GPWA Site Improvements

[MichaelCorfman]

I'm pleased to announce that we have rolled out some improvements to the GPWA website today.

First, we've integrated setting GPWA Approved Portal Seal Preferences directly into the site navigation through a new "Seal Preferences" navigation item under "My Account" in the GPWA site top navigation bar. Using seal preferences webmasters of approved portals can select the size of the seal they wish to display and the default language to be used when the seal is displayed. Over the coming months we will be adding a number of new options as we expand the services offered to GPWA members.

Second, we've done a maintenance upgrade from vBulletin version 3.7 to version 3.7.2 and from vbSEO version 3.1 to version 3.2. The new version of vBulletin is primarily just a maintenance release. However, the new version of vbSEO provides significant new SEO improvements, and we expect it will help increase the number of visitors to the GPWA website.

I wish to apologize for the periods earlier today when the upgrade was in progress and the site was not functioning properly. And please let us know if you discover any glitches that need to be addressed with the changes.

Michael

[chalkoutline]

Thanks for doing the work to the site guys, it is much appreciated. The forums do seem to be quite slow when accessing pages. My connection is pretty speedy but I seem to have to wait a good 5-10 seconds for each page to load in my browser. I like to be able to nip in and out of posts and skim through the new topics. The delay means that it takes much longer to read all the recent posts and I would say that this reduced the regularity that I check in here to the time when i have more time to spare. I would be surprised if it was just me that encountered these load time issues. It might be worthwhile checking to see where the slowness originates. I don't think I am alone in thinking this. Am I?

[Chips]

Thanks for doing the work to the site guys, it is much appreciated. The forums do seem to be quite slow when accessing pages. My connection is pretty speedy but I seem to have to wait a good 5-10 seconds for each page to load in my browser. I like to be able to nip in and out of posts and skim through the new topics. The delay means that it takes much longer to read all the recent posts and I would say that this reduced the regularity that I check in here to the time when i have more time to spare. I would be surprised if it was just me that encountered these load time issues. It might be worthwhile checking to see where the slowness originates. I don't think I am alone in thinking this. Am I?

I noticed the sluggish performance as well, any improvements to this area will be welcomed! Thanks for all te work and upgrades. Life is complicated, GPWA cleans it up!

[AE-Martyn]

Awesome job Big Mike!

[thepokerkeep]

I've noticed periodic slowdowns as well... mostly when posting replies or new threads.

[MichaelCorfman]

I'll have our operations group take a look and see if they can find anything than might explain any response time delays.

Michael

[Doolally]

Great job guys!

I've also noticed a slowdown at times over the past week to 10 days.

Keep up the good work.

[LiveCasinoPartners]

Great job on the updates to the forum. I haven't noticed any problems with the load times the last week. It's been running fine for me.

[GlenB]

Not really my place to suggest this but have you considered reducing the number of sub-forums on here? I know it's nice to have a separate place for everything but it seems that many of the sub-forums are spread thin as a result. It also makes navigating the forums difficult.

Just my 2c.

[aksana]

Thanks Michael, GPWA becomes more and more interesting.

[chalkoutline]

I'll have our operations group take a look and see if they can find anything than might explain any response time delays.

Michael

Thanks Michael.

I would say that it is really page rendering/load times that feel slow, I don't think it is down to the timing in the day (although I do read the forums at this sort of time most of the time) I would say that it is probably more down to a slow script or something in the page.

There are a whole bunch of external JavaScripts being called and the inline CSS styles probably aren't helping things much.

Thanks for investigating, I hate slow loading pages!

[chalkoutline]

I have done a little poking around with Firebug and the main GPWA forums homepage takes nearly 9 seconds to load all content on my 400kbps connection. The page is 274k when all files have been downloaded. It takes 2.5 seconds for the external javascripts to be downloaded. Getting the ad banner at the top takes 1.2 seconds.

[aksana]

Micahael, I have some problems with the GPWA performance especially in Forefox. In other words, it's impossible to read the GPWA forum in Forefox, all threads load very slowly, and usually I stopped them and open them in IExplorer, which I don't like.

[chalkoutline]

Did the tech guys find anything that could be imprved here? I still find the forums very slow to browse through. I seem to remember that the individual forum thread list pages responded more quickly in the past when the summary info about each thread wasn't be shown by default. Could we try swtiching that off to see how load times change? Just a thought...

[MichaelCorfman]

Earlier today we determined that the www.gpwa.org website was configured to not allow any content to be cached. Evidently this change was made during the feature deployment to resolve problems we were having at the time. The change in settings was subseqeuntly forgotten about. We've now configured the web site to allow content to be cached once again. Our tech staff says based on tests on a random selection of pages approximately 80% of the content is now being cached. They believe this will result in a noticable improvement.

Please let us know if performance is reasonable now, or if there are still issues.

Thanks,

Michael

[bradz21]

Hi Michael,

I can tell that the threads load faster then before and I only use FireFox. Thank you sir!

Cheers,
Brad
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[Chips]

Still a bit slow in places and the thing that is getting my goat is even though i tick "remember me" it forgets and I lose my sign in session. If I am looking at new posts, and get logged off I lose all those posts I did not see.

[MichaelCorfman]

Still a bit slow in places and the thing that is getting my goat is even though i tick "remember me" it forgets and I lose my sign in session. If I am looking at new posts, and get logged off I lose all those posts I did not see.

In terms of "remember me" this instances I know about a problem here affect being logged in outside of the forums, but not inside them. Do you see instances where you are shown as being logged-out when inside the forums when you should not be? In terms of the problems I do know about here, I have a promise from the responsible developer that it will be fixed in the next week.

Michael

[Chips]

Sure make me think after 12 hours of work... lol. Actually I have been dropped both when logging in from say an email notification and when I just come here using the url and logging in. In any case, I notice that remember me forgets me more times than I would like to remember.

[chalkoutline]

Thanks Michael, that does seem to be noticably better where I am. The delays waiting for thepage to render are lower now and things move speedily. Great job guys!