Curse

Mercury Angel · Jun 28, 2007, 09:14 PM // 21:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Risky Ranger

An Elite site should not have these type of problems. I just ask that Guru fix the problem as I enjoy the site when it is working properly.

No major fansite has been without these problems.
Any time there's heavy load, they crumple like paper balls.

GWOnline's gone down in high volume times. Guild Wiki's gone down frequently as well. Guru's got sustained heavy traffic, so it's to be expected.

(As an additional note, GWOnline addressed its high levels of traffic for a time period by completely disabling searching + preventing unregistered viewers from accessing the forum at all.)

Even the official US Guild Wars site has gone down at least once, to the best of my knowledge, during some event where traffic was intense. I can't for the life of me think of what it was, though.

There's no way you can honestly expect any site run on ad revenues and donations to be able to keep up with the heavy traffic from the Guild Wars userbase with no official site to go to. Especially when a huge percentage of the users see no reason they should load the advertisements that pay for the site, who also frequently come to complain about the server being crappy. Not pointing fingers here, but I've seriously seen posts by people proudly proclaiming the blockage of advertisements from this site, and posts by the same people demanding the site undergo improvements.

I'm not paid one red cent to moderate, and I receive no benefit for saying this, but I feel this needs to be brought up occasionally as people have a tendency to forget.

Again, this isn't directed at anyone in particular; I know there are people who do understand this, and don't need to be told, and are simply interested in knowing an approximate date in the future when major issues can be addressed.

Also bear in mind that GWGuru is part of a larger MMOGuru network. Not involved in the administration of this site, so I can only guess, but I'd imagine resources are shared at least in part across the network. No clue if this is the case, though.

I think Inde's in an awkward position, balancing the wants and needs of the community, with the needs of the site.
A while back, advertisements could have been made more aggressive, with ads either in or between posts, and ample use of intellitext to increase revenues, but the ultimate decision was to remove them for registered users.
Search had to be disabled, as with GWOnline, and we got a lesser, but still somewhat useful search function in its place. Unlike GWOnline, we've never recovered enough to re-enable it. You'll notice that GWOnline has added a captcha (anti-bot measure) to their search to better manage server load.
A big point of discussion by users has been the high volume of guests; If we prevented viewing of the site by unregistered users, as GWOnline did, the forums would be much faster, we could probably have search enabled, and many people would be happy. However, Inde is adamantly opposed to this; All users are welcome to peruse the site freely, without an arbitrary registration barrier.

I honestly believe that if Guru were shut down permanently, you'd see GWOnline crumple under the combined load of ex-guru'ers, and this isn't a matter of arrogant pride. Guru has a lot of users, and GWOnline does too. Put them all on any single site, and you're going to experience problems. (Now, what is a matter of arrogant pride I'll say is that guru has the largest user base of any single US forum fansite, to the best of my knowledge)

Apologies on the impromptu speech. I'd also like to say, I'm not aware of the full extant of any recent problems, as I've been heavily occupied by college lately, so if I've missed something, I'm sorry.

The story of GWGuru is one I think you can look forward to seeing more of in the future. The big online advertising boom is over, though as with many such phenomena, it does continue to have mini booms and busts. Expect to see more sites push to either more aggressive advertising (see GameFAQs's recent controversy) or crippling features and accessibility for free users, and requiring subscription for full use.

Voltar · Jun 29, 2007, 10:30 PM // 22:30

though i'm in the "my fault" catagory having joined in like ummm
<---whatever it says over there
it was noticeably way slower after about a month ago. i kinda wish the site sucked so i'd just stop coming back...but there a lot of long loads which (in ie, not firefox) sometimes time out. unfortunately i have to refresh pages to see updates (which is likely more a client-side issue) which involves much more loading. is there some kinda of compression or archiving of old material or something for that?

Amy Awien · Jul 01, 2007, 08:01 AM // 08:01

One could remove some of the user-info on the side, the post-count-status and other user info are extra queries and serve little purpose.

kzap · Jul 01, 2007, 05:22 PM // 17:22

I have to say Inde does a fantastic job at running Guild Wars Guru and the Guru Select Program, it wouldnt still be what it is without her. Tweaks have been done here and there but in the end the fact is we get so much visitors and the site does so much traffic that it simply requires bigger, and more powerful servers. Right now we run the network on 4 servers, and we are working on getting a much more powerful database server. Each Guru Select Subscription helps, running Guru is a fulltime job and everything goes to keeping us up and running. We haven't been able to expand to other games much yet due to the current server situation. The fact of the matter is we've done almost everything we can to generate revenue to keep the site going without putting Gold ads on it, I can tell you I've had offers but have turned them all down and we'd probably have more servers already if we had taken such advertisers but we do whats best for our community as we always have and we know they dont want any such advertisers on Guru.

If you would like to donate to a Gold Ad Free Network and one that isnt owned by IGE (lol), please get a Guru Select subscription and encourage everyone you know to get one. The program hasn't been as popular as we hoped but nevertheless it enables a lot of extra features on our sites and there are monthly prize drawings for Select Subscribers.

https://select.mmoguru.com/

As for the new server, its big, its powerful, looking to be a 2x Dual Core Xeon 2.0Ghz with 8GB DDR2 RAM + 3x36GB 10K RPM RAID5 Hard Drives. We'll let you know when we get it and you'll notice when the load times decrease

Bowstring Badass · Jul 01, 2007, 06:45 PM // 18:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malice Black

Guru was actually fairly quick/stable until just before Factions was released, search worked (the old decent version) load times were acceptable, so if your join date is after Feb-Mar 2006 you are to blame

I agree dang Factions.