As an experiment to try to improve the forum speed, I’m just about to set up a couple of “Archive” forums - one for the public discussion and one for the members discussion.
Each will be read-only (no new posting or replies) and will contain all the posts older than 3 months. The archives can also be searched.
Posts newer than 3 months will continue to be kept in the main Public and Members discussion areas.
I’d like to leave it this way for a week or so, both to see whether the speed improves noticably and also to see whether you all strongly prefer to have the entire history of posts in one location rather than having the archives.
For the next hour or so you may see a few “weird” things in the forums - particularly if I screw up - but hopefully all should be stable again soon.
One side-effect of the forum split seems to be broken links pointing to older messages. I think the forum-id is part of the link url, so with the change they’re broken. Don’t know if there’s an easy fix for that one.
I wonder if the category filtering is an issue with the speed? Perhaps you might try turning it off briefly, if such a thing is possible.
IF it’s part of the problem, it might be worth considering if it’s proven to be worthwhile. While I was one of the people pushing for breaking up the forums into topics, now that it is implemented as filtering I personally find that I never think about or use the categories other than when posting a message. When searching I always search everything. And it does take up a lot of space on the screen. I wonder if others find the categories/filtering helpful or if it was one of those ideas that sounded good at the time but doesn’t really help much? Of course, this would be irrelevant if it’s not part of the speed problem!
I hesitate to sound critical as I know that this was a lot of work to implement. I should add that I think the COPA website is the shining star of the organization…the communications tool that holds us all together. You should be proud of the work you have done and know that your work is greatly appreciated.
There’s a relatively easy fix but let’s wait and see if the change is permanent first. I haven’t seen much change in the forum speed, but let’s give it this week and see what happens.
I agree with Tim. I first thought the categories were a great idea, but I never use them. They did coincide with definite “hesitation” with our web site. My 2 cents.