G'day guys
Jim told me he took it down as it may have been the problem behind the problems ANYWAYS, is it gonna be back soon, i found it really useful.
cheers

Yes....well I am debating that.

Has anyone else noticed that with it off the site seems to be running faster??

Thanks,
Jim

Hey Jim,
I find the site runs much faster without it in place.. I never used it really so I dont miss it at all.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Cheers,
Bryan

Jim,

Site is way faster without it. Although it was nice to see who was hanging out on the site, I do prefer the speed.

RR

Hi Jim!

Consider my inputs as a report, instead of complaints, please.

The online user list is helpfull, and today, even without it, the "too many users connects " php error appeared to me (20 minutes ago...)
So, probably, the problems weren't made by the inclusion of this list...

Could it be a numeric paramether that is making this exception and as a result the website crashing?
We could make a test with the community and not login (for a well defined period of time - let's say tomorrow 10-13 GMT) and browse as guests / unregistered and see what happens!
It could be a question of server capacity to requests - either registered or unregistered - charge testing....

To my perception the website access is fast, using LAN and ADSL connections (little slower, but still acceptable) and I do not notice any changes by excluding the list.

A "nice to have" tool would be to have access to our sent PM.
I only discovered this when a few days ago, someone asked me for help on the "Dive! Dive! Dive! Campaign" and I had answered the same question to a PM...
Just a thought!

Hope that I explain myself clear - no harm intended

Skipper

hmm, well im noit sure, i didnt notice the speed difference until you guys mentioned it...but i really really liekd the front gate, as i could tell when my buddys were on, then id bother em with pm's, :-)

I agree with David,
I am on dial up (please don't laugh) I haven't really noticed any difference. I appreciated having it there to see who was online.

We won't Andy ( ). But seriuos, I've not noticed that much of a speed difference. I do second Skippers comment regarding the send PM's. It would be nice to be able to see at least if you had replied or not to a PM which you read, but had to look something up and then overlooked to reply...I would imagine that to be able to see the replies archived would probably take up to much space.

Henk

I miss the front gate, I always knew who was here, I have cable, and it does seem to be a little faster, but I still sometimes get "timed-out".... but I mark that to my "wonderful cable connection"..... since it happens at other sites also.....

Yeah, I liked the gate also. Knowing who was on was cool. That way, if I sent someone a PM, I could tell if they were ignoring me or not! :-)

Also, I have DSL and have not noticed much difference. Sometimes, not very often, a page here will drag loading when I click on it. When it does that, I don't give it the chance to time out. I just stop it and reload the page which usually works.

I've been a part of many messageboards/bulletin boards that had the "who's online" feature, and it invariably slowed each down.

It was handy but wasn't worth the slow down in my hirsute opinion.

If there was a way to have a "favorite members" area that you could see which are online, like some IM things have....perhaps that would work....just a thought

Not that i don't like the idea....... But it could be a bigger memory hog.......6000+ users..... = 6000+ "front gates"

ACK

Matt is correct. That would be an even bigger issue as it would mean additional querires to determine "who" belonged on the list.

What is really the issue here is the overhead it takes to constantly be updating the table that shows who is online. And it's not just members currently that are tracked but anonymous visitors as well. So every time you access a page that has the Front Gate it makes a check to see if you are already listed in the table and updates the time you accessed the page. Then it also updates your view of the Front Gate to show who is currently online and again Updates the database table by removing those who have not accessed a new page in x minutes (5-15min I think).

It's a very database intensive process when you think about 150 users all moving around the site and this happens on every page they visit (on top of all the queries run when a normal page is created).

Jim

Jim one question, is there any why of not tracking the anonymous visitors or the non-register visitors. There always seem to be more of them on-line then members. I could be wrong but i would think this would help...maybe. But again i don't know how this works. As for having the front gate yes i would like to see it up. It's like being in a bar, you know everyone's there, but having the gate closed to keep the site open and running..well we will adjust to it.

hmm i think that its good that site goes faster and also is good to have front gate as a feature .

oMore than this i bet sometime soon Jim will arrange to have both goodies fast and front gate

With regards to pms, how about adding an "icon" to sent pms. Just like Yahoo, you get a little icon beside the sender's pm telling you that you had replied to his questions.

Just a thought

Maybe you can just have it on the homepage or as a separate link to another section that does not require constant refreshing. That way if a person want to go see who's around they can find that page. If not, there is no need to calc who's around.