The downloads are still slow. Is this still happening to others? There was a another topic posted about this but the sensors must have gotten nervous and deleted it because a lot of folks were comparing it to atvtime.com.I imagine it won't take to long for "big brother" to decide this post needs to be terminated as well.
Joe

 

It was fast for about the first day, I don't know what happened after that. Lata.

 

It's still a joke. It's even getting slower.

 

It took me exactly 32 seconds to download this thread. With atvtime. it takes about 2 seconds. It's the amount of traffic this site gets. This was the first site I found when I bought my first quad.(I rode dirtbikes before). And this site and its members were extremely helpfull and I learned alot of usefull information. There are many knowlegable people on this site but I see alot of them have jumped ship to atvtime. I really can't blame them as this site gets frustrating and kind of heavy handed when comes to the moderations. Hopefully the staff here will see the error of their ways and keep this site as usefull as it has been in the past. But I dont know sounds like there may be money involved.IE: better and faster servers. I guess we will all have to wait and see. Jay

 

"The forums will be flying within 45 days. We're doubling our bandwidth. We exceeded 150,000 people a month and now we need to upgrade again in order to provide premium service for our readers! "
the 'patrol' gave me this response and i believe them. i like this forum and i'm not bailing-out!

 

All the ATV boards look good when they first start out! Why? They only have a few people--which means less moderating is needed and they have less people competing for bandwidth and server resources. As soon as a board grows all of a sudden their $25 a month ISP hosting account won't do it any more. Then they need to buy a T-1 at a $1000 a month. Oh, then their servers can't keep up anymore. So they need to spend several thousand dollars on a faster web server. But wait...now that they have a faster web server their database server can't keep up. So they have to dump several thousand more dollars on a new database server. All so they can continue to provide this "FREE" service to their visitors (don't get me wrong...we love you guys). I'm just sharing the reality of what it takes to bring these forums to you!

Well, now, where does the money come from to pay for all that? Well, from advertisers! But wait...if people start posting commercial links to their business' in the "FREE" forums then they can get free advertising without paying for it, right? But....then that means the "FREE" board can't pay for the service it's readers enjoy. So...they need to eliminate the free commercial advertising so that people buy advertising so they can continue to provide the "FREE" board for people to enjoy. But then the people who were abusing the forum by advertising are unhappy. So they try to get around the no advertising policy by posting tricky advertisements such as, "Anyone buy this ultra cool hot new pipe from company abc located at www.abc.com?" So then the moderators have to decide if this is a person asking an honest question or merely trying to post an Ad.


So...you see...you can't please everyone! The best we can do is to set rules that permit us to fund the services we provide to you so that they can continue to be free and can be a high quality service. Our goal is to always do our best for the ATVers even if it means some hard rules born of necessity. We try to please as many people as possible while doing what is necessary for a large forum such as this to exist for your use.


My point is its all a matter of size. If 1% of 17,000 forum users decide they want to have fun and spam the board or post filthy messages...that 1% amounts to 170 people. If 1% of another board with only 1500 users decides to cause problems...that's only 15 people. It's all relative to overall size.

So, yes, we're bound to have more people who get frustrated by some of the rules because we have MORE PEOPLE! We're bound to have some performance problems because we have more people! The people who won't support our rules so we can continue to serve you...go start other boards and then spend their time complaining that they weren't permitted to violate our rules. Frankly, we don't miss those folks.

The important question is what are we doing about the performance problems and moderating? We just installed a brand new dedicated server for the forums. It has two 1 ghz CPU's and 1 gig of ram. It has a ultra-high speed SCSI disk drive capable of transferring data from disk to CPU at 160 megabytes per second. Your hard drive transfers data at about 10 Meg/sec. This is some serious hardware we just installed (2 weeks ago.) We have another Hewlett Packard server with two 400mhz CPUs and 1/2 gig of ram--all it does is runs the database that stores the forum messages. So...these forums require two high-speed dedicated servers in order to effectively operate. In two weeks we're upgrading the underlying software which the boards run on. It's called Cold Fusion. The new version of Cold Fusion will process pages at 75 pages per second versus the current version which runs at 35 pages per second. We're doubling the throughut of our page per second processing via the Cold Fusion upgrade in a couple of weeks! Cold Fusion version 5 just became available yesterday and won't ship for another week or else we'd already have installed it!

We also have a new point-to-point T-1 (direct Internet Connection) on order. It will double the amount of bandwidth (our pipe to the Internet) that we currently have. It will take 30 - 45 days before they can install it. This will provide the biggest performance boost for the forums. Then the only thing slowing down the forums will be YOUR connection to the internet!

As the forums grow...down the road...we'll hit performance problems again. We always do. At that point, we'll need to install a second dedicated forum server and load balance the forums across 2 (both) servers. Then, eventually 3 servers, and so on.....

We're also adding about 6 new moderators to help keep this forum clean, informative, friendly and professional. Which benefits all of us who use the boards. There is nothing worse then wanting to post a message but being afraid to because you're scared someone may personally attack you and call you names. We want everyone from kids to older folks to be able to participate here and have a good time. Hence, we'll have board helpers and moderators here to service you.


History has shown that when I post a message explaining the "why" of what we do....a bunch of people will want to engage me in a long discussion about the info I shared. So...to set your expectations ahead of time...please know that I won't post any more replies in this thread. My time is better spent working to improve the service for all forum users rather than chatting with a few users who want more info or who may not agree with us on some things. As a wise Vulcan once said, "the good of the many outweigh the good of the few." The fact that I can't spend hours here chatting with you about this message doesn't mean I don't listen or I don't care. I do! It just means I only have so much time in the day and you can see when the owner and president of a company (I'm president of ATV Connection) is still working at Midnight that I do have a VERY HEAVY workload. So please trust we're working hard to resolve the issues you've brought to light and we do both care and listen. Thank you!


Please know that we always have your best interest at heart and we're working extremely hard to respond to your concerns and to continue improving our services to you. YOU ARE the ATV Connection and it's a priviledge to serve you.

Stay tuned! Good stuff is happening. And thank you for your patience while we respond to your concerns.

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply. sounds like things are going to get better around here. I'm looking forward to it!
Jay

 

Thank you very much for the informative reply and your efforts
to speed things up.

 

Thanks for your reply your explanation is well received. I will stick it out and wait for the next phase of upgrades.

 

Thanks for the explanation!! it really cleared thing us, at first, i thought you guys must have been using 14.4 modem or something.. i can't wait for the new upgrade. i like all the new buttons and everything, they're pretty cool