forum jump

Bryan · 01-24-2002, 04:18 PM

Hey Mickey,

I noticed the forum jump drop down box is not there anymore. Is this permanent or is this temporary? I hope it is temporary; I used that feature quite a bit.

pinkangelkitty · 01-24-2002, 04:23 PM

yeah, i used that sometimes for jumping to GP. whats up?

MrCrabby · 01-24-2002, 08:46 PM

Yeah, i used that ALL THE TIME!!!
Please bring it back!

YWING85 · 01-24-2002, 08:57 PM

yeah....now i can't rip thru gc to cheap post....

MrCrabby · 01-24-2002, 09:01 PM

On second thought.......

Kelly · 01-25-2002, 03:58 AM

Sorry to disappoint you guys, but the Forum Jump is gone permanently.

Due to heavy traffic, we had to find a way to ease up our load and that was a way to do it. I don't know all the logistics (I'm not Mickey

), but we just did what we had to do.

So, please just understand and be patient during the upgrading process.

Closing thread.

IHPL,
Kelly

Brent · 01-25-2002, 07:29 AM

I'll chime in here, even though this is closed now! I know a bit about the forum jump thing... The forum jump menu was ran by a javascript (I'm assuming...if not, it was a script still, nonetheless). These boards have TONS of individual forums....nearly 100 forums and that's NOT counting the individual artists under each letter (when each letter is ALSO a forum) in the individual artists section. So it's probably more like 200 or so. Now, for the forum jump feature, within the code for that drop down menu EACH and EVERY forum has a link on that list AND a title (the one that appears on the menu). For EACH of the forums it requires *at least* 2 lines of code to operate it on the forum drop down list. Now multiply that by the 200 or so forums there are and you've got a LOT of extra code that is not a necessity to run the site. That's extra code that has to load each time you load a page on here...including those pages where people post their "Oops! Sorry this pic is so big!" posts and their goofy moving text and their 3 page long manifestos....that's a LOT of bandwidth when you consider how busy the site is. Getting rid of that extra bit of code cuts down a lot on bandwidth usage, I'm sure, and also speeds up the page load times for everyone, but especially those on dial-up accounts.

Mickey · 01-25-2002, 09:12 AM

As always, Brent pretty much hit the nail on the head. There two things that go into forum jump:

Server side - Our server needs to hit the database, create a list of the forums (around 200 of them), and then build the code for the list.

Server and you - Bandwidth. It takes time and server power to send data, and the forumjump creates quite a bit of HTML.

Your side - Processing. Not much, but Internet Explorer needs to take those hundreds of lines of code and build them into that drop-down box.

All of this happens EVERY time ANY page on the boards is pulled up. By itself, forum-jump isn't a huge deal, but it is probably the single biggest resource hog on the boards, so it had to go.

If we get to the point where the load isn't so bad (new server someday...?), then we'll put it back. Personally, I like the feature - I just can't justify the server crunch for it.

IHL,
Mickey