raised by somebody else and don’t need to keep people informed about such issues as that forum does not suffer from the problems this forum does. From an IT management perspective one only needs to keep users informed about fixes, etc. when there are major problems.

Quote: “Secondly the this forum and others run by Archant are free services and only cater for a small amount of the IT business of the company so for technical staff to spend hours, days, weeks on this problem continiously is not on, they do it when they can, bit like Forum Admin.”

Exactly, I agree. As I commented, running these types of forums does not take a lot of work (particularly where you have a group of external moderators to assist). It only becomes a lot of work where you have unreliable and inadequate software running on inappropriate platforms (as indicated in a previous post). Given that Archant (quite reasonably) don’t want to spend lots of IT resource on such things it is amazing that they are continuing with this forum software and solution where other more proven solutions would require a lot less ongoing work.

[Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)]

[quote]Quote: “…“Last Page …” link to get to the post (or scroll through pages if there have been several posts and I cannot know where the first of my unread posts is). This requiring several pages to be ge...[/quote]

To pick up I1's point - "But phpBB does not “fit-in” with Archant IT Group’s capabilities":

LF is one of about 300 websites currently supported by Archant IS's Digital Media team, which as a combined portfolio generate 6-800Gb of traffic per day.

All of these sites are running either ASP or ASP.NET code because as a team of professionally trained and certified Microsoft developers, this is the platform which we are currently best positioned to utilise. Our development team currently includes two of the first 1500 people worldwide to gain the premier MCSD.NET certification, and a number of other MCAD & MCP qualified staff.

Unfortunately the enterprise environment is very different to that of a small business. Small businesses are typically able to select a platform based on the application they want to run, and are usually constrained in terms of budgets. This is why the PHP/LAMP stack tends to be so popular - it's all free software, allowing time and resource to be put into extending functionality or creating customised solutions.

In the enterprise environment, while we're still constrained with budgets we are able to look more towards pre-packaged or commercial software, and utilise commercial server products. This is part of the reason we've been standardised on MS for several years, although in recent times this policy has been adjusted to mainly focus on the desktop environment. In terms of server products and Group applications we now aim to select the best solution that both matches our requirements, and fits the existing environment.

When supporting this number of sites with a small development team, there's simply no point in starting to select random platforms for particular sites. If everything's based on the same core platform our development team is able to rapidly integrate new functionality, without needing to stop and spend time learning new skills to support 3rd party applications.

So, I1, can we please agree to disagree over PHP vs ASP.NET, and this forum software vs phpBB?

You're never going to like a product that runs on a Microsoft server, and we're highly unlikely to start ripping out established ASP.NET functionality, and replacing it with a PHP product (don't get me wrong, phpBB is a first class product - just unsuitable for our environment).

You obviously dislike anything Microsoft, and by the sound of things think that everyone should be running their sites on PHP. While I can see where you're coming from here, as an enterprise function we don't have this level of flexibility as we have a large amount of existing systems to support and maintain, with which our sites and platform need to be closely integrated. At the moment, the best way to achieve this is through using MS products.

This may change in the future, but to be completely honest, if we were to switch development environments we'd opt for something that could match the functionality and performance offered by .NET (Java, for example). PHP would be a backward step, and one which we would be unwilling to take.

Should you wish to discuss this further, please feel free to PM me. There's really been enough public discussion on this subject now, and there's absolutely no point in continuing to bore the readers with an ongoing debate about the merits of one bulletin board system vs another.

Regards

[Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)]

[quote]I am finding it quite tedious to continually hear about about the shortcomings of this site. It is plainly obvious that Archant are trying to sort things out but the continual criticisms are not IMO ...[/quote]

Thanks Baz.

We do take the problems seriously, and this forum has had our continual attention for most of the last week.

Most of the problems have now been resolved, and all being well the forum system is running smoothly. I have not been made aware of any more occurences of those "out of memory errors", but should any occur please PM me with a date and time.

Many thanks

[Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)]

[quote]Baz, With respect, it is only because some members have been very vocal, that things did actually got a move on, regarding the continued and ongoing improvements to the site. If nothing had been sa...[/quote]

Cheers Miki, although can I just point out that the only reason nothing happened for a while with the site was simply that we were tied up working on other projects (and the minor problem of Christmas / new year).

The comments in the various threads have been extremely useful though in helping us to track down the cause of some of the problems, and in identifying some of the software's shortcomings.

Keep 'em coming, though feel free to switch to PM's rather than public posts!

[Tim Stephenson (Archant IS)]

[quote]Quote: “I notice even TF (as an example mentioed by yourself) does not keep people informed the way you describe.”TF was raised by somebody else and don’t need to keep people informed about such issue...[/quote]

I1, and how would you know what issues TF suffer from or have suffered in the past? According to your posts on here, you've only just joined their community!

Running a single forum doesn't take much work. Running over 250 of them does.

No forum solutions are ideal or trouble free due to how we need to them to operate. We can't support 250 separate installations of a forum system, with 250 separate copies of the forum code, and 250 separate databases.

I'd expect you'll find that if you tried to push phpBB to these levels you'd encounter very similar problems.

[Iceni]

OK, Devil Incarnate hat on  - well an MS partner hat on but for some that is the same.

I for one would like to thank Tim, all the team at Archant and also the moderators and those members who have put such positive feedback into this site to get the problems solved and the site working again. There was no end of complaints regarding the old forum, there have been niggles and probs getting this up and running but it has been delt with at all times with as much speed as Archant and the team could apply to a free system (and more than I would have expected due to the amount of sites I now see they support).

Thank you, this site has been a godsend to us regarding our renovation and we have met many new friends via this board.

[Miki]

Miki, I agree with some of what you say, but Tim has made improvements and will continue to do so - to keep criticising must make him feel he's p***ing against the wind

Then imagine the poor chaps that played under the management of the one and only Brian Clough, didn't do them much harm did it, success & motivation come in many forms..........   

My post to Tim was how I saw it and I am pretty sure that Tim knows what I was on about.  What I posted was just a gentle reminder of how it needed a few members to get something concrete done, after weeks and weeks of sheer annoying time outs and the forum being a pain in the butt generally with all its problems. Will, will know what I mean.

Sorry but it is a fact of life, that people just want things to work and offering too many excuses, honest as the reasons might be, just won't wash with any problems one might have,  (ask all the people who have gites and B&B's etc). Of course I know Tim has tried and is continuing to try and get the system glitch free. 

So now I guess, it is a case of fingers crossed that soon it will all be cooshty bop on LF  

Now what have you lot done with poor James ? Was he offered up as the chief culprit to 'Arry Archant himself ?

 

 

[I1]

Quote: “You're never going to like a product that runs on a Microsoft server”

Quote: “You obviously dislike anything Microsoft”

I actually develop software systems for the Microsoft platform (and have done since the pre-Windoze 3.1 days). There is no element of like or dislike. It is “appropriate/suitable/reliable/etc.” or "inappropriate/unsuitable/unreliable/etc.”.

I have no strong feelings about phpBB (other than in my limited experience it works), and I use it as an example. People here are beginning to leap to conclusions a bit.

[I1]

[quote]I1, and how would you know what issues TF suffer from or have suffered in the past? According to your posts on here, you've only just joined their community!Running a single forum doesn't take much wo...[/quote]

Registered there under current name early-Nov. Was previously registered and active using a different name.