| Author | Subject: Impending problem - NOTICE!! |
| Webmaster | Posted At 15:14:56 06/11/2001
I just got the following message from my domain hosting service today: The domain herpwantads.com is over pace for web/ftp traffic in the month of Jun. The total traffic for the month so far is 3.086 GB. The projection for this month is 10.286 GB. The limit on your account type is 8 GB. Please take steps to reduce traffic or upgrade your account status, or the domain may be disabled. Thank you for your attention. OLM OK, I have had to upgrade twice already and this has been money coming out of my pocket. This has been king of fun (in a sick kind of way), but it's going to stop being fun when a LOT of money has to come out of my pocket to maintain this site. Right now I am checking into upgrade options. I don't know which way I am going to bounce with this, so I just wanted you all to be aware that some changes might be in store. The BIG problem is that eggs are going to start hatching in less than a month and I don't have a reasonable window of opportunity to implement anything that is going to require major time and effort on my part. Stay tuned.... |
| Mickey Hinkle |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4402.html Posted At 15:34:16 06/11/2001 How do they calculate your traffic out of curiosity.Maybe the people using the board can help. Do they do it by the number of hits you recieve Do they only count the people who post Im just asking because I, like many other people Im sure, am guilty of stopping in 5-20 times a day just to keep updated on what may or may not be happening in the herp community.By doing this am I costing you money every time I stop by?If so I would stop coming in soo many times a day, and Im sure others (well some) would do the same out of kindness. And if that is the case, is their any way you could make people put in the email address of the person they are complaining about or praising in.That way maybe an automatic email could go out to them informing them their name has been placed on the board for one reason or another.Im no computer wiz, and that may be too much work for what its worth, but its an idea. Mickey |
| Webmaster |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4405.html Posted At 16:11:08 06/11/2001 Mickey, It has to do with the number of people in a round-about way. Each time anyone visits this page, they download the file, which is over 200K now. If you do that 10 times a day, you have just become responsible for 2 megabytes of transfers. Each message you read adds to the totals. And every night I have an indexing program being run for the KEYWORD SEARCH program that generates a file that is around 2.5 megabytes. I'm not sure how that adds to the transfer total when someone does a search, but it certainly must add something. Last week this site (HerpWantAds.com) got over 97,000 hits. This includes the Board of Inquiry, Herps For Sale, and Herps Wanted message boards combined. And the trend is definitely upwards.  One possibility might be to break off the Board of Inquiry into it's own domain. I already have BoardOfInquiry.com reserved, so maybe that will work. But it would still be money coming out of my pocket to have another active domain, so I need to give this some serious thought. This whole Board of Inquiry thing was born when someone screwed me with $2,000 in bad checks and I wanted to make his name public. I just expanded on that slightly (or at least I thought at the time) to make it an open message board where other people could post their experiences as well. I had no idea it would get this popular. As for your request for automatic emails, believe me, that would not be easy to do. Just trying to get people to spell the email addresses correctly would be a MAJOR PITB. |
| Kathryn Hall |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4406.html Posted At 16:14:44 06/11/2001 Is there any way you can possibly archive the older posts on a second page, with a link to them? This would lower the amount of data a person downloads each time they visit the page. It hides some data unfortunately, but those of us out there without DSL/Cablemodems/Broadband would certainly appreciate a reduction in the amount of data we have to download at one time. |
| Tony Basica |
I hate to say this
4417.html Posted At 19:37:38 06/11/2001 BUT YOU NEED TO BE MUCH MORE STRICT WITH POSTS!! When people post the same person over and over it takes up space, Maybe don't allow immediate access to the list, make the first page strickly either a search button or a button to add a new person to the list ??? Or you need co-webmasters to seriously monitor the board. Just a few ideas, although I'm not sure it will make a difference deleting any files but it might. Anyway keep up the good work. Tony Basica |
| Ian Dungan / PlanetHerp.com |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4418.html Posted At 19:56:40 06/11/2001 maybe we could all pitch in and help out with the money problem,every little bit helps. :) |
| John A |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4420.html Posted At 20:17:02 06/11/2001 I think if the webmaster asked for donations and put his address here a lot of people could send him say 20 bucks or so Every bit i am sure would help, This forum is very useful Everybody that found a good deal here could help keep it going Apple |
| chad osborne |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4431.html Posted At 23:52:03 06/11/2001 I think you guys misssed the point. Read "The Webmaster's" post about the eggs. |
| Brian Conley |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4478.html Posted At 06:42:07 06/13/2001 Webmaster, why not delete some of the older posts. Especially, the inquiries that got no response or ones were a question was asked and answered a year ago. Just an idea. Brian |
| Webmaster |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4480.html Posted At 08:46:36 06/13/2001 I've gotten a lot of good suggestions of how best to handle this situation and have implemented a couple of them. Some of the rest of the suggestions, although having merit, were either unfeasible or impractical, at least at this time. I'll itemize a few of them: Deleting older posts will be self defeating considering the purpose of this board. Suppose you posted a message about someone that scammed you out of money and every month, two months, or six months, the message you posted got deleted. How many times would you be willing to keep on posting it before you got tired of doing that? Bad guys never go away. As for donations, no, I'm not in the position yet where I need financial aid to keep this all running. I did upgrade the service (once again), but the next upgrades are going to start getting rather expensive. If it reaches the point where it just gets too expensive for me to keep this up, then I will be considering going to a new type of message board system that will be accessible through a minimal ($20 per year?) paid registration system. This will kill two birds with one stone. It will give me financial incentive to keep up the work load presented to me keeping this message board functional and running well, and also will put an end to anonymous postings for good. But that's down the road a bit. I am now paying (or at least I applied for it) 10 gigabytes of monthly traffic on this site. I will be rather ruthless in the future about deleting threads that are not appropriate and messages violating the rules. I will also implement some other suggestions about removing the graphics buttons and offload my rules at the top of the page onto a separate document that won't load each time someone visits this page. That should help keep the bandwidth requirements down somewhat. My idea of offloading this Board of Inquiry board onto it's own domain won't work. At least not easily. Whomever wrote the software for this message board system implemented the linking messages via absolute addressing and not relative addressing. What that means is that the entire message forum cannot be relocated without manually editing EVERY link on the board to point to the new domain it will reside on. Quite frankly, I don't have that kind of time. There is a function in the message board maintenance program to archive threads, but from what I saw of it, it is basically useless. It just copies the threads as text files and there is no way to reference them any longer to view them. For instance, this thread would only have the name of 4399.html, without any reference to what it is about. I could link them into the indexing scheme to include them in the keyword search program, but I'm not sure what would happen if someone tried to reply to one of those archived posts. Either it would fail, which would aggravate people, or it would succeed, which would cause one heck of a mess. What I would REALLY like to do is to write my own message board system specific to the way I would like to see this work. But such a project is a LONG way down the road. Maybe if some of the snakes I hatch out have bites that can cure cancer I'll be able to sell enough of them to retire from my day job and play with snakes and this web stuff all day long. But until that time, you all are stuck with only what I can provide at this time. |
| Kathryn Hall |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4484.html Posted At 11:48:36 06/13/2001 Hrmm... :) Maybe you could ask others to design a new forum for you? Some sort of contest maybe, where you post approximately what you're looking for in a bboard system, and the first person to come up with a system you like and fits all your needs, wins? Just a thought... :) -Kat |
| Kathryn Hall |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4485.html Posted At 11:49:25 06/13/2001 Er.. make that, first person to actually code the system themselves that you like, etc... :) |
| Entheos Nyx |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4486.html Posted At 14:22:52 06/13/2001 Instead of simply deleting the posts, is there a way you can archive them off the main page? If users need to search for a name, then, they can search the archives. The LONG text file before the actual forum would be better served as a splash page (with a much smaller and easier to read font - 2pt Verdana, perhaps) before the actual forum loads. Nyx |
| Tom B |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4609.html Posted At 19:35:06 06/16/2001 A site that gets 97,000 hits per week should be attractive to anyone wanting to advertise. Have you considered selling space for banner ads? |
| brian |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4612.html Posted At 22:31:47 06/16/2001 what if you do like some other sited delet all adds at the first of each month? if someone hasnbt sold the reptile they will just put it back on that will eliminate most of the adds that are already sold just a sugestion. hope it help and thanks for makeing this site for fellow herp lovers thanks again |
| Webmaster |
Re: Impending problem - NOTICE!!
4618.html Posted At 00:42:03 06/17/2001 Advertising would be a catch-22. Posting banners and the like will just increase the bandwidth requirements since it would be loaded each time the page is loaded. If you will all notice, I took down my own sponsor banner just for that very reason. Also removed the graphics buttons and replaced them with text. All in an effort to reduce bandwidth. I do go through the Herps For Sale and Herps Wanted boards quite frequently and delete old messages. But I don't just delete all of them at the beginning of the month. I do a kind of rolling deletion where I delete the records to keep one month's worth of messages on the boards at all times and delete those older than the date I do the maintenance. I think this is a better way to do it and allows everyone to have their message remain on the board for at least a month, no matter when it is posted. I tend to do this every 5 days or so. I've already addressed the problems associated with archiving messages earlier. We'll see if the changes I've done keep me from exceeding my bandwidth quota again in the near future. |