GC's Most Popular Discussions was added today as a new forum area on GC.
It was setup to serve a specific purpose.
Turns out that very long discussion threads are a bit of a problem for the software that GC is running on. Very long threads have been slow for a long while and it looks as though the longest threads are still going to be quite slow, at least for now.
Slight or moderate slowdown of threads seems to begin at right around the 1,000 post mark. And the longer they get the slower they become. It also has some negative impact on the rest of the site when many of those pages are being loaded.
This happens because of the way that the forum software is programmed as it is not optimized for the longest discussion threads.
I had a hunch earlier today that maybe there were a bunch of bots / web spiders / web scrapers loading those very long GC threads & causing much of the site slowdown. I suppose it likely was also some legit site visitors loading those super long pages as well. So I tested moving most of the longest threads into a private GCers only forum. That way at least the automated bots wouldn't be able to access those threads (unless they are logged in with activated accounts).
Anyhow, doing that seems to have helped a bunch with sitewide performance.
The new
GC's Most Popular Discussions forum & threads within can only be accessed by GC members with activated accounts. Other site visitors & non logged in GCers, as well as bots / automated spiders will see some sort of access denied type page.
Anyone without a GC account who does want to be able to access that forum can join at
http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/register.php (although there is a slight problem with that page which I'll post more about in another thread in the
GreekChat forum).
Threaded Mode