Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Why has this website been corroding over the past 6 months?

The forums are slow, the galleries, even the classifieds.

Can't these people afford to buy decent webhosting services?

THis sucks.

They claim its not a problem with their end so who knows. It is irritating though.

EP
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Occupants not paying rent:
7 balls
2.1.10 corns(candy cane, creamsicle, ghost, 6 normal, 4 anery )
1 pueblan milk
1 everglades rat
1 cal. king
1 gray band king
1 w. hognose
1 bearded dragon
1 fish
1 mouse
3.3 cats

Yeah right. I've heard that one before. The check is in the mail too.

I just think it is rotten to charge people $40/month to post classifieds and then not allow them to get their money's worth.

People should wise up and ditch this site.

They are the only website that uses this archaic forum system too. Everyone else has moved on to phpBB2, which is far superior. Look at dendroboard.com for example.

Anyways, these guys must be taking in $50K/month on classifieds and they can't spend some of that on a better hosting provider and BB software?

Pfft.

>>Why has this website been corroding over the past 6 months?
>>
>>The forums are slow, the galleries, even the classifieds.
>>
>>Can't these people afford to buy decent webhosting services?
>>
>>THis sucks.

Yes we can, and do, every month buy decent web hosting services. The majority of our users can access the site with no
problems at all. Doing a tracert back to you however I found that your ISP, or their upstream provider (bellsouth.net) appears to be your specific performance culprit, with 120-128ms latency times between hops. I would contact them and see if they can determine where the problem is at their end.

Most of the performance problems that have been reported to us
turn out to be routing, ISP, and upstream provider issues, and
are not specifically related to our equipment, systems or connections to the net. These problems are unfortunately beyond
our control in most instances. If you are currently seeing site
performance problems and want to determine if it is you or us,
find a friend that uses a different ISP and have him access the site and tell you what his load times are.

Thanks for checking on the problems. I noticed the slowdown about 5 months ago and several of my co-workers logging in from other places noticed it as well.

We figured the server was laboring and you guys were stuck with a provider because of a contract. It is frustrating not being able to get to your site because it rocks and the classifieds are very useful.

Anyways, I guess it might be localized to our surrounding few counties. Most other sites access fast but yours may be traveling through more gateways depending on where your servers are located.

Last question. Have you guys thought about moving to a more robust forum system like phpBB2? A great example can be found at www.reefs.org forums. It certainly generates a lot of traffic but it might require some high-level programming know how. All I know is it is awesome for users and we generate a much more active community that way.

Thanks again for your very pleasant response too. I realize that I may have sounded overly harsh and I apologize for that.

Cheers.

>>
>>Last question. Have you guys thought about moving to a more robust forum system like phpBB2? A great example can be found at www.reefs.org forums. It certainly generates a lot of traffic but it might require some high-level programming know how. All I know is it is awesome for users and we generate a much more active community that way.
>>

It has been made known in the past that our software is:

* a custom written dbase
* written in house
* works on 12 of our web sites (kingsnake, ks canada, ks europe, exotichobbyist, insecthobbyist, aquariumhobbyist, pondhobbyist, doghobbyist, cathobbyist, birdhobbyist, horsehobbyist, and pethobbyist)
* supports over 500,000 registered users
* is designed to accomodate millions of messages
* is searchable / archivable
* has sub-forum capability
* has anti-spam and anti-virus features
* has sticky (pin-up) notes
* interfaces with our photo gallery system
* interfaces with our mail system
* interfaces with our advertising systems
* interfaces with our user registration system (which works with ALL our systems including our chat rooms)
* is spyderable by third party search engines
* has two different interface styles
* is considerably more secure than most message boards
* and is user customizeable/configurable

That I am told is the short list.

What the software isn't:

* a third-party freeware or cheapware type of "message board in a can" that seems to be used by almost every other site on the internet, is uncustomizable and/or limited customization, and regularly targeted by virus writers.
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PHWyvern

>>Thanks for checking on the problems. I noticed the slowdown about 5 months ago and several of my co-workers logging in from other places noticed it as well.
>>
>>We figured the server was laboring and you guys were stuck with a provider because of a contract. It is frustrating not being able to get to your site because it rocks and the classifieds are very useful.
>>
>>Anyways, I guess it might be localized to our surrounding few counties. Most other sites access fast but yours may be traveling through more gateways depending on where your servers are located.
>>

I am on dialup and usually do not have problems with the site being slow and if it is, it tends to be during peak usage hours so it's not unexpected. At work, we are on an ISDN connection and it's usually slower than dialup even though ISDN us supposed to be faster than dialup. Also, in the winter time when there are bad storms (snow, ice, etc.) some regions locally could go down so the internet traffic has to reroute through other hubs and the increased traffic going through fewer hubs kinda bogs it down like a traffic jam on a highway.

You might also want to run spyware/adware hunter programs on your computer. You could have some sneaky programs hiding on your computer running in the background that in general is slowing your computers performance and internet connection down. I'm pretty sure that is one of the big problems with our work's network being so bogged down.... people on the network not running their spyhunter programs regularly let alone updating the definition lists for it.
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PHWyvern