Endor

Since I scan FlyerTalk daily, I always read the posts by selecting "Click Here To View Today's Active Topics (all public forums)." I like to scan through everything and read what's of interest to me regardless of forum. I wish that this link appeared on the front page--with the new change, now I have have to go through 3 screens to get to it (assuming I start at the main page).

Randy Petersen

Well, since it was Monsay when Dan posted an update for you all, I guess it's not to be expected that we have the Monday morning quarterbacks arriving to practice. The three things that stood out most from the comments so far, given that most of you seem to be qualified "experts" on servers and bulletin boards. 1) My FlyerTalk. You're really too late. When the board was introduced back on 1998, the orginal plan called for a custom interface of forums each member could determine. To date, after three years, we have yet to find any board platform that allows such. Have we looked? Well, having invested in licenses to test about 5 other platforms, I'd say we've looked high and low. But since you all seem to know so much, why not supply us with the name and tested perfprmance for such a board replacement. You see, that will be of far more use to us than assuming we don't know anything. 2) More RAM. Gee, I guess the 2 gigs of RAM we're now using doesn't stand for much. How's that compare to the 64k you have in your little Compaq? Truth is we have continued to invest in these things. 3) moving to a 3rd party Web hosting company. You might all be interested to know that we've always been in a cluster firm. Any company? Well, we moved several times over the year to bigger and better netowrks and services. Currently we use Verio. Ever heard of them? Well, owned by NTT, they are considered the largest Web hosting company in the world, right up there with Exodus and others. Bigger is not best. That's always a $64 question but being that big does allow us access to all the latest and greatest technology services for performance and certainly bandwidth.

Now, to back track a little. Read very close the comments by Dan. We did not want to change the user interface, we like the way it was. However, you will notice that Dan references "the creators of UBB". That's right, we wanted the absolute best advice for your board. We've used the regular Tech help desk for UBB all this time, but given the traffic volume on FT, we wanted to be absolute sure we had the best advice money could buy. So what did we do? That's right, we hired (that means paid a lot more) to get the attention of the guy who wrote the orginal code for UBB. No, he doesn't regularly staff the help desk anymore, since they boast they have over 12,000 licenses out there for UBB making it the most popular bulletin board engine in the world. What Dan outlined for you is what he recommnded given our traffic. Last month alone, FlyerTalk pushed 130 gigs of data on the server. This month looks like that will spike to 180 gigs because of last weeks trajedy and the interest in it. Now, all you internet guys and gals, go back to your resources and ask around, is pushing 180 gigs of data a lot of data for some little old bulletin board to have for traffic. Chances are they will all tell you - that is one hell of a lot of data. Bottom line, this is a major board for traffic and one that i am starting to think hasn't yet earned the respect it deserves from some of it's users. Contrary to what you may think, we didn't just fall off the turnip truck, we all don't use Front Page to design the Web site and we didn't learn to run servers from "The Dummies Guide" and we aren't using a dial up server of an old Compaq computer sitting in my closet in an unused bedrrom at home.

As for not knowing how you use the board? Gee, the fact that we know that from Jan 1 to Jun 30 that members of the board in the 6 motnh period only accessed threads from the year 2000 and before a mere 812 times. Clue, there are almost 600,000 threads on this board, and in that 6-month period we had just over 2 million total user sessions and 812 of those sessions were for old data. That is what slows the server, lifting all that data when someone uses any of the threads. Could someone figure out this percentage for me, my calculator doesn't have that many decimal places. Again, advice of the guy who wrote the code for UBB. We are really spending a lot of money and time searching for performance solutions for you. Maybe the solutions is to leave things the way they are and simply add filters to the board that delete complaints about being slow. That way we'd all think things are luvy-duvy. You all go ahead with whatever you want to post here, I'm not reading any of it until a month from now whaen we have completed all the changes we want to do to make FT a better place to surf. Feel free to complain everyday, but it only makes our jobs not much fun. Because of staging issues with servers, changing pointers for the DNS with Network Solutions and a host of other things, it's not as easy as you might think. Dan, Michael, Tim, John, Keary, Mikel, Daryn and Lisa have over time earned my respect here. And when people come to pitch us for new technology and when we do tech business with the likes of American Express and others, they always go out of their way to compliment the staff on their knowledge. So far, we've not met a technology partner who we can't converse at with the same level of conversation.

Well anyway, sorry if i bored you.

amazing nj

Randy and staff: I am not complaining, just asking:

could you please fix the "hop to" bar. It is about one and a quarter screens wide since the new format was introduced yesterday.

clacko

i would like to second the above mention of the "go to bar" being too wide . i have the problem w/ other posts, but figured that because i use a mac ibook w/ aol 5, that might be a problem. thanks, don...... also, i've been trying to buy somethings thru webflyer & gave up. can't get there . have the same prob w/aolaadvantage. i just give up!........ also, i wan't you people to know that i have spent a lot of time going thru your sites. & like the info. also, is there a 'whatever" to click on to find out how to help sponsor your bb's?

sendoisan

Randy - fine idea to limit 'search' to 12 months, if that speeds things up and frees up resources, and as you point out the number of folks using the search facility past that window is very small, and you will archive it anyway.

Also agree with others the "go to" bar is far too wide for me to even use. There is nothing to "click" onto at right for me at least. To navigate around now takes 10 minutes to several forums I like reading, not one click as before. Sorry, I dislike it. Must agree entirely with MrLimo comment above:



[This message has been edited by sendoisan (edited 09-18-2001).]

LAX 1K

I have to agree with Randy's post and compliment him on posting it. I am sure Randy does not want to post something like this especially on how valuable and enjoyable Flyertalk has been. I have been distressed over the last 6-9 months frequenting flyertalk. We lost some really good members or have their voices squelched by alot of people who just want from this board.

As many services online have turned into pay services, pushing more advertisement, and cutting services back, Randy and the Flyertalk team has continued to strengthen Flyertalk as its popularity and usefulness grows. It is sad that at a time of such uneasiness in the travel business, people are worried about how the site works and that "they hate it". I am happy I can get on to this bulletin board and share information and gain information from other frequent flyers. At a time like this, the value of such an online forum is priceless.

Please, we should be praising the flyertalk team for continuing to improve this bulletin board and not criticizing it. I really long for the days when we shared our secrets, bonuses and the ins and outs of the frequent flyer programs.

Please think before you post. This is a gift from the Flyertalk team for us to enjoy, a priveledge, not a right. Please do not make this site more trouble than it is worth for Randy and his team.

Flyertalk, keep up the great work!!

CrazyOne

You'll notice I'm not a huge long-term user at FlyerTalk (though I do remember lurking before the 4-way-split change, just vaguely remember). But I would agree that given UBB as a platform, it's amazing the amount of users and posts that are handled here.

I have two words for high-volume message boards, though: Web Crossing. Possibly Randy in mentioning that they've tried several will know why they dismissed this one if they've tried it. I know it would solve the personal list of forums feature, though (even though I personally never use web-based forums that way).

Just a thought. If Web Crossing is *not* one of the platforms that were investigated in the past, it could be worth a look. I don't know how long you're going to be able to patch this UBB together.

SkyMiler

Interesting when you got back to an older thread, (see example below) that the settings re the "hop to" box are still as there WERE back before last Monday! So the present settings might easily be adjusted by Michael to how it was then - in respect to that box at least.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/Forum...ML/000436.html

SMessier

Pointing out the obvious it seems, but from the complaints here it appears that many are not taking advantage of what, for me, was the solution.

Those who only read a few specific forums can easily create a bookmark (what a radical idea!) for each of his/her favorite forum(s), put all these in a FlyerTalk folder under the Favorites menu (in IE), and not have to worry about opening screen displaying or not displaying direct links to desired forums.

Active threads of the day: http://www.flyertalk.com/forumcgi/se...ction=getdaily

Even with a new DSL connection, I don't know why one would want to bother loading up a screen full with the forum list just to click on 4 or 5 of the forums. (Or even more: my FT folder includes 15 forums or so).