New Site Changes = Great, But There Are Some Problems
by jchamberlin on Comments
Last night's preview of the site was pretty cool. I was kind of shocked to see the design changes, and from all that I saw, I thought they did a great job with it. The personal pages (blog/profile/whatever) looked better, had 10,000 more emblems, and contained all of out stats in a little box, including contribution numbers, review numbers, forum posts, etc. This box will certainly have an affect on many of our blog entries, since a lot of them seem to include that info, and a few, nothing but that info. In fact, my blogs will no longer feature this info. Anyway, the staff had to pull the site changes because of performance issues. Anyone who logged on at the time noticed there was some serious lag. I'm sure they'll have it fixed within a few days, like the performance problems that existed when the forums were upgraded. One bug which caught my eye with last night's preview was found on the show guides. I noticed this while checking The Drew Carey Show page, where the top contributor was retired, but he had the new "Editor" graphic next to his name, yet I still seemed to have Editor powers (the show was listed under my profile's list. I recommend that the staff look into this before they go live with it again. Because of the performance issues with last night's changes, I was unable to check the changes to the submission status pages, but I highly recommend they re-think the idea of the drop-down menus to narrow down the options for the show/person you contributed to. As discussed here, there is a huge performance issue with people who contribute a lot. The average contributor likely won't contribute to more than 30-40 people/shows, but the top contributors contribute to a lot more than that. Contributing to hundreds of shows and people will likely create a large number of queries to the database to get the appropriate info to fill out the drop-down menus. I am reminded by a contributor who put over 600 shows in his favorites list, which pretty much disabled his account until the staff went in and cleaned out his favorites list. It was just too much to load at once when he tried to login or browse. The same is true for the submission status.