Reporter Bots

[Cloudee1]

 

The forum just grows and grows and grows. I have added a new board to the forums in the general section which you may have noticed. I've added a reporter bot to this board which is supposed to report on all of the latest rss feed news. As you can see from it's first couple of posts it's a little under the weather yet.

As I work on that, I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for any other news feeds that they would like to see posted on.

[Chris Cromer]

How about a bot for Gamespot's feeds.

[Cloudee1]

The Reporter Bots have been fired. It may have just been me, but it seems the forum slowed way down with them running off to check for news all the time.

I've gone ahead and trashed their most recent contributions already. I may charge them up once in a while to manually send them off, but they won't be left on all the time to fend for themselves anymore either.

If anybody really liked the idea of the news bots then let's hear your appeals, but for now a responsive forums is a lot better than random news blurbs in my opinion. It already seems to be running a little better.

[troflip]

The forum is still reaaaalllllyyyyyy  ssssllllloooooooowwww

[Cloudee1]

I'm using dial up and it seems alright now. Obviously some times are worse than others, but if it seems to be persistently slow then there are a couple of things we can do to decrease drag.

The rss feed used to keep the agi forums and here linked are pulled while viewing the other forums board index. So if Chris is having a busy day, our server is going to think we are too and vice versa. Making this a static page, that is generated prior to being called would eliminate more of our servers work. Over the weekend may possibly be Chris's sites busiest time as people realise MT is closed and follow the link over.

In attempts to guard against future drag, I am also working on my game upload script, but it and the games will be hosted through a different server. The upload form is basicly a popup window which you fill in and submit. After I make sure there isn't any virus or threat, I'll link it up to the games page. The download game will also open a popup window allowing me to collect download stats, cause after all everyone wants to know how many times their game has been downloaded. But it should work pretty seamlessly and not a single game download will impact our forum browsing in any way.

But, I digress. For now and this weekend I am going to shrug it off and blame it on the external activity, but if it still seems slow on Tuesday, I'll start looking into options.