The maddening thing to me is went over for a look see then asked who I could privately speak to regarding what I can glean from an examination of the output code. It seems you have to go through a "customer service" department.
I've worked in cust-serv -- their entire job is making you
think something is being done while nothing is being done. I have better things to do than try to convince some moron making WA state minimum wage (or less if they're outsourcing) that I know what the hell I'm talking about.
I told them in February 06 just before I left when it was mentioned to me that they were merging accounts that it was probably not a good idea, and in any event to be careful. Apparently they weren't careful.
Consider their archiving code for a moment. When it was mentioned to me I thought it was a neat idea but didn't really think further on it. I considered writing such a module for ENWorld and discussed as much on vbulletin.com with the people who've been working with MySQL since the early 90's - the thing is due to the structure of MyISAM tables the size of the post and thread tables is fairly irrelevant to most searches since any search starts end of file and moves backwards across the disk. Archiving isn't necessarily that helpful even on a large board.
ENWorld has about 1/2 the threads of the WotC boards, it also has 1/4th the hardware yet it gets along very well. Yeah, we got bumps, particularly with the new wiki - but nothing that mandates taking the boards down every two days. Emergency maintenance on the 4th of July -that's got to be pretty damn bad.
They are trying to get vbulletin to do something it isn't designed to do - scale across multiple servers. What is worse they are fighting the grain of the software. There's a better way - here I'll explain what I'd do publically since the tech staff over there has cloistered themselves in an Ivory Tower anyway.
First off I'd make up my mind whether I'm using Microsucks ASP technology or PHP. There are forum packages written in ASP. They aren't as *good* as vbulletin, but they are functional and in any event would interface with the rest of the software much more smoothly and would smooth out the hiring requirements of the tech department. If they do still want to use vbulletin then let it alone - don't try mixing PHP and ASP adds an uncessary layer of complexity.
Don't try to mirror the whole damn forum front end on two machines. Get one machine to do PHP parsing - that's it, and one or two machines to handle mySQL. Still have money to throw at the problem? Put all static files (images mostly) on their own machine and domain it to
http://images.wizards.com or some such. While your at it the css and javascripts can be placed there as well.
Pay attention to what your mixing guys. You're loading two AJAX frameworks on the wotc boards - prototype.js and sajax. Prototype is KNOWN to have issues with all versions of vbulletin prior to 3.7.0 (
Note bene: I pestered Jelsoft throughout the vbulletin 3.7 beta to get this issue resolved and they caved at revision 3.7 beta 5
-- that's why prototype is used here). The javascript suite at that board has all the appearance of script grabbing by a script kiddie -- there's no sign that the person in charge knows anything about javascript beyond the most rudimentary syntax.
Harsh. Probably. Had they kept communication channels open then I would have used those channels. As it stands I can only rant. If I'm going to rant I might as well do it from the safety of a board where I know the moderators won't get all miffed and delete the post mysteriously -- there's been far too many accusations of that on the WotC boards for it not to be the case.
They need a new tech admin. Unfortunately any tech admin who knows what the hell they are doing isn't going to touch that hornet's nest of screw ups without a lot of incentive. I know I for one don't want anything to do with it - it reeks of the tech having to try to meet unreasonable demands from some VP named Beuller who has never and will never set foot on the damn boards but will happily see them messed up in pursuit of his grand DDI vision.
I'll add this last note though - When I left it wasn't broke.
![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
