The forum is now back online, though is still suffering some issues with regards to speed (mainly when quoting posts). The website suffered a server overload yesterday, which meant that the web server often returned an error code preventing access to the entire website. Other times, users were enduring long delays when trying to access the forum.

The problem has arisen due to the 'update' we performed last month, when we merged all of the main operator "Latest" threads together to tidy the forum up. The Go North East thread is causing the most problems, due to the fact it is now approaching 19,000 posts.

I spoke to both Liam and aureolin about this last night, and we have established that, to prevent this from happening again, we need to reduce the load on the server. One way this can be achieved is by splitting our main "Latest" threads. We can still work on tidying up the forum by implementing sub-forums for archived threads, with only the main active threads being displayed on the main page, but we need to act sooner rather than later.

We've come up with two ideas and we'd like to gather your feedback so that we can discuss the way forward.

Option A:
The "Latest" thread is abolished. Instead, news and discussion is categorised by thread. For example, Go North East is implementing some service changes later this month, and we have discussed these changes since November when the company undertook a customer consultation in Sunderland. Instead of having all of these posts in the "Upcoming Service Changes" or "Latest" threads, the discussion would take place in a new thread, entitled "January 2015 Service Changes". All VOSA registrations would be copied into this thread, all speculation with regards to the new allocations, all consequent repaint updates, all updates when content on the website has been changed, etc. After a period of time (30 days, for arguments sake), this thread would be automatically locked and archived in a sub-forum which could still be viewed, but no longer posted in. The threads could be unlocked by a moderator if there was a need to discuss the changes again, but I'd imagine that by the end of February, there would be no need. My personal fear is that this option is potentially quite confusing, but the advantages are that users can select the individual discussion topics they want to view (for example, one user may not want to read about the service changes occurring later this month, but they may want to read about GNE taking on the QuayLink commercially). In a "Latest" thread, users are somewhat forced to read through everything.

Option B:
The "Latest" thread continues, but is split by month. We tried this before, and it did work well at the time, but it was incredibly tedious for Liam and I. There is nothing available (as far as we know) which is capable of automatically splitting a thread by month, nor is there anything in place to select all posts on a page in a thread, which means each and every post has to be selected individually. The advantage of selecting this option is that the simplicity of there only being one thread to post in remains. The old thread would be archived in a similar way to Option A. An issue arises at the end of each month, though. Although possible, it is more difficult to quote a post in a locked thread to transfer it over to a new thread which is still active.


Thoughts/opinions? If neither option is clear enough above, post below and I'll try and make it clearer...