another suggestion to cut bandwith

[BrooklynKnight]

Merge D&D Rules and House Rules

People can just use a House Rules tag to distguish House rules posts.

I think some other boards can be merged too, but i'll consider and list the justifications of that later.

[Crothian]

That's a bad idea. With only 25 threads being shown now, that's really a low amount of each one.

[Crothian]

At the very top of this thread (scrolling as high as I can go) I see this message:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /http/forums/includes/functions.php on line 5448

Just thought it a little odd

[LightPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Crothian

At the very top of this thread (scrolling as high as I can go) I see this message:

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /http/forums/includes/functions.php on line 5448

Just thought it a little odd

Not seeing anything of the sort. Could it be left over from the database upgrade?

I also think merging House Rules and Rules is a bad idea. One, I don't think it would really do that much to lower bandwidth. Two, there's no need to confuse people looking for rules questions with all sorts of house rules. Three, my personal view of HR is that it's for all of the d20 systems, with the possible exception of d20 Modern, which would go in that forum. Fourth, HR is about a third the size of Rules - that's unfair to burden each forum with the other. Imagine if every fourth post in General was about computers. Or if three out of four posts in General were about computers. Finally, you're combining the third and second biggest forums together - that just increases page views and such.

Really, I think the majority of the bandwidth problems are coming from General RPG and possibly D&D Rules. I mean, the rest of the forums besides those two are still only 431,000 posts - that's still less than General alone! In fact, those two forums account for about 59% of all the posts on this messageboard. I'm willing to bet that percentage is only increasing.

I actually just thought of this, and I'm ashamed I didn't think of it before, but what really needs to be done is for part of the boards to be archived. That way you're splitting off a good deal of the ~1.05 million posts (not counting the Moderator's forum, which probably doesn't add anything significant) so the pages don't have to continually reference a huge database. How much bandwidth is being wasted on threads no one ever reads?

[BrooklynKnight]

Originally Posted by Crothian

That's a bad idea. With only 25 threads being shown now, that's really a low amount of each one.

So what? General is FAR more active and FAR more important (IMNSHO).
If we need to save bandwith then fine. Rules are rules and they can share one forum.

[Piratecat]

Not gonna happen.

1. This will have zero effect on bandwidth.

2. It would irritate everyone who uses Rules and House Rules. This includes me.

3. It would make it extremely difficult to track down threads.

4. In my opinion, as a pure D&D site Rules is probably more important than General discussion. They both have their value, of course, and we're not going to get rid of either.

Bandwidth usage comes from the amount of data being called, not the number of forums. For instance, we're messing around with limiting the size of attachments, because these contribute significantly to the amount of bandwidth used without providing any gain over a certain size.

[LightPhoenix]

Originally Posted by ArthurQ

So what? General is FAR more active and FAR more important (IMNSHO).

Not to piss on your parade or anything, but this is first and foremost a D&D site. Suggesting that ANY forum is more important than Rules and House Rules is just downright ludicrous.