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Currently, EN World is generating more subscription emails than the sendmail process can handle - causing a delay of several hours. This delay is compounded by more mails being added to the list, and more. A very large percentage of these mails are bouncing back to EN World, causing it to run even slower.
There is a chance we may hve to force-unsubscribe everyone from the forums to which they are subscribed. What I need from everyone is to check their emails - make sure that they are accurate and able to receive mail - before you resubscribe. I'm looking at other settings and possibilities to try and prevent from having to do this, some way of increasing the speed with which emails are processed. The problem is that while this is going on, the whole server drags until they're processed, and while more mails keep getting piled on... You get the idea.
For example, there are 250 people subscribed to the General discussion forum for instant email notification. That means every time people are posting, and replying, in that forum 250 emails are getting sent out. As you can imagine, this is creating quite a backlog of mail! And I can't believe that anywhere NEAR 250 people are checking every one of those emails to see if it's something they want to reply to. (Well, maybe Crothian.... )
And how many of those e-mails are going to dead accounts?
Not that I set policy or anything, but geeze, yes. Either force-unsubscribe everyone, or at least all those who haven't posted to (or maybe visited, if that information is available) the forums in some period of time.
Yikes, I did not realize people actually subscribed to entire forums. That sounds like a scary amount of email.
Most of threads to which I am subscribed are for reference purposes only. I set them to no email and just check them when I feel the need. I only subscribe to a thread if I am asking a question and don't want to forget to check back for all the helpful answers.
Will we lose subscriptions if they are set to no email?
__________________ "I urge you to make up a simplified version of the D&D game for play with as many of [your children] as are now willing and able to play. The thrill of the adventure and rolling of the dice is likely to make them devoted gamers ever after."
- Col_Pladoh's advice to me, and my advice to you.
I'm afraid vbulletin doesn't allow me to differentiate the kind of subscriptions. I already thought of that - the daily digest, weekly digest, etc are NOT as bad.
I'm going to start with 30 day subscription removal, and work from there.
Edit: For forum subscriptions, I was able to remove all the instant notification ones. That was, sadly, the vast majority of them! vBulletin still needs to process it's old queue, but I may restart the server and clean it out if the queue is still persisting.
30 day subscription removal? Does that mean they'd be back after 30 days?
__________________ Bring on the Funk.
Talk hard. My internet connection sucks. Wanna run a game? Try EN World's own PbP boards! It's loads of fun. Here are my games so far.
Other stuff:
Spoiler:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kemrain
- Kemrain the Medicated for Your Pleasure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kemrain
I pity the thread that talks about Mr. T.
- Kemrain the Sigged.
Manamana.
Hey Houston EN Worlders! Interested in Getting together? Let's meet up and have lunch or something!
30 day subscription removal? Does that mean they'd be back after 30 days?
No, it means all subscriptions that were set 30 days ago or longer. We're going under the assumption that anyone who has subscribed to a thread in the last 30 days has a valid email address on their account.
Oh, just forum subscriptions, right? I was worried I might have to dig up threads.
__________________ Bring on the Funk.
Talk hard. My internet connection sucks. Wanna run a game? Try EN World's own PbP boards! It's loads of fun. Here are my games so far.
Other stuff:
Spoiler:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kemrain
- Kemrain the Medicated for Your Pleasure.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kemrain
I pity the thread that talks about Mr. T.
- Kemrain the Sigged.
Manamana.
Hey Houston EN Worlders! Interested in Getting together? Let's meet up and have lunch or something!
There is a chance we may hve to force-unsubscribe everyone from the forums to which they are subscribed. What I need from everyone is to check their emails - make sure that they are accurate and able to receive mail - before you resubscribe.
Anyone subscribed with an inaccurate email doesn't know they are subscribed because they aren't getting the notifications (so asking them to double check before they resubscribe is perhaps a bit pointless ).
Quote:
Originally Posted by Twin Rose
For example, there are 250 people subscribed to the General discussion forum for instant email notification. That means every time people are posting, and replying, in that forum 250 emails are getting sent out. As you can imagine, this is creating quite a backlog of mail! And I can't believe that anywhere NEAR 250 people are checking every one of those emails to see if it's something they want to reply to. (Well, maybe Crothian.... )
The busier forums shouldn't allow for subscription. Just ask those who wish to subscribe to the General forum to remind themselves that anytime they aren't looking directly at the forum, someone is probably posting something new.
Doing this seems to have cut down - vastly - on the number of returned mails getting sent to EN World. That's definately a good thing performance wise.
I've been cleaning up extraneous queries as well. (People will notice the 'thread similar' links are gone, at least for the time being, for example). We're still running at higher than acceptable queries per second (800+!) but this is down from where it was. In fact, the number of broken/lost connections is down from about 6.5% to about 4% (meaning, if you find a single page is slow to load one time, the chance of it happening again is reduced in that way).
I'll be continuing to optimize and find every little bottleneck I can!
__________________ - Piratecat, EN World Admin
Currently editing the 4e War of the Burning Sky adventure path. Support EN Publishing, get excellent modules!
Ditto Joe Blank. Most of my subscriptions are to small, low reply threads that had nifty world building ideas in them.
Make that, were....
Jesus, give us a heads up next time so we can bookmark them, maybe?
I gave a couple of hours, the best I could. The number of emails being pushed into the queue were exceeding the number being processed - by a pretty fair amount. What I suspect was going on was replies to various story hours, old subscribed threads, etc, from people returning from Gen Con.
An interesting side note is that while we were all at Gen Con, the site was apparently running smooth as glass. I wonder if it's not something the people who went to Gen Con do on a regular basis that others don't use... Perhaps extensive searches? I don't know. Could be something to do with review moderation - I think just about all the staff reviewers were there.
Ah, I was just going by what Morrus told me when I got back. (He said I was bad luck, but then I got to thinking maybe there WAS something going on).
Oh, unquestionably, you're bad luck. Don't get me wrong. I remember that boat trip we took up the river. The bullet in my leg still aches on cold winter evenings. Still, we got rid of the body so I shouldn't complain.
Ditto Joe Blank. Most of my subscriptions are to small, low reply threads that had nifty world building ideas in them.
Make that, were....
Jesus, give us a heads up next time so we can bookmark them, maybe?
You caused me to panic. But have you checked your subsribed threads? Mine are all still there, including one with no replies since January 2004.
Twin Rose, I'm still unclear, did you just delete forum subscriptions or thread subscriptions too.
If you meant to delete everyone's thread subscriptions, and I was somehow missed, the please pretend I never posted this. This is not the thread reply you are looking for. Move along.
__________________ "I urge you to make up a simplified version of the D&D game for play with as many of [your children] as are now willing and able to play. The thrill of the adventure and rolling of the dice is likely to make them devoted gamers ever after."
- Col_Pladoh's advice to me, and my advice to you.
Anyone subscribed with an inaccurate email doesn't know they are subscribed because they aren't getting the notifications (so asking them to double check before they resubscribe is perhaps a bit pointless ).
Asking them by e-mail would indeed be pointless. Asking them via a well placed note on the boards (like, in the process of subscribing) would not.
)
).
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