Chance of unsubscribing

Twin Rose · Aug 16, 2006

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....

)

Umbran · Aug 16, 2006

Whoah, nelly!

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.

JoeBlank · Aug 16, 2006

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?

Twin Rose · Aug 16, 2006

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.

Jdvn1 · Aug 16, 2006

30 day subscription removal? Does that mean they'd be back after 30 days?

Twin Rose · Aug 16, 2006

Jdvn1 said:
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.

Jdvn1 · Aug 16, 2006

Oh, just forum subscriptions, right? I was worried I might have to dig up threads.

Mark CMG · Aug 16, 2006

Twin Rose said:
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

).

Twin Rose said:
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.

Twin Rose · Aug 17, 2006

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!