Welcome to XenForo

[Mike]

No such thing as too much Hp or too much speed. There has got to be another tenth in it somewhere.

What, you want the site logging you out before you get your password entered to log in, or what?

There wasn't much speed gained in changing the storage engine. And that was an hour's worth of work, to boot. The average dropped to 0.1212 second, so it was only 1/10,000th of a second increase in speed. But that is one heckuva lot faster than it was a week ago, at 0.3670 second. Pages are loading in a third of the time they were loading after the conversion.

Server load dropped nearly a tenth of a point, so the storage engine change was worth it. When the site is busy and has a lot of users trying to post, things will go much quicker. Before, if 10 people were posting to 10 different threads at the same time, the entire database table would lock, until the first post was written to the database. Now, when you submit a post, only the row you're writing to will be locked, so if it's ten different rows, the posts will all be written much faster.

It's been a trip, optimizing this script. I managed to take something that was already 20% faster and really crank it up. When was the last time you managed to get something to run 73% faster and not spend so much as one, red cent on it? When we get those busier days, it will all pay off.

 

[409T]

When was the last time you managed to get something to run 73% faster and not spend so much as one, red cent on it?

When I switched from Windows to PCLinuxOS, thank you.

 

[Mike]

When I switched from Windows to PCLinuxOS.

Another excellent example. I'm going to be doing a Mint install for a friend with a malware-laden Windoze install. He's going to be amazed at how fast his old XP machine can run.

 

[409T]

I bounced back and forth between Mint and PCLOS for quite some time. I like both, but I like PCLOS just a shade better, maybe it is the glitz of KDE vs. Gnome. Even though I am dual boot with Win 7, I have found that I can do everything in PCLOS that I used to do in Windows except for Flash. The real nice thing is Linux will read my Windows hard drive and copy files directly out of it. Can't even think about doing that the other way around.

 

[Mike]

It's funny how different people think. Which is why Linux is so much fun. I like both distros, as well. Both of the machines, here on the desk, have both PCLOS and Mint (this one is LMDE, the other is Mint 11) on them. I think both are very refined distros, but I prefer Gnome to the bling of KDE.

If you can imagine, I managed to completely crash LMDE. Twice. I'm thinking it was Compiz causing the issue. I've disabled it and everything is back to normal.

I had a dream about this place crashing, last night. I dreamed all of the changes made yesterday took the site down. It even woke me up. I was almost concerned enough to come in here and check. But common sense prevailed, I rolled over and went back to sleep.

 

[Mike]

Gee. I just managed to knock another 0.0188 second out of the page load time and it's like nobody even noticed.

That's it. I've hammered, banged, tuned and tweaked on things as far as I am going to go. Time has dropped from 0.4500 second to 0.1024 second and that's just going to have to be good enough.

 

[lincolnuT]

Damm I thought .4500 was pretty fast..........works for me............

 

[Mike]

Some of you may have encountered a database error page a minutes or two ago. Apologies, but I had to restart the MySQL server, so there was no database to connect to, for about 3-4 seconds.

 

[Mike]

I have my ol' pal, Test, logged into the forum. He's going to be helping me test some permissions over the next couple hours.

If you notice any of the forums behaving a bit strange, please be patient.

 

[Keeper]

hahaha he seems to be a very popular person, I have used him many a time.

Though I have developed a great relationship, with "Bob (the) Builder" who has been subjected to many a test.

BTW I am loving this forum software.

 

[Mike]

I'm loving the system, too. After spending a couple weeks just trying to get everything working correctly for everyone, I suddenly saw something I had missed before.

XenForo's forum permission settings are absolutely brilliant. Thanksgiving Day, I spent a couple hours making what I thought were individual usergroup settings in each forum. It was completely unnecessary, because all that was necessary was to inherit permissions from the regular usergroup and then add or subtract permissions as necessary.

For the moderators, they inherit the same forum permissions you have. But since they have secondary membership in the Moderating usergroup, they inherit those additional permissions. In my case, my primary usergroup is the same as yours. But I have secondary membership in the Moderating usergroup, to inherit those additional permissions, and I also have secondary membership in the Administrative usergroup, to inherit those additional permissions.

Instead of setting all 26 forum permissions for each of the 9 usergroups, for each category and each forum, all I really needed to do was click the inherit button for each usergroup, to automatically inherit everything. I had created work for myself, because the XenForo system was simply too easy. But it's all fixed now and it will make changes down the road easier than ever.

The biggest hurdle in using XenForo software is realizing there really are no hurdles.

 

[Mike]

I've been exploring the use of XenForo's custom pages a bit further. If you look up in the NavBar, you'll see a new Site Info tab. As time progresses, I'll be grouping pages pertaining to the site at that tab.

Here's a look at how I had the Rules page set up -

Lisa from over at Admin Extra, ever the sweetheart, stepped in with some CSS styling and look what we ended up with -

Not only is the software making life easy for me, Lisa is helping out with a lot of styling pointers and other good advice. At this point, I don't see any way we can lose.

 

[Mike]

OK, I just did some more tweaking for, you know, if we are ever going to add a photo gallery to XenForo. I'm not saying we are definitely adding a gallery script, I'm just saying if we ever do, I want to be ready for it.

We've been using the GD library extension to edit images on the server. Which works alright, as you can see -

I've just added the Imagick extension, which has a lot of advantages, including image quality, as you can see -

The image Imagick produces is much sharper and cleaner. Plus it has the benefit of using less memory than GD. And it will run about 10% faster than GD (not that I'm all that interested in speed, you'll understand ).

it just never hurts to be prepared...

 

[Mike]

Were now over 60 days in with this new software. And I'm loving it.

Our search engine numbers are all bouncing right back. I watch a handful of our keywords, to see how well we're ranking on them and how many indexed pages they are showing up on. Some of those keywords are now appearing on 10 times the pages they were on in early November. The sitemap generator I'm running within XenForo is submitting twice the URLs and the indexed sitemap URL number has also doubled. Based on our average, daily traffic numbers, we're going to be setting yet another record for the month of January.

Our post count numbers were flaky over the holidays, which is normal, but the overall trend is up over 30%. Our daily, active member count is up a tick over 20%. New registrations are up within a couple ticks of 10%. So it seems all of you are enjoying the new software, as well. The e-mails to announce trouble with the forum have dropped to a fraction of what they were. And the best part is in all of those instances, the problems have all been client-side. I had some problems with getting some forum rules to update on the rules page and that gave me fits for a couple of days. I thought we were having problems with all the caching we're using on the server and was really scratching my head. And it all turned out to be a case of cranial-rectal inversion on my part, because I had forgotten how XenForo treats the code on custom pages. Once I made the popping sound and got my head out of the dark place, I had things fixed in minutes. It was a case of applying IPB thinking to XenForo coding and making things harder than they had to be.

XenForo is running better on our server, as well. I have always tried to optimize our software to work well on the server, but XenForo is making that pretty easy on me. We're running faster than ever before and with lower load numbers. We're coming up on another anniversary with our hosting company and as a token of their appreciation for our prompt payments over the years, they allocated us a bit more RAM and a lot more bandwidth as a Christmas gift. XenForo didn't have us anywhere close to the previous limits, so we've now some additional resources in the bank for the coming months and years.

But I've found one thing I don't like about our new platform. Whilst we have a smooth-running Donation Manager, this one will not allow me to define starting and ending dates for the monthly donations. I had the IPB donations set up to run from the 26th of one month to the 25th of the next, so I could always be sure we either had enough funds in our PayPal account to pay the hosting expenses. Otherwise I would have time to transfer funds from the bank account back to PayPal, which typically takes 48 - 72 hours. And since we're running behind on donations for the month, I figured I better make a transfer this morning, to be sure I can cover the bill.

One thing I really hate doing is talking about money, so I'm just going to say the clock is ticking down on the month and let the above image fill in the blanks.

Overall, I think XenForo is the most positive step this community has ever taken.

 

[madmike8]

Since I only get paid once a month (k-12 School System) I try to donate at the first of the month, but with it being a holiday... I forgot! I usually leave a browser tab open to the "What's New" page, and refresh it as necessary throughout the day, so I don't get the nice Donation reminder from the Home page to remind me. Sorry...

Btw, you've made me a Xenforo fan. I definitely like this over IPBoard!

 

[Mike]

You guys gonna leave me hanging on the last $55?

 

[Don'tCallMeJimmie]

It was only $30 by the time I got there, but I gotcher... I don't always have the scratch but this month was an exception.

 

[Mike]

Thanks to everyone who stepped up in the closing hours. I was able to move money back to the bank account this morning, after I paid the bills.