[katyasha]

nope didn't have any problems accessing the site.

[Tiva]

It was on and off like the server just didn't want to let people on or load too much.

[Lucid:]

Originally Posted by Ashy

Lucid your trades only load that slow because you have like 50 billion items :P

husssshhhhhhh. >.>
people with 50 billion items like to trade sometimes, too.
<.<

[Asami]

The site is faster but every time I try to come on the server is to busy

[Arikana]

The server was pretty much busy for most of the day day for me, but now it seems to be back to normal and faster than ever. :3
Hopefully the amount of 'server is busy' messages can still limited for the rest of the day. >w<

[Coda]

Update: I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I'm blocking an incredibly aggressive search engine crawler. The bad news is that this crawler comprises 90+ of the "guests" active at any given time, so it's going to look like our activity is suddenly dropping dramatically.

My hope here is that by removing the foreign crawler that we'll be able to sustain more real activity on the site to make up for that.

For those of you who are curious, this means that we're going to stop showing up in searches from China, specifically on Baidu. Since we mostly gain new users by word of mouth, not showing up on one search engine (as long as that one search engine isn't Google) isn't going to hurt us too much.

Edit: If we have any users from mainland China who have been unintentionally caught by this firewall rule, please let me know; I'll narrow the block if it turns out this affects legitimate users.

[Arikana]

Sounds good to me. :]

Also: What are "crawlers"? owo

And really? We have users from China on here? owo

[Rem]

I was actually going to ask about that Coda! XD I saw 109 ppl on at like...i don't remember, really late for it to be that many and 90 something of them were guests, I was like
'........huh.'

[Coda]

A crawler is a program that loads a website and follows all of the links. Search engines use these in order to know what content you have so that people can search for it. Sometimes it's called a spider. Baidu's crawler, unfortunately, is excessively aggressive. Hopefully taking out the traffic it generates will speed the site up a little more.

And yes, we might have a couple legitimate users in China. I know we have a few users in Asia, I just don't know where.

[Alpha]

I know we have a few users from the Phillipines. You might want to make sure they aren't blocked.

[Coda]

I doubt we'd see trouble outside of China and Taiwan, but we'll see.

[Tiva]

Okay! *is happy Cazzidy won't be blocked*

[Misfit]

Its loading faster (:
No more duplicating.

[Funkduder]

The avatar thing is freezing up on me more. It's laggin out and not applying items as I change them in an out. This used to only be a problem when I used internet explorer, but now it's on firefox. I also end up having to save my avi twice in order to apply the background.

[Coda]

Yeah, I'm noticing that the performance gains have basically gone away. x.x The site's back down to being as slow as it was before I made the changes. I honestly don't know what's up and I'm not sure how to improve general performance. (I've got plans for the avatar editor but not the time to implement them.)

[Tiva]

More server space could solve the problem but I am assuming the mess ups and lags are due to our growing population putting too much strain on the server.