Quite a lot now i've been getting the message saying something about there being stress on the server and when it finally doesn't put me through there have only been about 80 members but like 350 guests.
Isn't there a way to give members priority to the site?
I'll admit, I got a bit annoyed at the sheer number of guests that were on yesterday when PC encountered slowdown. At first, I thought it was peaking at like 1000 online members or something, but it wasn't even that. The
guests were the more numerous variant of users, rather than the members. :x And even then, the number of members and guests combined (roughly 430) didn't seem
nearly enough to cause unexpected slowdown like that. But it happens, I suppose.
Idk what you mean exactly, but this is a bad idea. A lot of people like to lurk the forums and decide from there if they want to join, and a lot of people come to PC to download stuff like hacks/games, so it's not fair that they should have to join just for something as mediocre as that. So yeah, I'm against this idea.
So they just come to our site and jack our hack games without actually being members? LOL. Personally, I think only contributing members should be permitted to download hacks from here, but then you get the drawback of wasted accounts made by people
specifically just to download the games. :<
The only issue there could be is people intentionally being guests to strain the server, because this has been speculated to happen, but I don't think it happens very often, so we should be fine.
Yeegh...I'd probably smack anyone who came here
solely to worsen the browsing experiences of others.
I.. don't know how I feel about that. xD;
Emulation / ROM hacking, Wifi, etc is what brings in a lot of our members, and the reason why they joined is probably because they were able to lurk and see for themselves how interesting those areas seemed. If we take that ability away from them, that might stop people from wanting to join, kinda like what I said earlier.
This whole idea is a nice way to de-stress the server at times, but it's downside isn't a good one, IMO.
I never knew the "hacking" portion of the site was our main draw...I initially came here because it was one of the first forums that popped up on Google when I entered "Pokemon forum", not because of hack-game notoriety. XD Then again, I often see the Emulation subforum and the like pulling in more viewers than the subforums dedicated to
the actual/official Pokemon games themselves.
It seems like the choice has mostly been made, but I would like to post this anyway:
I have joined countless forums with throwaway accounts made with throwaway emails (Seriously, I believe I have created over 100 gmail accounts so far, not to mention hotmail, etc). Restricting access would just cause a huge amount of people to join and never post, just to gain access to restricted features. This would be even worse for the server, as instead of just bandwidth, hard drive space would also be taken up.
Gah...I hate having to make "throwaway" accounts/emails just to access a certain forums. It wastes account usernames on a particular forum, and it wastes potential e-mails that could be put to good use by other people.
As for lurking...I would say I don't really the point in lurking for a month or more...I mean, by that point, you should either make an account on the forum or just leave. Then again, I sporadically pop into the Smogon forums just to see analyses that are a bit more detailed for the battling scene, as they concern certain Pokemon species, moves, and the like. I guess that could be considered "lurking", and I recall being frustrated one day when those forums were seemingly viewable only to "members"; I think it was due to a server error. So an entirely/partially members-only forum viewing method would undoubtedly discourage unregistered guests. Sigh...if we only had a perfect world where we'd have enough server space for members
and guests, with no compromise of server speed from the userload.
So yeah, in times of server stress, I'd
like to prioritize users to have pages load faster as opposed to guests who would have to wait slightly longer for pages to load. But that stifles potential growth of this body that we call PokeCommunity, so that doesn't seem like a very feasible option at the moment. I guess we just have to manage with the occasional slowdowns from both members and guests until we can improve and enhance the server... T_T
