Another scenario is to not accept new members until we know what we've got.

I think that only helps us if we also made the board a closed forum. No unregistered lurkers.

Thus, a meara post replying to several people in one posts costs less then 18 individual small posts.

You are correct.

Except for static pages like the FAQ, every page view hits the database. Posting may hit it more than once -- I'm not sure.

Would it help to try to voluntarily limit fun, though contentless, posts--such as number-slutting or lots of -ma posts or Happy Birthdays or whatever?

Hee hee. It's like the solution to overpopulation turns out to be me dating all the supermodels.

We could take over some other board's chat room for all of the live chatting. This might work if there are people who consider their posts in Natter as ethereal and never to be read by anyone but those who are there right then and Java Cat. I think most people post things because they think they're worth posting, though, so they wouldn't want to waste them in a chat room.

I know that it was discussed to have people not just rest on the message center, because the refresh, of course, uses up resources. Could this be part of the problem? I try not to rest there, but sometimes do anyway, and I'm sure everyone else is like me, cuz, well, I sure am.

Should we be announcing some of this "how to conserve board resources" over in Press? Because I had no idea until today that leaving the message center up was a problem, nor that it would be better if I meara'ed, nor that I should set my posts per page count higher. I usually have a separate browser window for Buffistas, which sits merrily on the message center all day. I won't anymore, but I didn't know any better. (I assume this was discussed in BaBBB, where I never go because it's like overhearing Spanish. I understand many of the individual words, but little of what they mean when put together.)

Does it make a bit of difference if my message center only contains the threads I'm actively reading, not the ones I check out occassionally? I think Susan's got a good idea to consolidate what ideas we have come up with and make sure everyone knows. It's not a fix, but it might give us some more time to come to grips with things.

I'm off for the night, but have one more question. Can we just disable the automatic refresh alltogether for now? I like it, but it's certainly something we can live without. And if you leave the computer for any length of time, that's a lot of useless page hits.

Starting Friday the deathmatches will be suspended for two weeks. That'll be a good way of seeing how much damage they are doing.

Here's a quick answer to some of the questions (I'm wading through documenting the SQL, and what a dumb idea that was -- I should just toss it at y'all volunteers (and then run away in shame)).

Posting takes more resources than not posting, but really, the time spent composing the post when you could have been hitting refreshrefreshrefresh probably evens things out a bit.

The smaller any table is, the quicker any SQL operation is, so the less time any given connection involving it is open. Less concurrency, then.

I adore Kyan, still.

You can't kill Natter. I don't think it'll work. I suspect, shoudl you try and kill Bitches, Bitches will kill y'all.

let's research who the chattiest people are and just ban them.

Dare you.

Should we be announcing some of this "how to conserve board resources" over in Press? Because I had no idea until today that leaving the message center up was a problem, nor that it would be better if I meara'ed, nor that I should set my posts per page count higher.

I don't think these things don't make a lot of difference. They're like writing on both sides of your Post-It notes to conserve resources, while some bug is causing your printer to print 24-7. I wouldn't want people to feel guilty for not doing them. As with conservation, what will work is changing the system, not asking people to go against the flow.

. Can we just disable the automatic refresh alltogether for now?

Yes, this.