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