As you might notice from the new NEWS items, I am working on tweaking the site a little bit, in order to speed things up, overall. Over the last few months, the site has been hitting some pretty serious lag time during peak hours and I finally found some time to do something about it. (The other option was to get a new dedicated server with more power, but I don't think that Raine wants to pay for that.
)
So... over the next few weeks, I will be tweaking things and running improvement scripts. While these scripts run, the site may slow down terribly -- we have A LOT of users and A LOT of messages. Anything that I run to compress or otherwise optimize those two tables is going to affect the site (slow-down) while it runs and (hopefully) affect the site (speed up) after it's done.
What can you do to help, you ask?
* Kindred is glad you asked...
The first thing you can do is take a look at your PM (personal message) inbox and outbox.
If you have a ton of crap in there that is just being kept because you've been too lazy to remove it, then please do so sometime in the next few weeks.
We're not asking that you clear your PM box, delete ongoing conversations or remove messages which have important information that you want to hang on to (although, that does beg the question, why are you storing important information on a website? Always keep backups of important info on your own PC, just in case)
However, we'd appreciate it if you could clean anything which is just taking up space like a series of "yeah", "me too", etc. messages
And, as always, be patient as I work to improve the overall experience on our site!