Server working overtime?

[Frenchy]

I look through the different threads, and see many of them that are good reading, mind you there is a lot of bickering, but in general there is a lot of good reading if you can get past this. Then I see other threads that are basically one word or very short phrases like the “word game” and the Caturday pages, and think to my self, how are these helping the forum, apart from being a “word game”, a pastime.

If I look at these as a person who browses the web, I see many PAFOA pages, quite a few will bring me to firearms pages. Many do not, they lead to pages and pages of “words” and pictures that have little to do with a search.

What they do however is bring many people who would have not otherwise found PAFOA, and although this is generally some thing any webmaster would want, it may be what is slowly killing the server. Mostly if they don't actually participate and join in the forum.

Chat, as nice as it is, is an option that one can find on many other servers, be it java, flash, irc, paltalk, yahoo, Google and the likes, there are chats every where.

As I write this at 9/4/2008 1:44:22 AM there are 30 registered users online.
171 “guests” many looking at threads I had completely forgotten about, and 4 search engine spiders.

I can’t start to imagine the hits this website gets in a day or week, but it must boggle the mind and how many visitors actually come here not looking for firearm information but for cats and what ever words the spiders report.
Over 10,000 members, possibly 900 give or take that come one any given day, and possibly 10 to 20 times that happen by because they believed the search engine would give them some info on Ferrari and gets 20 or so pages of nothing about them, but some one mentioned the AR is the Ferrari of guns…

That I believe is to be expected, but what about the threads that talk of really nothing at all? The words on those attract people as well. Right now, Mccain, Obama and every other political name is big on search engines, PAFOA comes up on those search as well, mostly if you add Pennsylvania or firearms to the search.

Maybe its time we give Doug a hand here and trim down the posts for a while, At least until the elections are finished. That way we might be able to reserve the server some to what 10K members want to see and keep the hundred of thousands that pass by because a search engine suggested it only to find noting good to them.

You know what I mean, the threads that have absolutely noting to do with PAFOA but every one enjoys looking at. It may be time to archive older threads as well, although one could argue they take very little room on a server, the server does slow every time some one accesses the thread and or does a search..

Just my .02 cents, but I believe the server must be working overtime here these days. What with all the people searching for a reason to vote on some one, and the other people just typing in a word that happens to be on the thread of a forum. There are at this moment 12394 words that have very little info about them other then to see what the next word will be on http://www.pafoa.org/forum/lounge-10...page-1211.html

That is 12394 chances that some one typing a word, will wind up on PAFOA just to see a word all by its self and leave.

BearTitan once wrote a thread about “we used to talk about guns here” maybe its time to go back to this a while and stop posting just to post. This would give the server a chance to catch up some. As I look at the list of people “guests” I see most are looking at Motivational posters. I can only imagine the word Motivation is what they are looking at, be interesting to see the starts and what the most searched terms on PAFOA are.

[LorDiego01]

You mean....

threads like this one??

I'd imagine, that so long as the server is not crashing for being overloaded, them mere notion that we actively try to cut down web-traffic to this site is certainly NOT what the admins want.

The more the merrier says I!

[normanvin]

Has anyone heard that band width is why chat is down?

[RocketFoot]

Has anyone heard that band width is why chat is down?

I be more inclined to believe that it is down as a result of all the Chat Drama that surfaced on the forums a week or so ago...but I'm just speculating!

[danp]

Lately chat has been literally kicking our servers' ass. It has nothing to do with drama, it simply has to do with the load it puts on the servers.

We're looking for alternate solutions.

[RocketFoot]

Thanks for clearing that up, Dan.

As for other alternatives, may I suggest AddOn Chat? I use it on my Mack forum with good results. Here is an example...

http://client0.addonchat.com/sc.php?id=251730 (type your PAFOA name into the login)

Website:
http://www.addonchat.com/

AddOn is hosted off site so it won't bog down our servers!
Did I mention that it is available for FREE!

[edstephan]

DanP, I can donate a server or server space and bandwidth
My servers are Dual Opteron 2.0GHz with 8GB DDR.
Ed