David Drummond
Member
I posted this on WXCHASE to address some concerns, but I wanted to CC it here:
Since Tim reopened and changed the registration process, there has been a HUGE number of new signups. By HUGE I mean well over 100, closer to 200 I think. One of the StormTrack staff has to go in and review each one of these, and then set up each account manually. As you can imagine, this is a time consuming process, and is in addition to regular moderating and just our own personal enjoyment reading/posting on the forum.
The mods do this voluntarily and on their own free time. If we added in giving a "we received your application and are reviewing it response" to everyone that applied, the time to get new accounts up and running would take even longer.
If anyone signed up after the change....and sent the required note to the proper address, then it WILL get reviewed ASAP. Please everyone try and have some patience with us on this.
On another note I am working on ways to streamline the server performance for the forums. Just to give an idea the kind of load it was under... the NOW thread for the 5/4 event recieved over 12,000 views before the forum crashed. The NOW thread for the 04/24 event received over 25,000 views before it crashed that night. Keep in mind this is run off a database and each view generates a number of database pulls. When people sit there and refresh the thread over and over, it eventually crashed. This was the primary reason the Target Area was restricted to members only for the present time. There was nothing malicious in the intent whatsoever. The server could only handle so much and something had to be sacrificed to get the load down. Absolutely no members were pruned to do this at that time.
The server is NOT a high-end server. In fact, it's a Celeron server with only 512mb ram. Some options are being looked at for getting a higher-end server. To that end, Tim has put up a donation page, which is often common for higher traffic forums that are non profit. You can see the details here:
http://www.stormtrack.org/donate.htm
Keep in mind we are all chasers too, and we are out chasing this time of year as well.
Sincerely,
~David Drummond, StormTrack Technical Admin
and all StormTrack Admins and Mods
Since Tim reopened and changed the registration process, there has been a HUGE number of new signups. By HUGE I mean well over 100, closer to 200 I think. One of the StormTrack staff has to go in and review each one of these, and then set up each account manually. As you can imagine, this is a time consuming process, and is in addition to regular moderating and just our own personal enjoyment reading/posting on the forum.
The mods do this voluntarily and on their own free time. If we added in giving a "we received your application and are reviewing it response" to everyone that applied, the time to get new accounts up and running would take even longer.
If anyone signed up after the change....and sent the required note to the proper address, then it WILL get reviewed ASAP. Please everyone try and have some patience with us on this.
On another note I am working on ways to streamline the server performance for the forums. Just to give an idea the kind of load it was under... the NOW thread for the 5/4 event recieved over 12,000 views before the forum crashed. The NOW thread for the 04/24 event received over 25,000 views before it crashed that night. Keep in mind this is run off a database and each view generates a number of database pulls. When people sit there and refresh the thread over and over, it eventually crashed. This was the primary reason the Target Area was restricted to members only for the present time. There was nothing malicious in the intent whatsoever. The server could only handle so much and something had to be sacrificed to get the load down. Absolutely no members were pruned to do this at that time.
The server is NOT a high-end server. In fact, it's a Celeron server with only 512mb ram. Some options are being looked at for getting a higher-end server. To that end, Tim has put up a donation page, which is often common for higher traffic forums that are non profit. You can see the details here:
http://www.stormtrack.org/donate.htm
Keep in mind we are all chasers too, and we are out chasing this time of year as well.
Sincerely,
~David Drummond, StormTrack Technical Admin
and all StormTrack Admins and Mods
