GreekChat.com website speed survey/poll: How Fast is GreekChat?

[John]

Please vote in this poll to answer the following question: Overall, how fast is the GreekChat.com website?

More detailed comments would also be helpful. If you would like, please feel free to elaborate a bit more regarding your experience with GreekChat's website speed.

Some aspects to consider:
- page load times
- image load times (various site images, site logo, icons, smilies, ad images, etc)
- posting messages/threads
- page timeouts
- connection issues

Thanks in advance to all who participate in this informal site survey. Information learned through this survey may help guide future GC development.

[KSUViolet06]

Pretty fast for me. Athough I had some outage issues a few weeks ago (I think some other people did too).

[ladygreek]

Same here.

[tld221]

i've never noticed anything abnormally slow about the site's speed. only when opening a thread with a lot of .jpg and .gif files, which is expected.

on another note, GC logs me out every so often (id say after 15 minutes of activity) and i have to log in again. incredibly annoying when i'm mid-post and such. is this a new feature? started happening a couple weeks ago.

[SAEalumnus]

It's usually pretty fast for me, but the last several hours it's been insanely slow, in particular with loading graphics.

[sigtau305]

Originally Posted by tld221

on another note, GC logs me out every so often (id say after 15 minutes of activity) and i have to log in again. incredibly annoying when i'm mid-post and such. is this a new feature? started happening a couple weeks ago.

same thing happened to me as well.

[TPA85]

Originally Posted by tld221

on another note, GC logs me out every so often (id say after 15 minutes of activity) and i have to log in again. incredibly annoying when i'm mid-post and such. is this a new feature? started happening a couple weeks ago.

Originally Posted by sigtau305

same thing happened to me as well.

Check the box that says "keep me logged in" when you sign in. Just be sure to log off when you're actually done though...don't want any "my roommate posted using my screenname" debacles!!!!

[John]

Originally Posted by tld221

GC logs me out every so often (id say after 15 minutes of activity) and i have to log in again. incredibly annoying when i'm mid-post and such. is this a new feature? started happening a couple weeks ago.

Originally Posted by sigtau305

same thing happened to me as well.

This issue may have been triggered by a forum software upgrade that was installed a few weeks ago. Probably some change by the software developers which affects the web browser cookie in some way. It's also possible that your browser cookies had some sort of file corruption which along with the change in the software upgrade may have caused the problem.

Possible solutions:

1. Are you checking the "remember me" option when logging in? (Note: As TBA85 mentioned in the previous post, be sure to logout if you're using the "remember me" option on a computer that you do not actually want to remain logged in on.) The forum will automatically log you out after 15 minutes of inactivity if you logged on to GC without selecting the "remember me" option.

2. Try logging out then log on to GC again. Use the logout link which is near the top right corner of pages in the nav bar. Using the logout link will (should) delete your web browser cookie for GC. When you login again your browser cookie should be refreshed. Sometimes the logout link doesn't work for deleting browser cookies, which would probably be due to a corrupted cookie file. If this doesn't work, try the next possible solution.

3. Clearing your browser cookies. You do this from within your web browser software, usually within the Tools menu (depending on the browser software that you use). In Internet Exploerer 8 you do this via Tools > Internet Options > General (tab) & click delete under the browsing history section. In Firefox it's Tools > Clear Recent History. Doing this will clear all of your browser cookies, for GC and other sites.

It is possible to delete just the GC cookie file instead of all. If you want to go that route let me know what browser software you use along with the version # and I'll get the details for you. Easier than doing this, would be to go on to the next option...

4. Install a different web browser software program and try using GC from that. If it works without issue then the problem is more than likely related to the cookie file in the other browser software. Some browsers to consider using: Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer

* If you still have this issue even after testing with a different browser program, let me know and I'll see if I can figure out what else it might be.

Originally Posted by AGDee

Pages with animated gifs take a bit longer, but that's to be expected. It's much faster than other vBulletin sites I use sometimes, but I think that's because we don't have Avatars (which I know a lot of people wish we had, but personally, I find them to be obnoxious most of the time)

Site speed / server capacity is the main reason why GC doesn't have avatars. Avatars will eventually be enabled once I have things setup so that they have minimal impact on the site/server. Anyone who wouldn't want to view avatars will be able to turn them off via an option in the account control panel.

Originally Posted by thetygerlily

As a side note, I will say that many people have been confused about how to post pictures. Not sure if there's an easier way to do pictures here, even to upload them straight to GC. But then that'd get into storage and retention issues, I know... but a girl can dream, right?

Originally Posted by thetygerlily

It's more of a wish list item to just be able to click on the "insert image" icon and be able to actually insert an image there without needing to host it elsewhere.

That is possible and is something I would like to enable, but it's turned off for the same reason avatars haven't been enabled. Eventually GC will have the option to post images directly and also member photo albums as well, just don't want to bite off more than I can chew at the moment as enabling these features now would very likely result in GC slowing to a crawl.

[RaggedyAnn]

It really depends on the advertisements up top for me. Sometimes they take a long time to load, others not so much.

[AGDee]

Pages with animated gifs take a bit longer, but that's to be expected. It's much faster than other vBulletin sites I use sometimes, but I think that's because we don't have Avatars (which I know a lot of people wish we had, but personally, I find them to be obnoxious most of the time)

[pshsx1]

It may be the crappy computer I'm using because I've never had this problem on my laptop (or even a cell phone), but the page doesn't always load up correctly.

I'm blaming it on my computer, though.

[NinjaPoodle]

I'm on my laptop and I'm connected via wireless/broadband. Its fast but when I'm @ school, it much faster. I can't complain.

[moe.ron]

No problem whatsoever

[OleMissGlitter]

Always been very fast for me. At work I am on the University's network/internet (whaterver you call it!) and it is very fast. At home I have the mid-level internet from AT&T and it is fast there too. No complaints from me!

[thetygerlily]

Mine probably loads slower than most because I max out the number of posts per page, and one of my most frequently visited threads is Badge Trends, which is heavy in pictures. Put the two together and it's not super fast (mostly because of all the images loading from various sources)- but GC itself is fine, and seems like lightning when I load non-photo threads like this

As a side note, I will say that many people have been confused about how to post pictures. Not sure if there's an easier way to do pictures here, even to upload them straight to GC. But then that'd get into storage and retention issues, I know... but a girl can dream, right?