Very important suggestion for making forum run a lot faster

[MonsterMMORPG]

Alright forum was too slow for me and i also checked from alexa. According to the alexa forum is also very slow even slower than 93% of the all websites. This also causes search engines to decrease rankings of PC. Less rankings also means less income.

So how can you make it faster ?

Well very simple yet so effective way. I am guessing that the reason of slowness coming from avatar and signature images. They requires extreme bandwidth since all of them are being delivered by PC server. So how can you solve that question ?

You can code a software which will upload all avatar and signature images to another image serving website like photobucket and replace the received url with the avatar or signature image url. So simple yet so effective. This will make forum a lot a lot faster and a lot less bandwidth. I checked and photobucket does have API so i think it should be really easy to code software. If you are using windows environment i can even code the software for you at C#.

well tell me at least what do you think about this suggestion. I really want to bring this forum to its 2009 old days :)

 

[Nick]

I'll move this to CQ&F. Getting a reply here is going to be very rare. lmao.

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

I'll move this to CQ&F. Getting a reply here is going to be very rare. lmao.

thanks i also think this place is better :D

 

[Alternative]

While it seems like a good idea to have the Avatar/Signature Images be uploaded remotely to an image hosting site such as ImageShack, that would also require people to make an account there, which not everyone wants to do. Some people prefer other image uploading sites, and restricting people to one where you would only be able to upload a certain amount of images anyone would be a hassle.

But nevertheless, it's a good idea and I would support it, but I don't even know if it can be done.

 

[Legendary Silke]

Something like, the user can pick where the image is hosted? Maybe that'll make it work a bit nicer - users can choose whether to host the images here or elsewhere. If we are allowing images to be hosted elsewhere, it'd better be for everything major at least.

But I'm not sure whether it's truly possible. Maybe we need an add-on or something to achieve it?

 

[Melody]

While it seems like a good idea to have the Avatar/Signature Images be uploaded remotely to an image hosting site such as ImageShack, that would also require people to make an account there, which not everyone wants to do. Some people prefer other image uploading sites, and restricting people to one where you would only be able to upload a certain amount of images anyone would be a hassle.

But nevertheless, it's a good idea and I would support it, but I don't even know if it can be done.

ImageShack doesn't require an account to upload, neither does photobucket.
Besides, PC could create one master account for it's forum uploads on one of them and use the API to log in to the site and upload any avatars and whatnot automatically to there.


The problem is implementation, and if it requires editing skins, it'd take ages.

I wouldn't mind it if PC simply quit requiring that you use an on-site image for avatars, and allow you a way to insert a url from which the image is fetched every time.

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

While it seems like a good idea to have the Avatar/Signature Images be uploaded remotely to an image hosting site such as ImageShack, that would also require people to make an account there, which not everyone wants to do. Some people prefer other image uploading sites, and restricting people to one where you would only be able to upload a certain amount of images anyone would be a hassle.

But nevertheless, it's a good idea and I would support it, but I don't even know if it can be done.

No people don't need to do anything. The PC owner will write a software and register premium account at photobucket. The software will read from database and upload images to the photobucket with using API. so after a while all images will be hosted from photobucket. There will be only a very small delay or no delay at all after all current images uploaded.

 

[Melody]

No people don't need to do anything. The PC owner will write a software and register premium account at photobucket. The software will read from database and upload images to the photobucket with using API. so after a while all images will be hosted from photobucket. There will be only a very small delay or no delay at all after all current images uploaded.

Flaw in bold. That would require paying an unreasonable amount of cash, and this site, while it draws in enough donation wise to stay online, probably doesn't budget for things like that.

The idea I had was simple. Rather than forcing you to upload the image to PC, they could change the "Upload image url" to not copy the file from the given url to PC's server, but to actually be inserted where the browser loads from that url directly!

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

Flaw in bold. That would require paying an unreasonable amount of cash, and this site, while it draws in enough donation wise to stay online, probably doesn't budget for things like that.

The idea I had was simple. Rather than forcing you to upload the image to PC, they could change the "Upload image url" to not copy the file from the given url to PC's server, but to actually be inserted where the browser loads from that url directly!

you should get some information before post.

https://pic.pbsrc.com/help/PhotobucketHelp_Left.htm#CSHID=Accounts%2FProAccounts.htm|StartTopic=Content%2FAccounts%2FProAccounts.htm|SkinName=WebHelp



and here the prices

photobucket is just an example. there might be other websites which provides this feature. they say that unlimited bandwidth for non commercial use. i think hosting avatars and signature images shouldn't be commercial.

 

[Rukario]

we have been looking around at various CDN services to help lighten the page load (as well as server loads) time and so far, haven't yet found an easy way to integrate it into our backend.. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means we're still looking.

Photobucket is NOT an option. they delete way too many images and have other unfriendly restrictions.


as for patchy's idea, the reason we don't allow image link in avatars is we can't control those sites, and malware and other bad things could seep in.. also not to mention breaking the avatar size limit thingy.

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

we have been looking around at various CDN services to help lighten the page load (as well as server loads) time and so far, haven't yet found an easy way to integrate it into our backend.. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist, it just means we're still looking.

Photobucket is NOT an option. they delete way too many images and have other unfriendly restrictions.


as for patchy's idea, the reason we don't allow image link in avatars is we can't control those sites, and malware and other bad things could seep in.. also not to mention breaking the avatar size limit thingy.

well you may try imageshack. i almost never saw that they delete even with non premium account.

https://imageshack.us/content.php?page=subscribe


Google does care about website speed so if you are too slow you get penalized at google searches. So speed is too important factor.

 

[Oryx]

well you may try imageshack. i almost never saw that they delete even with non premium account.

https://imageshack.us/content.php?page=subscribe


Google does care about website speed so if you are too slow you get penalized at google searches. So speed is too important factor.

To be honest, PC is not low on any related google searches so I doubt the speed it's at is going to affect its rankings whatsoever.

 

[The 100 Mega Shock]

You're asking for far too much trouble to try and host every single avatar through an external hosting site.

By giving them all the cards you're liable to have images removed for whatever reason the host desires, every single avatar being rendered unreachable in the event of downtime that the host controls and users that have issues with displaying images hosted on particular websites.

Most importantly they're likely to look at this scenario and consider it a violation of their service terms or fair usage policies (even if they don't explicitly mention it) because of the extreme amount of bandwidth served from a single account that is essentially shared with thousands of users.

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

To be honest, PC is not low on any related google searches so I doubt the speed it's at is going to affect its rankings whatsoever.

how do you know ? they certainly penalize PC for being slow. They say that they are taking into consideration speed of website.

Before they start this thing they can contact the imageshack or whatever and ask whether this would be allowed or not.


https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pokecommunity.com


Average Load Time for Pokecommunity.com

Very Slow (4.377 Seconds), 93% of sites are faster.
Note: Slow sites may be penalized by search engines.

 

[Xyrin]

Well... Hate to tell you but we're the top result when you search anything like "pokemon forum"

 

[donavannj]

Notice how the note says "may be penalized." Not all search engines grade based on site performance as well as relevance. Bing does, but it doesn't seem that Google does yet.

And that top result thing is kinda dependent on your browser cache, guys. :\

Edit: I would be in favor of this idea if there were a host the site could reliably depend on and where free usage wouldn't be a violation of the site's ToS.

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

Notice how the note says "may be penalized." Not all search engines grade based on site performance as well as relevance. Bing does, but it doesn't seem that Google does yet.

And that top result thing is kinda dependent on your browser cache, guys. :\

Edit: I would be in favor of this idea if there were a host the site could reliably depend on and where free usage wouldn't be a violation of the site's ToS.

Google certainly does take into consideration. and the person who says that pokemon forum just lol :) you should learn first what is SEO and being webmaster .

 

[parallelzero]

Also... why does it matter? We exist to bring a Pokemon discussion experience to the fanbase, and we succeed in that respect. It doesn't matter if we're first or whatever.

I really think pruning unused accounts might help with the speeds. I'm not sure the last time we did it, but there's likely a lot of accounts with avatars taking up space.

 

[MonsterMMORPG]

Also... why does it matter? We exist to bring a Pokemon discussion experience to the fanbase, and we succeed in that respect. It doesn't matter if we're first or whatever.

I really think pruning unused accounts might help with the speeds. I'm not sure the last time we did it, but there's likely a lot of accounts with avatars taking up space.

well it is also important with user experience. for example it was extremely slow like 2 days ago. it changes depending on the time.

 

[parallelzero]

well it is also important with user experience. for example it was extremely slow like 2 days ago. it changes depending on the time.

You've been a member how long? Since this month? It's not something we're proud to admit, but PC has been running slow since I joined in 2004 and we're still insanely popular. We've had harder times than this (one year we went like a whole month with PC not being online at all). User experience is important... but apparently it isn't inadequate enough for people to keep joining and posting. The community continues to grow regardless of page loading speed.