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.

Dare you.

Triple dog dare?

At the Bronze, to conserve bandwidth for people with slow connections, there was a huge effort put forth to stamp out wasteful posts. A post with just a shout out, put on the board five or six times, was contentless. Numberslutting was a waste of valuable board space. Four posts per hour was the rule (which wouldn't work in a non-linear format, but hey, if you've got nothing funny to say, go pitch to Leno).

Some of these things, "Timelies all! I'm here to poke the thread!" can be discouraged. Getting the word out? Hard. We'd need to put a bigass banner on the page explaining the sitch, and asking folks to curb their refreshes, at the least.

Go ahead and toss, ita. We won't mind. We can slog and you can slog and we can all slog together.

there was a huge effort put forth to stamp out wasteful posts. A post with just a shout out, put on the board five or six times, was contentless. Numberslutting was a waste of valuable board space.

I would guess that changing the system to allow only four posts per hour had a much greater effect than encouraging people not to do these things.

Well, we tend to have good manners.

I think if we asked (prominently) to eliminate certain things people would do so readily. It would be like spoiler policy-- everyone knows it and newbies occasionally need to be told.

I agree with Trudy on this. I think Buffistas value the board enough that they would be willing to think harder before posting and give up or consolidate some threads.

How about adding a note where Autorefresh was?

"We're sorry, autorefresh has been disabled for further study. Please move your mouse in an upward direction and select refresh/reload in your browser when a refresh is desired. Thank you - Buffista board admins."

or

"Auto Refresh is currently disabled. Thank you - Buffista board admins."