SoFo PLEASE fix your forum software

BillyBoy wrote on 11/18/2002, 6:20 PM
This is getting ridculous. It sometimes takes minutes to go from the the Main Forum Page to the Vegas Video forum. I'm now getting the following error message frequently:

The page cannot be displayed
There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please try the following:

Click the Refresh button, or try again later.

Open the www.sonicfoundry.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want.
HTTP 500.100 - Internal Server Error - ASP error
Internet Information Services

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Technical Information (for support personnel)

Error Type:
Active Server Pages, ASP 0113 (0x80004005)
The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded. You can change this limit by specifying a new value for the property Server.ScriptTimeout or by changing the value in the IIS administration tools.
/forums/ShowTopics.asp

If you'll permit a suggestion, dump the software you have now a get something like the following link illustrates which supports BBCode. Many advantages to newer forum software. If BBCode is active (user's choice) embedded links are automatic and clickable. Also better forum software allows simple additons like poster's having their own icons, smiley faces to express emotion, allowing images to be embedded within the forum itself from linked web sites and even poll taking on topics of interest. Something to consider.

http://www.debugmode.com/forums/viewthread.php?tid=204

Comments

FuTz wrote on 11/18/2002, 6:29 PM
In my "favorites" option, I entered the exact VEGAS FORUM adress so at least, I save a little bit of time with these error messages... still long to get there but at least, I get there...
rextilleon wrote on 11/18/2002, 7:47 PM
Billy---I agree--I contacted them via email and some guy responded with a "whats the problem" I said the problem is that it's slow as sin---Will let you know if i hear something.
rextilleon wrote on 11/18/2002, 7:47 PM
This is ridiculous!
wcoxe1 wrote on 11/18/2002, 8:41 PM
Guy, I agree with you fully, but EVERYTHING I am trying, all over the world, is messed up for me right now. SoFo is not any worse than many others, at least not for me. Perhaps it is on my end, my local server, or something, but from TWO completely different networks at two different locations, for the last several days, DRAGGS!
prairiedogpics wrote on 11/18/2002, 9:04 PM
Attention: Any SOFO folks out there? Lots of folks complaining about this! Something IS wrong. Don't have any other trouble with other forums. Check out these other threads that have already been reporting this:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=137002&Replies=12&Page=3

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=137245&Replies=1&Page=3

Took a full 2 minutes to get into the VV3 forum just now. HELP!!

Dan
BillyBoy wrote on 11/18/2002, 10:31 PM
There are always network problems somewhere. That's isn't it. This forum has been slow in the past and it seems to have gotten much worse over the past week or so.

Try this simple experiment. Visit the main forum page and go visit softencode. I'll bet you'll get in right away in part because there are only 77 posts. Contrast that to the over 7400 posts in the Vegas Video forum.

It seems that the script that generates the posts in the forum chokes once it gets to a certain point. If true, (guessing) then it will continue to get slower.

That's why I suggested SoFo dump what seems to be an in-house generated forum and use some actual forum software better suited to handle the traffic and volume. The benefit would also allow BBCODE, and other goodies, this kind of forum badly needs.

Time for a upgrade. Just to give a small example how much more powerful real forum software is, I could right now from this post set up a poll, where everyone could vote and it would generate real time stats.

Time to upgrade Sofo!

One example you see a lot is
phpbb http://www.debugmode.com/forums/viewthread.php?tid=204

Not generally for commerical use, just giving as an example. HAs lots of nice features, you can even see who's online.
swarrine wrote on 11/18/2002, 11:13 PM
Entry to the forum has gotten very slow for me in the past 5 or so days.

Once while flying in a plane the engine quit. After fiddling for 30 seconds I screamed to the pilot "undo whatever you just did!" Turns out his knee hit the fuel selector to off (long story in a weird plane for you pilots out there). Anyway, we were at 3K discovered the problem at 2K and all was well.

So, to SoFo - what happened 5 -7 days ago?
satish wrote on 11/19/2002, 12:23 AM
DebugMode forums are not phpbb, it is based on an old version of XMB (www.xmbforum.com). It was once free, but now has become paid.

- Satish
TorS wrote on 11/19/2002, 3:16 AM
The forum is slow for me, too. And I've noticed that some of the major contributors to the forum has raised their voice about it.
Plus the amount of new posts last week I think must have been down to a fifth or tenth of what it has been in the previous weeks. That fact alone ought to send a message to the forum decision-makers.

This forum contains massive amounts of good info for beginners and (I guess) veterans alike. But there are also a lot of me too messages and comments which may have seemed appropriate at the time they were made but does not serve posterity well. I know I'm guilty myself.
The archives of this forum would be even more valuable if there was a way to filter out the noise and stay with the signals.

Tor

lowayko wrote on 11/19/2002, 3:26 AM
yes!! the forum is slow!!...with my cable modem it takes more than 2-3 minutes sometimes to view the forum..i can't imagine people with dial-up modems...anyways vegas video is a perfect,great product and the forum should be fixed for the good of vegas video...thanx
Tyler.Durden wrote on 11/19/2002, 6:56 AM
Here's a thought:

The SoFo folks that cruise this board might be busy working on our editing software... I'd rather have them doing that, than speeding up this board. (You might have noticed their participation here has dropped off too.)

As noted, the slow element is displaying the topics... so when I'm done posting and click to return to the topics, I go to my other browser window where I keep the COW forum open. I read posts there while the topics page loads here. I also keep other pages open too, so I can be productive. I just check back to see if the page has loaded.

I'm confident that the forum here will get fixed. In the meantime I'll put up with the wait and multi-task around it, and try to be of help.




MPH


P.S. (five minutes later...) I'm getting topics (50) in less than 17 secs... maybe we are back to normal?
rextilleon wrote on 11/19/2002, 7:39 AM
Marty--I was thinking the same thing---they were just getting 4.0 ready and didn't have the time---(haven't seen Sonic around much). Having said that, the other thought that went through my mind was that they cut back staffing to meet their 350,000 per month cash requirement---Kidding aside, I think that this forum is a relatively cheap way of marketing their product---I have seen lots of people who don't own VEgas come in here and ask pre-purchase questions---thus this forum should run smoothly and I hope it does ASAP.
Labatt50 wrote on 11/19/2002, 7:45 AM
For what it's worth, I'm on dialup (most of the time 28.8 and often 26.4) and this forum doesn't seem any slower than anything else...but I'm a LOT faster than two minutes per refresh.
JJKizak wrote on 11/19/2002, 8:18 AM
While the forum is slow, it is not unusual and as long as it still functions
I'm happy that they are working on V4.0 and besides I have stock in the
company and want them to start making lots of money so they can provide me
with lots of good software.

James J. Kizak
brnijeff wrote on 11/19/2002, 8:48 AM
Well,
Just another voice to say there IS a problem. Taking forever on a cable modem. Never had a problem before, so something has changed.

If you have stock in the company, you should want to see this site running smoothly (and i think this has been mentioned before) because:

1) It's an incredibly cheap marketing tool for presales questions
2) It cuts down the customer support workload by allowing users to answer each others questions (freeing up time and resources for product development)
3) It helps keep current customers happy-- anything you can do to keep them from looking at other solutions is a positive for retention.

-Jeff
JJKizak wrote on 11/19/2002, 9:48 AM
Brnijeff:
I just don't want them to pull off programmers from VV4 to fix this thing
right now but I think if they would just lop off about the bottom 3500
strings it would be OK. I just tried Creative Cow and it actually took
longer than Sonic Foundry.

James J. Kizak
wcoxe1 wrote on 11/19/2002, 10:05 AM
A note on self help:

I find that if I use my browser's BACK button, it can get back to the topics panel MUCH fasther than if I actually click on the BACK TO VEGAS TOPICS at the side or bottom of the screen. MUCH faster, even if I have to click on it several times.
TorS wrote on 11/19/2002, 12:49 PM
... even if I have to click on it several times.

You can edit your account to show you all msgs in one thread at once. Then you get the main view back by one click only.

Tor
theigloo wrote on 11/19/2002, 1:33 PM

The forum is slow as hell.

Web pages are not rocket science. Neither are databases. I think the Vegas forum is slow b/c they have not optimized their database to pull records back fast when querried. It could be an index on a table, cacheing, I/O or a pile of other crap.

In any case, this forum is a serious tool that we all use and it should be fast.

SF - please fix it.

BillyBoy wrote on 11/19/2002, 1:56 PM
I would hope that SoFo isn't so small or understaffed that it would need to pull someone working on developing their applications to debug their in-house web site.

If you take a quick look at the source code once in the forum, you'll find what is best described as "HTML Soup" with loads of nested tables, Java Script, etc., making it a very bloaded page that would probably give the W3C validator a nervous breakdown.

A quick fix would be to prune some of the older threads and archive them somewhere. Without really looking at the source in detail it seems the old I didn't hit the ending table tag issue prevents the browser from displaying anything on screen until it reads the whole page into memory. If the scripting is running through every post in order to sort them first, that's another big bottle neck and why the Vegas forum takes the longest to load.
salad wrote on 11/19/2002, 3:10 PM
I agree on the archiving. Trim a couple thousand off the bottom end.
Trivia Q: What is the date and topic of thread #1

HPV wrote on 11/19/2002, 5:06 PM
Looks like they fixed it. Kinda crazy I started here last summer and there was less than 2000 topic headings in the single "vegas" forum.

Craig H.
rextilleon wrote on 11/20/2002, 8:17 AM
Much better this morning--thanks for the fairly quick response!
FuTz wrote on 11/20/2002, 8:23 AM
***I agree on the archiving. Trim a couple thousand off the bottom end.
Trivia Q: What is the date and topic of thread #1 ***

I do not agree. It's a bank of information for those (few?) who use the "search" option !