Animation Source Forums

I'm not exactly sure what causes the slowdowns, but I didn't do anything.
The server gets overloaded sometimes, when there is high traffic, there may be other reasons as well. For example, robots such as Google and Yahoo crawlers take up a lot of the server bandwidth and CPU, so I made some changes so that they don't crawl everything.

I have improved many things in the "new" code version that TSS uses, I hope that when I migrate BS and TLKS to this version it will help a bit.
We're planning a server upgrade anyway (the current one is a pentium 4 with 1.5GB of memory, we would upgrade to a quad core...), and that will definitely help.

In any case - this has nothing to do with TSS.

It could be caused by my Sentinel[bot] (I refer to it as SPS - Sentinel Protection System) during peak hours, when there are a lot of members online and the forum, comments and shoutbox parts of the website. I'll disable it and do some optimization changes to ease the stress on the server during those peak hours.
The reason is the recent addition of TSS which the program detected itself. Since it's very similar in layout to BS, it automatically assumed that it should monitor that part of the website too (I didn't notice it until I checked yesterday night). So instead of 2 websites, it began monitoring 3 at the same time.


Perhaps limit its ability to navigate quickly through the website to 2 pages every 3 seconds instead of 8 pages every 3 seconds and make it only capable of monitoring one website at a time before it moves on to the next one would be a solution.

Na..its Okay, just a slight mumbo jumbo. Steet pretty much cleared the whole subject up and Jersey plus lux. Simply a go and post to the new section or dont.

The server just recently wasn't accessible for almost a full day, due to an OS upgrade on the server - again, nothing to do with TSS.


And...what's the use of that, exactly?...
The least you could do is to tell me before adding something like that which could consume a lot of the server ressources. I already have enough trouble preventing the "bad" robots from wasting CPU ressources...

I didn't inform you mainly because I forgot. That's an error on my end, sorry >.<

In any case, I've done the optimization changes to the program - it shouldn't even be noticeable now. (At least not more noticeable than one person browsing AnimationSource using three-four tabs at one time)

The use of the bot is to automate a lot of the administrative (read: moderator) features that I have access to and to make my busy life on BS easier (especially now in these exam-days). It's capable of making small "decisions" on its own, but only if I enable it (it's disabled, don't worry). Its current purpose, though, is to add a more external protection to the site. At the moment, its only task is to scan content on the website and forum and assign "ID's" to them which it identifies using (in the case of the forum) a combination of the post ID and the time/date it was made.
The purpose of this is to be able to quickly identify content which may have been lost by mistake during a server crash/upgrade, etc.

I could really go in-depth about the plans for the program, but I plan on selling it by 2020 (if it's completed by then - and I'm not going to sell it as a bot; the fullversion of the SPS will be a full-scale system monitoring and protection software. The bot stalking AnimationSource from my home computer is just something I quickly threw together a year ago, roughly) so it would really suck if someone would come across a list of what it can do x]


If it absolutely is an annoyance to know that there's a "good" 'bot' stalking the website and the forums, just type the words and I'll disable it. But it really shouldn't be consuming much more CPU resources than a normal member and his/her account would (especially not anymore if it was always the case).

*edit* Then again, if I disable it, the time my account spends online each day may be cut my 25-50% xD (for obvious reasons)

And how do you make the difference between something being removed for "normal" reasons (such as the news on the main site page, which gets replaced after a new one is posted - or messages/topics deleted by moderators), and "lost" topics due to corrupted database?

It doesn't seem that important to identify that too - but that's only my opinion...


You're...serious?
And me who thinks I'm already fooling myself when planning something one year before...



Don't tell me - I had a lot of things I wanted to do on the site yesturday. The fact that it was a Sunday was the reason it lasted so long (there's no one at the Data Center) Hopefully this won't happen too much.

It can't tell the difference between something which is intentionally and unintentionally removed. It checks the cached ID's and if something's missing, it puts the saved title and URL into a .txt file which I check once every day. Then I cross-check its findings with the moderator shoubox (or ask there if there's no mention of any content removal there).

It can, however, tell the difference between topics and forum posts because of the forum moderator logs. It goes through the logs once every 6th hour (sometimes every 12th hour) and looks through the different changes, identifying each action logged there. It then visits every topic posts have been deleted from recently and looks for a missing post ID. When the cached post ID's have been checked and it finds that one or more are missing from the topic after going there through the moderator logs, it stores this information and deletes the post ID's from its cache.
It can also store the topic titles in the forum into a .txt file which uses a very unorganized tagging system I intend to re-do at a later point. In any case, when it spots a "Deleted topic" in the moderator logs, it reads the topic title which is found just below that message and erases that topic name from its list.


But on the website (now that I apparently no longer have access to the site moderator logs), it can't differ between legitimate and illegitimate content removal.


As for the news, it doesn't check it. There's no easy way of checking that so I just couldn't be bothered trying.




I'm very serious xD
Coding goes slowly; I wouldn't expect it to be finished any earlier. Although there's no definitive date (no matter how much I wish there was).


*edit* Also, I need to stop calling her an "it" xD It is much too formal.