by Simon 36 Replies latest forum announcements
Hi Simon, thanks for all of your hard work! I emailed you early on in the conversion process, and I posted in the technical forum. I am able to log in under my old user name, rubadubdub, by using my old password, but I would like to be able to use my new user name which is Sail Away (different password).
Thanks,
Sail Away
Update:
I think I've fixed the IE posting issue. As I said earlier, the script that Google supplied as part of their service seems to have a problem with IE. It was working when I tested it but right now in production it's balked. I don't feel good relying on something that's been problematic so I re-developed my own simpler version to use.
It seems to work on all the browsers I've tested and so IE users should now be able to enjoy the same slick posting experience / auto-redirect without any workarounds.
Sorry, I didn't get as far with the user accounts as I intended to. Possibly as a result of redirecting the domain name over, Google's search engine bot decided to index the site. Normally, this isn't a problem as it just grabs a few things but I think it saw major changes and decided to go nuts.
There is a setting for webmasters to control how fast it will crawl a site which I had set. However, if they detect that the site is running on a Content Delivery Network (which the site now is) then the limits are discarded and they go full speed. The Google spider went berserk - it's possibly a direct link over their own network without having to go out onto the interwebs so it could go fast, really fast - several hundred requests per second. Because of the extra traffic the cloud service launched extra instances to satisfy the requests.
App engine runs on what's called "container" technology. Like a virtual machine, it's a little instance to serve your site. Instead of the 16Gb server the old site had been running on it now runs on either a 128Mb (yes, Mb!) or more instance. Your phone has more memory than the server that now runs JWD :)
For normal use it has 1, 2 or a few instances running throughout the day as demand fluctuates. When the search engine hit it there were 80+ instances and I didn't want to use the DoS protection to block the Google index - I want the site indexed, I just needed to control how fast it went. Sadly, Google don't honour the settings in robots.txt to set the crawl rate so I had to cobble together a rate-limiting throttle to send 429 responses to Google (a webservers way of saying "whoah, slow down pal!").
That worked but it took a lot of the time I was intending to spend on the user sign-in issues. It's also why some people may have seen a "quota exceeded" message for a short period as the site went over the billing limit I set.
One the plus side, we can cope with a lot of traffic if we need to and while it may have made things slightly slower, overall it coped very well and wasn't too noticeable.
Go cloud !
Test on IE 11 Win.7
Yes works fine Simon.
I miss the old feature that, for each post, showed the post # out of total posts - for example, post #365 of 399. Could that be added here?
Actually, Magnum, some kind of post numbering system would be very useful in keeping track of responses in a thread - especially a lively, busy one - and navigating/cross-referencing between other threads and posts.
If you, Simon, do not want to reintroduce the dates on posts, a post numbering system will be vital. Both dates and numbering would be helpful, though. It isn't always practical to quote every bit of text you're replying to and it would be handy to say which post is being referred to..
For instance, which is easier?
"Regarding Simon's post he made approximately 9 hours before this one on this thread - the one 10 posts down on the first page (or 5 posts down on the 2nd page if your page is set to 5 posts per page) ...."
Or,
"Regarding Simon's post #10 ...."
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Regarding some of the reasons I think reintroducing dates are important. See THIS THREAD and a comment I made approximately 2 days previous to this post, 14 posts down on the first page (using the 20 posts per page setup).
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It makes it a lot harder navigating through this massive site without a numbering (or dating) system in place. If individual posts could be hyperlinked to as well - even better!
Thanks for all your work Simon it's coming on really well.
I have a quick question when you get a minute.
Is there any way to get the url of a particular post so we can link a quote to the original post so other readers can see the context? I used to click on a little icon in the old site and paste it into the link.
Thanks
