Minor forum settings update due to traffic overload

[DJ Omnimaga]

Due to extreme traffic overload in the news sub-forum in the past two days (between 50 and 70 guests viewing that sub-forum within 60 minutes), we have been forced to reduce the amount of topics that show up per page from 100 to 50. We also edited the "New Posts" page to show the recent topics and recent posts on separate page (recent posts will now show their content, 10 posts per page). Hopefully, this should fix most of the many "500 Internal Server Error" we have been getting lately, for now.

[Galandros]

That is one guest per minute, huge traffic.
I hope we can continue to provide the news to visitors without problems.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Not to mention that many of those guests might be actually visiting several pages in their visits (or the same page multiple times).

Earlier I disabled the news section for guests, but now I just decided to decrease the amount of topics shown in a page.

THis is an issue with shared hosting, especially cheap hosts like 1and1.com. I hope in June the site can take the traffic overload if we get any, especially if we start a contest.

[Galandros]

With a contest we can have even more visits...

I was going to ask about a contest after I saw in the stats the contest thread views.
If someone wants a mini-contest, I had a idea of a screen saver (TI-BASIC) for the calculator and I have the requirements of the program well though.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Well I thought more about an Axe Parser this year, so the community can show what the language is capable of. Source code would need to be provided, as well as the copy of Axe Parser used to compile the entry, when contestants submit their entries. I'm not sure about the theme yet, though.

And yeah contest might increase views a lot, because last year we went from 70000 views a month (on the site only) to 120000 the month after the contest was announced.

[Zera]

In a way, I suppose this is actually a good thing. At least we know we're popular.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah true, especially news and downloads. Now imagine if the other forums sections got as much traffic as the news section :O

[ztrumpet]

This is awesome!  Hopefully we're not going to get more 500 errors, though.

[DJ Omnimaga]

Yeah I just hope if traffic rises a lot that it won't happen too often, otherwise it can eventually backfire on us if the site is barely accessible at all (people will get discouraged and come less often).

If it has to happen, I will add some warnings that if error occurs during posting, simply click the back button of their browser, copy their post with CTRL+C, refresh the posting page, paste the post then try again until it works, like when that happened in March once.

If I notice traffic continue rising after this Summer, we will probably be looking for a new host, though. KermMartian told me that Cemetech, which is hosted on Surpasshosting, gets about 100000 hits per day, which is about 5 times what Omnimaga domain name gets, and they have no database errors during high traffic. On the other hand, Netham45 had a lot of issues with Surpasshosting in the past. That said, if it looks like Surpasshosting is more reliable, we might be attempting a hosting move in late September or early October when site activity will be lower.