Wanted info and advise from our" IT" members

[Mrs Langtrees]

I have noticed the forum is slower to navigate around lately. I am now using a Turbo Telstra wireless card for internet access.
Is the navigation slower because of my card or do we have too much information on our site and maybe need to archive some of it is what I need advice on.?
All assistance appreciated.

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

I did it again, hit submit reply before switching email notification on... here goes

 

[Mary Anne PA]

Maryanne, if you go into your profile, I think you can automatically pick send emails when thread is added to as I never select the submit and always get updates to a thread i have posted to.

Also you will always find anything to do with wireless no matter how turbo will always be slower than direct cable or broadband. I don't seem to notice it being slower and I am attached by cable to my sis's computer

 

[corneus]

Damn Telstra!

Hi Maryanne,
Serena's right - it will be your card slowing you down. Telstra (Bigpond) will of course promise you the world in terms of speed and availability, but the reality is that the speed they deliver never approaches the speed you are promised (and pay for!).
The real world is quite different to how they see it.
Just as an example of how they see the "real world", try looking at any site sponsored by Bigpond (AFL.com.au springs to mind)and see how mind bogglingly slow it is. I think they even believe their own rubbish about how wonderful their internet experience is, and build sites optimised for speeds nobody in the real world actually gets.
(well, that's my rant for today! lol..)

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

Thank you Miss Serena,
I did know I could do that feature but disabled it as my inbox was forever full and just like to mark a few threads so I cna check the progress of all our amazing members.
That is why I have to retrain myself to mark email notification.I was also hoping that pointing out all my silly mistakes it may help some members learn to navigate the world of our forum.
I was having a webair lesson with Justin tonight and was checking the stats for adult forums. He said 9GB of downloads this month was very sizeable. What I now need to learn is all the KB, GB codes so I know how to interpert them.

Thanks corneus for the speed info, it was my main thought also. I am getting a ASDL connection next week, what they have asked me is how much I download, any advise on how to check my usage out would be appreciated.

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

Web Site www.adultforums.com.au
Date Created Saturday October 22nd 2005 07:46:14 AM
IP 69.42.71.133
Username
Bandwidth transfered this month 9.93GB (As of Monday January 28th 2008 12:51:07 PM)
Bandwidth transfered last month 3.18GB
Current disk usage 3.05GB (As of Monday January 28th 2008 12:51:07 PM)
Disk usage last month 3.04GB

This was the info i was checking on my sites tonight. I can't figure out the bandwidth has increased three times from last month to this month, we did not register triple activity on our administration stats. Any helpful tips on reading this gobble gook?

 

[Naughty Thoughts]

Get and instal a little program called AnalogX Netstat Live. I've only recently come across this little marvel and it tells you a whole lot of information on what is really going on with your computers' connection. Small to download and easy to set up.

To run a test: go to any page that you know how fast it normally takes to load and have it come up. That's your baseline.
Go the page you want to check (such as adultforums) and see if it runs at the same speed as the baseline site did.

If they both run at the same speed, it's your connection.
If the forum runs slower, it's the forum.

You can also do a brute force test at Speedtest.net which will give you a good baseline for your speed. Try two or three different destinations, although note that it will run a little faster (according to speedtest.net) than what your real connection is doing (according to NetStat Live).

To streamline the forum: there are a bunch of different options to make the site run faster, but I don't know of any vBulletin specific tweaks.

There are some basic ideas that you could try to see if they'll make a difference:

• Replace multiple images (like the ads at the top) with a single image and an image map. These work better because on every "hit" you get one image request instead of five, but it'll vary on results depending on the size of the images.
• Using sub-forums means that less data has to be transferred each time a visitor looks at the front page. This may not be applicable in this case, and might increase bandwidth if people need to pop in and out of forums looking for the right sub-forum.
• Additional codes that might be running (such as something that hides postcounts) will put up the cycles on the server as it does something, then does something else to hide what it did first. These sorts of changes need a fair bit of tech-savvy to implement.

Can't think of anything else off the top of my head...

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

Thanks Lonestar,
It may take me a week or two to get through your helpful advise but certain points you make are geling with me already.

 

[Ian IT]

Here is something which has been overlooked and very 'important' if you want to cut bandwidth charges considerably!
There are many images posted on the forum by members which have not been resized and optimized prior to uploading.
And Admin allows them to upload a .jpg image up to 4GB.. Firstly, change your max file size settings for .jpg images to max 120KB. Also a max width dimesion of maybe 500px. Secondly, as many members do not understand file formats, how to resize and optimize images or how to find the property information of a image eg. file size, format and dimesions. You MUST have a IMPORTANT NOTE members need to read before uploading any images... explaining how to resize and optimize using a free graphics program.
By following these procedures the images and page will load much quicker and be more viewable on the screen. And guaranteed to cut bandwidth!!

Jackhammer

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

Thank You Jack Hammer, Serena can I leave this one in your hands to do as you undestand photo's far better than I.

 

[princesssuzie]

There is definitely one hell of a lot of stuff on this forum that needs either getting rid of or archiving, so many irrelevant posts that people don't realise are so old and meaningless and will add to them somewhere down the track.

Also I used to spend a great deal of time re-sizing pics as they really annoyed me when the people of this forum posted such huge photos but it took up too much of my time, so haven't done this for a while.

 

[Mary Anne PA]

same here suzi, tried to do a lot of archiving bit by bit daily, but got too hard and too much, although it should automatically archive stuff.

will check out the pic sizes, they were set up from the start

 

[Mary Anne PA]

Web Site www.adultforums.com.au
Date Created Saturday October 22nd 2005 07:46:14 AM
IP 69.42.71.133
Username
Bandwidth transfered this month 9.93GB (As of Monday January 28th 2008 12:51:07 PM)
Bandwidth transfered last month 3.18GB
Current disk usage 3.05GB (As of Monday January 28th 2008 12:51:07 PM)
Disk usage last month 3.04GB

This was the info i was checking on my sites tonight. I can't figure out the bandwidth has increased three times from last month to this month, we did not register triple activity on our administration stats. Any helpful tips on reading this gobble gook?

well, you started posting again maryanne..lol maybe that increased it 3 fold... rofl :headbang:

just kidding

 

[Mary Anne PA]

seriously, I've done a bit of maintenance and it has speeded up for me as was going really slow just before as well. Mind you I had my laptop going all day, but after the maintenance and not turning off the laptoip, its gone faster.. so hope it works for you maryanne

 

[Naughty Thoughts]

Yeah, user submitted images was something I'd forgotten about since there are a lot of "standard" protocols that I didn't realize weren't implemented on this board.

There are a bunch of free, online resources available for those who don't have photoshop or can't work out how to use MSPaint: Shrinkpictures and ReSizePic are about the easiest to use. Telling people specifically what the appropriate limits are is a very quick way of dropping bandwidth.

The alternative would be to ask people to host their images elsewhere and link to them. Places like ImageFap are great for storing on-line pics of yourself doing interesting things that normal image hosts won't host.

RedTube and PornoTube are also good places for people who want to share videos. That might be an idea for a new forum - share your home movies. Though it would need careful moderation (or obvious warning notices that you don't control the content people share).

There's also some good advice on optimizing vBulletin for lower server loads available. It's good to see that the site runs on the latest stable version (3.6.8 - new version 3.7 not yet a stable release) and there's probably more tips in the vBulletin documentation and the discussion forum has loads of resources as well.

 

[Mrs Langtrees]

Surely if we do limit the size of pics as suggested members trying to post out of size photo's will have them rejected.
If someone does post a pic that is wonky I would just delete the post myself leaving a message pic needs resizing.

 

[Mary Anne PA]

have set the admin for attachments to actually resize the pics automatically to the set size limit and have made the posts only able to accept one pic at a time for this to be able to be implemented, so maybe give it a try with a big pic and see what happens I guess.

 

[Ian IT]

Here is a link below to free resize and optimize software for those who do not have Photoshop Software. Very easy to use and there is no time limit or image limit.. the software is FREE!

http://www.download.com/Free-Pictur...-FreePictu&subj=uo&tag=button&cdlpid=10297789

Vbulletin is written in php and uses the php resize() class to resize images, however the images would not be fully optimized to cut down file sizes even more and still retain quality.

The free software may be used to resize, optimize and also batch convert. I think its a better option as members will be able to use this software to convert there images not only for the forum, but also if they wish to send images by email, etc...

All you need to do is have a STICKY NOTE with the free software link and your requirements such as image format preferable .jpg, max size and width dimesions eg. 500px

This will not only save Admins time resizing as stated by Slavegirlsuzie.. but also ensure you do not have the avoidable excess bandwidth charges.

For Photoshop users... I recommend resizing up to a max width of 600 pixels and make sure the 'constrained proportions' check box is ticked. Then go to FILE/SAVE TO WEB & DEVICES. The settings I use is.. .jpg format and with the quality compression set to approx 60. Make sure the 'Optimized' checkbox is ticked and then save to your hardrive ready to upload to the forum.

Jackhammer