Development Forum - Tester's thread

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 16:46

Maz wrote:thx PA registration bug sounds serious. I hope I have just forgot to do some edits on testarea, and that the registration works on real site...

Well, design is just a test I did last night. I don't know if it will be finished or used for real

hm... nice as an idea but a bit too dark and scary for a forum that has freeware games... Also I think that it was a bit heavy (in loading) in comparison with the one that we have now.

Post by **Chroelle** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 17:29

BTW, I am currently looking over testsite to see which places could look like what... And I just stumbled on the fact that I dont think the new versions banner should link to my webdesigncompany anymore. Maybe it should link to the mainsite of CWF now.
I am thinking about how we can make new design rather easy and without too much experience, and I think we should cut down on flames, and just let the black reign the table, and then add a few features here and there. I will be happy to dig up some stuff.
Maybe some charaters from some of the games... I think I can do something...

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 22:52

I agree with C about the link pointing to his webdesign site. We can and should of course maintain a link, but the place for the top title should be reserved for link to mainsite.

Reason why I chose flames was that it was simple to do. It's not easy to place many different characters from games, or some other images that cannot be repeated like flames. Flames are currently written in CSS, so the images cannot be selected with php. And doing the images in html way is clumsy.

Basically what I am trying to say, is that for next release we do not make wonders. It shall be either some image that can be easily repeated, or no images at all.

But if someone wishes to plan the outlook, and send me the images, I can do it.. (Or Zyx or Spanny) if it's not too complicated...

Regarding heavyness. I noticed that also the real site was working slow today. I do not know the reason. What comes to the features added to site... Only thing that can have some relevance is the flame images. Although that should not really be a problem either. (done with CSS, image is loaded only once). All other things added have replaced some existing image/thing.

Do not take me wrong. I am open for suggestions, but I just wanted to say that I have no time/skills do big changes. And basically everything else but 'border images' like the flames, and colour changes require much more effort...

Post by **Chroelle** » Thu Feb 15, 2007 23:34

Ok. I actually thought you had the flames placed one by one... Fair enough. Then I take back what I said. I don't think we should play around with placing characters, unless someone really has some skills and time to do the job. (Please remember that deadlines can be expanded if anybody needs that to make a design).

Yes, the site seemed slow today. I just tried looking over the profile at the host... Could you do the same. Is there anything suspicious. Especially I noticed the traffic. Also I saw that if you check out the webalizer statistics, then it shows the calendar-file as having an enourmous amount of hits...Does that mean anything to you?

Regarding Characters I still think we should keep them coming in, as they might be of use no matter what, or at a latter stage.

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 9:21

Regarding the hits, is it possible that is due to the refreshing of the Lurker page?

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:31

I can say that I looked in the admin page yesterday and it had like 50 guests visitn the board, all with the same IP-adress... So maybe that has something to do with it. I didn't think of it until just now. I will go see if it is still acting like that...

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:35

Well.... What do you know....Could this be the troublemaker? The list goes on and on. I think my bid of 50 was clearly a shot way below the real number...

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 11:53

The guest ip belongs to google...

crawl-66-249-65-133.googlebot.com

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 12:06

Then why the heck does it visit so often...? I mean it is currently visiting every single forum and have about 100 guests looking through the entire forum.... Any idea on why it would do this? And how that leads to the site being slowed and to some extent stopped. It is also causing problems with our ads, that keep getting stopped.

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 12:08

C. You can click on the IP, which redirects you to DNS lookup page. When you press submit there and wait for a few secs, you should see the hostname. If it contains 'google' in it, a bot is a good guess

(There's also some msn bots and other bots occasionally visiting. But that kind of google bot 'attacs' are quite usual

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 12:15

Ok...So we have established that it is not the bots that is the slow down problem? What about Spannys Lurk-idea then? (I am sitting here at work totally disregarding that I am work... We are so many employees at work and so few kids that there is no problem in me saying that I need to look at my jobs homepage and update it, and then doing that for 5 minutes and staying in the office for two hours...

)

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 12:21

ok... read this first http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html and then this http://www.revenews.com/jimkukral/archives/001160.html

This explains all about robots and how you can deal with them. We can insert a meta tag that prevents the robots from visiting, but this will affect how easy someone will find us through search engines...

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 13:06

Ok, so blocking bots - bad
Not blocking bots - bad...?

Can we assume that the bots are responsible for the slow-down? If they are then I need to invest in more bandwidth...

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 13:17

If you read the two links I gave you, you will see that there are good bots and bad bots... If we filter out the bad bots and provide a file for the good bots to take their data, I believe that we will be alright

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 13:21

Oki. Is that something you can look into?

I would be very grateful

I have no idea where to start, and I fear that I should not involve myself in any more subtasks, as I am about to loose my focus on the main things...

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 13:23

Chroelle wrote:Oki. Is that something you can look into?
I would be very grateful

I have no idea where to start, and I fear that I should not involve myself in any more subtasks, as I am about to loose my focus on the main things...

Ok... I will do some reading and I will try to find a good solution

Post by **Chroelle** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 13:30

GREAT!

Post by **Zyx** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 13:57

Chroelle, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Webmaster tools, sign-in and there you can see what Googlebot actually does with this site. There we can also submit a sitemap, so Google knows what we actually have here AND we can also choose that Googlebot visits us less often.

spanek · Post by **spanek** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 14:42

Zyx wrote:Chroelle, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Webmaster tools, sign-in and there you can see what Googlebot actually does with this site. There we can also submit a sitemap, so Google knows what we actually have here AND we can also choose that Googlebot visits us less often.

ok.

So C. do you want to check first the tools and see if something can be done from there, or should I keep searching?

Maz · Post by **Maz** » Fri Feb 16, 2007 15:02

Most of the bad bots do not care about meta tags. And most of them have also been dealed with. Furthermore, we have had similar amounts of google bots visiting the site for quite a while now, and that has not really slowed down the site afaik. But we could really set some time intervall for googlebots when to do the indexing. I believe once a week would be enough? Perhaps not even that often.