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."

Nilly can put "please e-mail your congratulations" on her announcements for a while, for example.

Scrappy is Wise and big hugs could go back chanel as well.

I've been thinking about things I do that could be adding to the problem, and I came up with two other suggestions I think might help lighten the load.

a) don't post just to tell people "insent".

b) don't make plans on the board to see people local to you.

I know that there are times when doing one or the other is going to be necessary, but if we encourage people not to do it unless they need to, it would lighten the load.

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.

At the actual!Bronze (not the Beta) - 4 posts per hour was completely user regulated. The admins. put it in the rules, but there was no code that prevented you from posting every two minutes. Instead, there were warrior!bitches who took care of that.

Just a few words in support of Movies and Music, because they've taken some spanking in this thread...

The movie thread has had 6954 posts since February 20th. Music has had 5517 posts since January 3rd. They are not huge drains on us. And I say that as someone who does not post there, and does post in the two resource-sucking threads (Natter and Bitches).

Although? What ita said about taking away Bitches.

Question about auto-refresh:

Do any tech-shaped people know, when the board does auto-refresh, does it count the X minutes on its own clock, or base it on exact seconds/minutes the user has been on the page? What I'm asking is, if it knows JoeSchmoe loaded Message Center at 3:23 and 24 seconds, and JoeSchmoe's refresh is set for 10 minutes, does it refresh for JoeSchmoe at 3:33 and 24 seconds, or just at 3:33? If it just rounds to the minute, and if enough users have their refresh set to the same amount of time, then that could account for a lot of the my sql connections being open at the same time.

If we don't/can't know, maybe we should completely disable auto-refresh and see what it does. The chance that 100 users will manually refresh at the exact same time is way lower, than that the board is refreshing them all at the same time.

there was no code that prevented you from posting every two minutes.

Okay, I guess I am wrong about what you can accomplish by appeals to the community. I can't believe that worked. Didn't the warrior bitches get tired of using all their four posts on community standards?

Didn't the warrior bitches get tired of using all their four posts on community standards?

They didn't use all their four posts on community standards. They included information about community standards in posts where they were also responding/posting on other things. So you'd get:

Allyson: Did Fury's wife co-write Go Fish ? Are you going to include any information about her on your site?

Kristen: Why do you think Tim Minear kills everyone?

BuffiIsSoFit: This is not a chat room. We have a 4 post per hour limit. You've just posted 6 times in 10 minutes. Check out the FAQ, and conform to board standards, or you'll be reported to your ISP.

UTTAD: The CoW is so a patriarchal organi(s)(z)ation. I don't care that Giles' grandmother was in it. You don't think the oppressed ever contribute to their own oppression? For heaven's sake, look at Helpless. No. Don't threaten me with clarrie. I'd say the same thing to her.

Cashmere: Did you see Spike's hair in Intervention ? Did you notice how it stayed that way throughout the rest of the season? Are the make-up people trying to telegraph a fundamental change in Spike's person, or did they just realize the look was really hot on JM?

Narrator: Do you think Angel and Xander will ever have a cross-over, in which they realize they're love is so pure?

The WB's Bronze was completely community/peer-pressure regulated. There wasn't a mod in sight. If someone posted a death threat or something, we'd contact Apollo (the webmaster) to delete it. Otherwise, it was all us. It did wear on the nerves, but the Bronze attracted a less mature population than we do here.

Now, the Bronze Beta has a flood control function, that prevents you from posting twice in 5 minutes. I think it's kind of Draconian, but it helps. It's a hinderance though, for grown-ups, when they have something they have to post, that just suddenly came up, and can't stick around. It also frustrates the visiting VIPs, who only have a limited time to post, so the webmaster (in theory, anyhow) did something to exempt the VIPs from flood control. Still? Over there - it's probably needed. The warrior!bitches loved the Bronze. The Beta? Not so much. It's become a haven for chatlice and their Kumbayah singing enablers. I don't know that I'd recommend having that here.

I do think we could live without number slutting, and confine our birthday wishes to the top of posts with other content.

If it just rounds to the minute, and if enough users have their refresh set to the same amount of time, then that could account for a lot of the my sql connections being open at the same time.

I don't know the answer to that, but it's an interesting theory. Anyone? Bueller?

I am starting to feel that every post I make is slowly killing the board, but I do have to say that at this point killing natter and bitches will basically kill the Buffistas. I think that we'll just go to Peoplesforum or something, and then what is the point of conserving resources for people who are not us?

If it just rounds to the minute, and if enough users have their refresh set to the same amount of time, then that could account for a lot of the my sql connections being open at the same time.

I don't know the answer to that, but it's an interesting theory. Anyone? Bueller?

Thanks, Jon. It just seems to me, even if we have an average of 180 unique posters in a given month (and I realize that 180 wasn't technically an average - I'm guestimating), it's still frigging unlikely that over half of them would try to load a page and/or post at the same moment.

I am starting to feel that every post I make is slowly killing the board, but I do have to say that at this point killing natter and bitches will basically kill the Buffistas. I think that we'll just go to Peoplesforum or something, and then what is the point of conserving resources for people who are not us?

I agree Sophia. A goodly part of me wants to kill Natter, but admittedly, that's because I'm in a non-Natter mode lately. I run hot and cold on it. But I feel like, They Can Pry Bitches From My Cold, Dead Hands, and understand committed Natter-residents would feel the same way about Natter. So I don't think we should cut off our limbs, just the moles on them.

I think we can give up the number slutting. It's fun, but it's a waste. We're growed ups. I think we hold our birthday salutations and bracket hugs for the hurting, until we're actually going to post about other things as well. I think we can modify our behavior, understanding it's like getting our cholesterol levels down under 200.

I've suggested cuts in Lightbulb, that would leave us with a net of 10 fewer threads. I've explained my reasoning behind doing this at the bottom of the post. People will probably hate it, but I think it could help some.