Major site changes

[Oberst Hajj]

Hello all,

I've made several changes to the site last night. As always, if you notice something that does not look right or something does not work the way you think it should, please let me know in this thread so I can check on it.

Here is what has changed:


User Background Image
Usergroups: These are mostly transparent to you guys. They have now been re-aligned to the country that you live in. This will make it easier to work with the



User Background Images
These are now controlled automatically (as they were on the old software) by the "Country you would like to fly for" option in Settings > Edit Profile

Usergroups
These are mostly transparent to you guys. However, they do effect you in some ways. The usergroup you belong to controls where you can go on the site and what you can do... basically, your permissions here on the site.

These are now re-aligned to match the country you live in. This is in preparation for a more robust Player Locator system. Some of these are in effect now. More on those in a bit. I have currently added user groups for each country that has at least 5 members here on the site (based on the Country Flag users have selected).

Events Calendar: Each User Group has its own Events Calendar. This means the UK and the US (for example) each have different calendars that they can access. This should make the calendars much better for posting local events. You can access your calendar via Community > Events Calendar

Country Forums: Each of the User Groups also has a new sub-forum under the Report for Duty section. These are replacing the old Flight areas that we had on the old software. These are full function forums and behave exactly like the rest of the site's forums. They do not show up on the Home page at the moment though.

Hopefully these changes will make it easier for you to use the site or get more out of it.

Thanks for putting up with all the changes as we grow the site into a better place to be!

The Col.

[Oberst Hajj]

There is a known issue with the Private Messaging system right now.

[The Cowman]

Will you be able to restore the data from the old Calandar to the appropriate new calendars? I don't mind resubmitting the events I had up, I just don't want to do it, and end up having double listings if you were planning on restoring it.

Also I would swear that the Photo uploading script was acting very strangely last night... but that may have been my imagination.

[Oberst Hajj]

Go ahead and resubmit the events. There is not a way for me to move them over other then doing it by hand... which I don't have time for. Sorry.

[The Cowman]

No apologies needed, It is not like it will take any of us a lot of effort to resubmit our events... and I'll keep my eye on the photo upload glitches and let you know if I can sniff out a pattern of any kind... ;)

[Niek_vD]

Colonel, Sir, permission to speak!

I'd like to raise an issue with the division by country. It is sensible for most, but not for all.

I'm one of few Dutchmen in the list (we might have five now, I counted three plus me a while ago) and I joined the Belgian wing based on our common language and the fact that we are neighbouring countries, so geographically close (especially for American standards). This resulted in a fairly lively community with discussions on mainly Belgian WW I planes and pilots, and books (some of them in Dutch).

Alas, this is no more, I cannot even rejoin.

I discussed the matter with the Belgian Wing Commander, Bluedevil, and perhaps a solution is to sort-of combine the countries in regions. "The Low Countries" is a common denominator, as is the political entity "Benelux" (Belgium, Netherlands and tiny Luxemburg).

Can you please look into this?

[Oberst Hajj]

Looking into it and talking to Bluedevil. Right now I show only three of you guys from NL;

beagle1
Dionysius
Niek_vD

If there are others, they have not set their country flag so they are not counting towards your total.

[Oberst Hajj]

Looking into it and talking to Bluedevil. Right now I show only three of you guys from NL;

beagle1
Dionysius
Niek_vD

If there are others, they have not set their country flag so they are not counting towards your total.

[Bluedevil]

Keith,

I've send you and Niek a PM to explain my vision. Has the setting of the country flag something to do with the ability to join the flight?

[Flying Officer Kyte]

Col. Hajj, sir.
Is the British forum now open to all members of the British flight, or still restricted to senior officers?
Rob.

[Oberst Hajj]

Yes, access to the calendars and Wing forums are controlled by the country flag... or I should say I put people with country flag X into user group X that gives them access to the forums and calendars.

The forums should now be open to everyone.

[The Cowman]

Yes, access to the calendars and Wing forums are controlled by the country flag... or I should say I put people with country flag X into user group X that gives them access to the forums and calendars.

The forums should now be open to everyone.


I am not sure if it is supposed to work this way, but I have access to all the Calendars... I kept accidentally posting events on the Australia Calendar... :o

[Oberst Hajj]

Nope, you should not.. I'll fix that now.

[The Cowman]

All Fixed

[MayorJim]

...but that doesn't mean that the Ohio flyboys (and girls) couldn't actually go down under...once the rainy season ends that is... ;-0)

[gully_raker]

I am not sure if it is supposed to work this way, but I have access to all the Calendars... I kept accidentally posting events on the Australia Calendar... :o

Thank you Ken! That was very kind of you!! lol!

[MayorJim]

Well Barry, just post back on the US boards...that would keep us royally confused :-0(

[PRS]

Col. I was going to start a thread to talk about the server resource issue, but I can't in this section, so I'll just add to this one. I had noticed a few days ago that when I was on certain forum pages, my browser would get laggy and freeze up even after the entire page had loaded. My computer is getting a bit old, but I haven't noticed this on other sites. I looked at my task manager info and saw that I was getting regular spikes on my CPU usage. Some forum pages were worse than others, actually spiking to 100% and holding for a few seconds and freezing my browser. Looked like a row of Devil's Towers. Once I navigated away from the page to the forum lists or the site home page, the spikes would stop. The worst pages seem to be ones with images and embedded videos. Flying Penguins was quite bad. I did some checking just now, and even pages without images or videos will give me the spiking to some degree if there were a lot of posts in the thread. You have it set up to show 50 posts at a time, so I'm wondering if changing it to 20 or 25 at a time might help matters. Every time I go to a full page of posts, even if the posts are text, I would think I'm loading a lot of images from the server for avatars, backgrounds, flight banners, country flag animated gifs, and the like. I'm still confused about the spikes continuing after the entire page had loaded, so maybe there is still communication with the host server after the page has finished loading that doesn't need to be happening? I don't know enough to figure out what is going on, but I hope this info will help.

[Oberst Hajj]

Thanks for the insight Paul, I've got several people helping look into this stuff.

[The Cowman]

Thanks for the insight Paul, I've got several people helping look into this stuff.

I have used a lot of images in many of my posts... I am curious if the bandwidth usage would be less or more if I were to host those images on an external site and then link to them. I am sure I could set up a gallery script on my own domain and use that...

[Oberst Hajj]

I think we are talking about two different issues when it comes to the images. The more images in a thread, the longer it will take to finish downloading... but that is relative to your internet connection. The issues I'm currently working on is the CPU usage of the server. Don't go making any changes to your images/albums/threads right now. The software and server should be able to handle our normal activities with out issues. There is something else going on here.

PRS, I just opened several threads including the Penguin one and did not see any spikes in my local CPU usage. I can't think of anything on the site what would actually take more CPU power then just running the browser on it's own. Try killing all programs besides your browser and then open that thread and see if you still get the spike.

[Doug]

Col as computor problems are not properly under stood by my self, I will go by what you surgest and that will be fine with me!

[Bluedevil]

First of all : I 'm not a computer-specialist. But I would like to point out that the activity shown on this forum is not all that different from other forums I'm active on ( e.g. The Aerodrome to name just one )so the server should be able to handle our normal activity as Col. says.
If I had to put my money on who's the culprit here I would say that the problem is with the server.

Just my ( in hindsight not very constructive :o) 5 cents...

[jbmacek]

I have to agree with Alex. I've run a reenacting forum for quite some time now, and the one time I had issues that were similar to this, it wasn't anything we had done, it was the server. As I recall, nothing I tried doing on my end made any real difference - changing the size of avatars, limiting sigs, etc. Once they upgraded servers, everything went back to normal.

[Oberst Hajj]

They found and fixed the problem we were having. There were a couple of tables in our database that were not optimized very well. They did some work on them and have given us the all clear. Also, the issue with the RAID on the server has been resolved as well. So, we are free and clear as of now!

[jbmacek]

Huzzah!

[tuladin]

Thank you - everything's moving much faster! I often use a dial-up connection, and so small lags are exaggerated - but the lags gone now.

[Flying Officer Kyte]

Likewise for me Col. Everything seems to be back to normal.
Rob.

[MayorJim]

They found and fixed the problem we were having. There were a couple of tables in our database that were not optimized very well. They did some work on them and have given us the all clear. Also, the issue with the RAID on the server has been resolved as well. So, we are free and clear as of now!

Keith, thanks for the prompt resolution and reply...I'm not "hanging" much now either...