hmmm .. I've had to use a "sonymediasoftware" link to get here and NOT "mediasoftware.sonypictures" wh8ch WAS working yesterday - Go figure?

G

I had to put in the Sony website data in again to get it to work. However, I wish they would be able to handle pictures like the "Klipsch" forum where you just click an icon and the picture is there instead of all this "programmers" baloney.
JJK
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If the photo is located at another URL we used to link it. Many of us posted our own photos on Photobucket.

What's wrong with that?

John

Well I guess I don't like to use that method. I am too used to using Vegas workflow-----Quick & fast.

JJK

Under the "forum settings" you can set whether the forum displays the images or just the link to the images. I doubt that the ability to display images is the reason that the forum is so slow. It was just as slow before they added this features a couple of weeks ago.

It was just a thought John. When a person just enters the website with cleared cookies (as I do) the images aren't enabled until that person logs in. What I was suggesting is that maybe the image capability is a bandwidth hog for the server.

What is your take on it? We have less users on the forum than we did a year or more ago. Do you think it is a problem with their server?

John

My guess is that the machine on which they are running the forum needs to be beefed up (more RAM, faster processor, faster drives) or the internet pipe through which the forum is served up is too slow for the job. It could really be any number of things, the forum software seems to be custom written and perhaps the message database indexing system isn't as efficient as it could be and that the forum is going to get progressively slower as the number of messages increases. Whatever it is, the forum has been painfully slow to respond for the last few months and I really wish someone would do something about it.

The forum has been slow as long as I can remember. The slowness comes and goes. It certainly has been slow the past few days. As to pictures being the cause, that doesn't make any sense, because Sony doesn't store or deliver any of the pictures on its server. Also 98% of all new posts do not contain pictures. The preference to turn them on or off is strictly, I think, to let people avoid seeing things they might not want to see.

Finally, you can do a quick search and find a post from about a week ago, praising the wonderful, speedy response of the forum, and saying it was all due to the changes -- including the pictures -- that had just been made. I think this is a little like the stock market, where people try to assign reasons for the prices being up or down, and try to associate it with some totally random event of the day: "Prices went up to day on fears of new inflation," or "Prices went down today because inflation numbers were less than expected." Of course, most likely inflation probably had nothing to do with a million peoples' decisions to buy or sell on that particular day, and the result pressure up or down on prices, but human nature, being what it is, people want an explanation, and always try to make an association with something.

So, I will give you pretty high odds that the problem is now, as it has always been, either a lousy co-hosting arrangement for the forum, or the home-brew forum software that runs it.

Well we are back in biz. Issue has been resolved.

Nice one Madison! Or whoever did this? Dunno!!

I just noticed that not only are the forums slow to respond, but the entire Sony Creative Software site is slow. I'm guessing that the entire site is hosted on a slow server, perhaps through a dial-up connection in Tierra del Fuego.

perhaps through a dial-up connection in Tierra del Fuego ...

Good one! :)

The forums were unbearably slow before the bb code tags were implemented.

You're basically asking Sony to strip the scrub tool from Vegas until they get the titler tool up to spec.

Perhaps they should remove the forums until their prices go down too. :P

Well the speed does seem to fluctuate I'll admit, but as John Cline also observed, they are slower overall than they were a year ago and before.

One thing I would not want to see is a purging of the database of posts. It is an invaluable goldmine of information that not only benefits new users as well as vets, it also benefits the tech support department of Sony Creative Software. This forum is self-sustaining thanks to the genuine desire to help others on the part of the members.

John

Perhaps I'm in the minroity, but I really like the look and functionality of the Sony forums. I also like the wealth of content and the caliber of the folks that hang out here. This is far and away my favorite forum of any kind. Now that we can post images and videos, the only change I'd like to see is that it be made faster, much faster. I don't mind the "home brew" aspect of the forum, in fact, I suppose that an argument could be made that Vegas is "home brew" software as well.

Perhaps I'm in the minroity, but I really like the look and functionality of the Sony forums. Now that we can post images and videos, the only change I'd like to see is that it be made faster, much faster. I don't mind the "home brew" aspect of the forum, in fact, I suppose that an argument could be made that Vegas is "home brew" software as well.
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Don't get me wrong John. I like those features as well. I was just trying to prioritize if the system is maxed out. Maybe it just needs an upgrade as you said. If they are willing to do that for these forums, we would all appreciate it very very much.

John

I agree, John, purging old messages would be a tragedy.

I know that this is a Sony corporate web site and, as such, the forum software engineers need to keep a low profile. Just because I'm such a curious guy, I'd really like to know what how this forum operates behind the scenes, stuff like does the individual that wrote the forum software have a name, what are the specs of the machine on which the forum runs, in what part of the world is it physically located, how big is the forum database and what kind of connection to the Internet it has. I know that they can't talk about Vegas 8, but maybe they could be a little more interactive about the forum.

I don't know what they did but the forum now is faster than greased camel snot on a doorknob.
JJK

"faster than greased camel snot on a doorknob"

I can only imagine how fast that might be.

"faster than greased camel snot on a doorknob"

I can only imagine how fast that might be.
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Depending upon whether the camel has one hump or two.

The reason I might notice the fluctuation more than some is that this forum has always been my home page, so when I start IE this website either loads fast or sometimes it loads slow or sometimes it doesn't load and I have to click on another website. THAT is what I don't remember ever happening a year or more ago. This morning the website loaded pretty fast.

John

Two humps make a bactrian, one hump is a feature of a dromedary.