What can be done about the declining performance of WP?

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More and more often, I see these random errors and the server hanging or going to the "too busy watch this video" screen.

Does WP need an upgrade? Maybe we need to start chipping in to help with paying for more bandwidth. Maybe there could be a more prominent "help support WP" button somewhere.
It's incredibly generous of Alex to offer this site for free. But the popularity of this site is bringing down server performance.

I guess I'm just asking how I can help.

Unfortunately, anything "Off-the-shelf" is very recourse intensive, as it chucks out 10-20 queries per page. So, when you have 500 people/bots/guests/etc. doing that all at once, you can see how the DB is struggling to keep up, and why you're getting a "too busy watch this video" screen...

Hopefully; the custom platform will fix this.

I agree that "off the shelf" BBs are mostly not very good, but it does not take a ton of hardware to fulfill 5-10k queries per minute and certainly the expense of the hardware would be lower than paying someone to develop a BB. And don't say "Alex will develop one himself", because that is ridiculous.

That being said, I'm still kicking around the idea of developing an ultra-resource-unintensive BB.

All of this aside, the site is broken and has been broken for a while and there is no visible attempt to address that. Move some mountains, please.

This site appears to be ad supported. I don't know whether it operates at a profit or a loss.

It is not actually as ridiculous as it sounds.

It's not an 'off the shelf' BB.

One of the excuses which people keep making for the condition that it's in, is that seemingly Alex has "heavily modified" the forum.. which allegedly means that it's now impossible for him to upgrade it to the latest version of phpBB (which would solve many of the problems, most likely).

Personally, I've seen no actual evidence of this supposed 'heavy modification' ... but hey, that's just the word on the street.

Forum, CMS, whatever you call it...



Ok, fine.

WrongPlanet uses PHP-Nuke, however customised it is. Fact is, that Nuke uses a version of phpBB2 (2.0.7 from memory, explains the bugs), which to get to work with the rest of the site, had to be modified. phpBB2 is not Object Oriented, and was not even coded with php5 in mind. That said, phpBB2 being procedural means that it does the same for EVERY page, not function() and foreach().

Nuke was always very heavy. It was not meant for larger sites such as WP, and it certainly should not be used in a production environment nowadays as the support simply isn't there.

It has been suggested to multiple other sites to upgrade to phpBB3, but I come back to my original point, The phpBB version was modified that much that it no longer functions as "just a forum".



It's all mostly internal hackz0rs. The codebase to even the latest version of Nuke is a mess.

Well, I still don't see why he stuck the forum through the phpBB-phpNuke convertor in the first place.
I mean, WP forum is basically just a glitchy old obsolete-version vanilla phpBB forum as far as functionality goes.
It surely would have been easy to include a link to the forum from WP without messing about with the phpNuke convertor.

I quite agree with you about the lack of appropriateness of this decision.

It is at this point.

Yeah, it kind of really is.

I think that Alex has said in a recent thread that he's planning to revamp the site.

A few words: the beast is dying.

What I mean is, whoever runs this site has lost the will to let it live. If it was like Wikipedia it would let its users maintain it, but instead it's closed and rotting away.

On Wikipedia not only do its users write the encyclopedia, but competent programmers can easily alter the software itself (submit 'patches') too... not rely on a single person who's busy with publicity, wtf.

The only sign I ever see that Alex still has a stake in this site is when he chimes in and says he's "planning" to do something.

If I owned this site and the outstanding issues were not resolved by close of business tomorrow, I would probably be replacing the entire team.

Keep in mind Alex was in high school when he made this site, and at the time phpNuke was one of the better CMSs out there (at the very least popular), and there was a different vision for WP to be more than just a forum. At the end of the day it was a mistake, and Alex realizes that. But, hindsight is always 20/20.

About two weeks ago he displayed three new logos on here and on Facebook. Other than that, he hasn't said much.

He really needs to give this place a facelift.

Next Q: When will the site revamp take place?

It does seem like it's time to update the forum, since the performance issues seem to get worse every month.