Download pages' enourmous size

[Shambler0]

I find this site just awesome for downloading and sharing maps. Thank You for creating and supporting it.

BUT

You really, REALLY need to optimize your site.

Each page loads for quite a long time. People with dialup modems even have to ask other people to download maps from this site because they have to wait 15 minutes for each page to be loaded otherwise.


Here is how to do that:

1) REMOVE THE AUTHOR LIST from download pages!!!! It takes about 700kB (!!!) and growing; a size that is equal to that of a large warcraft map. It is too long to be usable anyway. A user has to wait a pair of minutes for it to scroll to desired author. Adding author search instead of the list would be a good idea, but not neccesary.

2) Instead of giving attributes to each HTML tag just specify a CSS class with a short name. If a user has a browser THAT old, aligns won't help him much anyway. Having 100 absolutely same tags with absolutely same STYLE="..." attributes is pointless at all.

3) Put all those CSS's and JS's to external files. They will be cached by users' browsers, rather than downloaded each time.


Feel free to contact me via ICQ/AIM/MSN for details.

Thank You.

 

[Ki]

Again, the only problem is Darky isn't going to do anything, and the only one who has access to the scripting is VGsatomi. I doubt he will give it to anyone he doesn't trust.

So my suggestion is get someone to download them for you and send them through another source. Either that or get a faster internet.

 

[Deathbringer]

He offered good advice though.. maybe have him speak with VG through AIM or something and do a step by step to fix it

 

[Mecheon]

FINALLY, SOMEONE WHO ACTUALLY IS COMPLAINING WHILE KNOWING WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT, ALONG WITH OFFERING ALTERNATIVES!

Thank you sir. You have rekindled my hope in humanity

 

[olofmoleman]

I completely disagree with removing the author list, it's already hard enough to find anything good in the giant piles of crap...

 

[Deathbringer]

I have to say though, its a pain in the ass to look through that list..

I'm even running DSL and it takes awhile to load

Overall I use categories or search (even though it doesn't work sometimes) to find something, or I go under memberlist, find an author, and look through his stuff.

 

[Shambler0]

I completely disagree with removing the author list, it's already hard enough to find anything good in the giant piles of crap...

1) Well, it would be a better idea to create a separate page for an author list, with details about them: how many maps have that author created, overall rating of his maps, etc. This will be MUCH more usefull than just a giant plain list of authors, where it is hard decide, what authors are good enough for you.

2) Just consider this:

If you already know author's name, it would be much easier to just enter it in a textbox, than waiting the menu to scroll to desired name.

If you want to see other maps from an author of some particular maps, find that map and follow a link in its description.

If niether of above, then you just will never find GOOD author by just browsing, no, scrolling a list of over 2000 nicknames!!

So this list is ABSOLUTELY USELESS.

3) It is not really too hard to make that menu into an <IFRAME>, where it will look the same, but load only if requested, and also be cacheable (cached until that list changes)

4) AT LEAST just making that list into a javascript array, not the <OPTION> tags will give away MUCH of space.



Removing that list is a matter of 2 minutes of editing templates and 5-8 minutes of debugging them. We're not even asking them to ADD a feature, but we're asking to REMOVE one.
Just Please ask those authors via AIM/MSN/ICQ/Whatever to spend the damn 10 minutes to cut their site traffic costs by nearly(or even more than) a half!!

 

[VGsatomi]

Thank you, Mecheon, for saying what was needed to be said. The author list is pretty useless, I agree.

For example, if I typed my name 2 different ways in my uploaded maps, say, VGsatomi and Vgsatomi, it would count both names as two different authors, even though they was uploaded by the same user with the same name.

I will see what I can do about removing it.
-VGsatomi

 

[olofmoleman]

Wait, I take back what I said, I was thinking of the author list in the models section, wich I mostly visit, that one isn't useless in my opinion, but the maps author list is useless because of all the different versions of names of the same authors.

 

[Shambler0]

Wait, I take back what I said, I was thinking of the author list in the models section, wich I mostly visit, that one isn't useless in my opinion, but the maps author list is useless because of all the different versions of names of the same authors.

I didn't notice that either: I thought that list was same for both maps, models, tools, and so on.

Well, I would suggest you consider a list unusable if it has more than ~50-100 items.

I also think that it would be a better idea to have a scrollbar instead of a javascript-driven scrolling system.

Another idea: if you would still like to have a list, at least put it to the end of HTML file, or, even better - in an external javascript file. Any of those will let people not to wait while the page is fully loaded.


Looking forward to be able to normally browse your pages!

 

[Matt540 sheep god!]

Now if only we could think of ideas to prevent spam topics and posts...

Not saying you put spam though. You have some great ideas here.

 

[Shambler0]

Today I noticed your site is lagging heavily. I think this could mean only one: overload.

So why are you just standing there and doing nothing?? Is Darky29 or VGsatomi or any other admin alive?

Now it IS time when you HAVE TO do something.

 

[Mecheon]

Veeg isn't a php wizard who can do everything. The only one who can touch the site and knows what he's doing is Darky, and anyone who's been here long enough knows how rarely he visits