Things to change at WC3search

[VGsatomi]

All moderators have been promoted to moderate all sections. That should solve the problems of have active mods with loo little responsibility and vice versa.

Also in the maps section, these will be added to the submittion critiera;

-Original maps only. Thats mean no edits of other people's work. This includes blizzard. The only exceptions to this is if a map was willingly passed on from one owner to the next, and not valid edits made from open source maps.

-No demo maps.

-Beta maps are okay, but they must be late beta stage maps. If you do not know what a late beta stage map is, please read the map submitting criteria in the maps forum.

-No maps that cannot be play tested (mainly pertains to open RPG maps. Sorry, but if you know enouph about triggering to add a save/load code, you should know enouph about triggering to break it when there is only 1 player present.) Our moderators will need to be able to play test maps without having to log into bnet.

-A minimum standard of quality will soon be put in play for all sections soon. I will write up a description of what is needed to meet minimum requirements for maps when it is put into effect. Other section mods will be required to write one up for their own sections.

Also, we will begon removing resources with broken links immediatly. If a resource comes up with a "page cannot be displayed" when you hit the download link, please report it to any moderator and we will deal with it.

I will also begin trying to remove the author list drop bar from all sections. This is one thing we strongly suspect is causing the long page load times.

Everyone has been chanting "purge! purge! purge!" these past few month. You know what they say, be careful what you wish for.... please do not get upset with the moderators if any of your material is among that removed. Thank you.
-VGsatomi

 

[Metal_Sonic]

This sounds much better. I'm going to gather a list of broken links now, let the purging begin.

 

[Rao Dao Zao]

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm going to do my bit for the purge by clearing out all my old crap.

 

[AztraL-]

Finally the purge shall win!
I also will purge my part and will tell this to my brother & sister.
Let the cleaning begin.


Did someone found my noobeating dog by the way? :twisted:

 

[dudeofwar]

Ill start helping too everyone lets look for broken links :!: finally purging is coming :twisted: :lol:

 

[dudeofwar]

Oops double post oh well lets go, if this is cleaned the site will be faster and browsing will be easier

 

[Alvatar]

Fine, this site needs cleaning, but there is few...at least speculative points.

On first place, "minimum standard of quality". This is really subjective thing and many people can see same thing many ways and which is considered as crap by somebody can be found as good by someone else.

Second thing is purge will never accelerate site! Reducing filters may realy help (author seach is at least sporadic). You should not end with authors and for example remove tileset (who actualy choosing maps by tileset?)
Removing mainpage random icon shall help as well.

If you actualy doesnt using cashing of some not-such-variable pages, you should. It really helps.

Hope somebody will read to this point

 

[Samuraid]

On the issue of performance...

You should consider enabling GZip compression on all the main site pages (the forum pages already use GZip).

As it is now, the index page of wc3sear.ch is around 110KB. If you used compression, it would reduce the size down to around ~20KB. This would drastically reduce your HTML bandwidth requirements, allow pages to load much faster, and allow the server to perform more efficiently instead of having to keep really long connections open to send so much HTML.

To enable GZip, simply place the following PHP code at the top of all your pages (before any HTML output occurs):

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

PHP.net reference for this feature:
www.php.net/ob_gzhandler

Hope this helps. I've used it on tons of sites and it works excellently. Give it and try, it should work well.

 

[Mr. Clean]

Elmiinate this one.
http://www.wc3sear.ch/?p=Maps&ID=4882
It was an old prototype of things I was thinking about for patch 1.19 balance changes, thus it is no longer needed.
Anyway, in regards to the new rules, what about maps that need multiplayer to be at their best? I remember putting a difficulty modifier system in my multiplayer RPG (thanks to an idea in one of VG's threads) to make it more single player friendly but its still more fun with more than one person.

 

[VGsatomi]

Second thing is purge will never accelerate site!

That is correct. Reducing the number of files will not make the site go faster. I dont know where that myth started, but it sure has been perssistant. I am currently working on other methods that likely will improve speed, one of which being the author list.

@Mr. Clean

When I meant report broken link maps, I didnt mean report it HERE, I implied through PM. I guess I should have made that more clear.
-VGsatomi

 

[Gauntlet2021]

As a note to anyone whos map get taken down in the near future:
You've (hopefully) gotten some constructive critisism out of posting. This should show that you do have potential if you keep trying at it, and take peoples reccomendations seriosly.

I may only have posted one map, but I got enough critisism to help me out with current maps that i wouldnt have noticed before.

 

[Alvatar]

To enable GZip, simply place the following PHP code at the top of all your pages (before any HTML output occurs):

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

I have bad experience with this. There is problem with browsers witch not support GZ compressed pages. Also this helps with traffic, not with performance

[EDIT] : for better performance is good to use pear package Cache - http://pear.php.net/package/Cache

In PHP is also memchache but I have no experience with it.

 

[Kimbo]

excellent.
Ill go looking for links and ill go through my stuff, and see if i can get soem things done.

Edit; although i dont think this is pm worthy, maybe use search in the map section with the words "beta" "test" "demo" etc.

 

[Capcy]

In a note of this the resource pages all have...

Comments are Moderated by Darky29, Sansui, Leopard, Afronight_76, oz02, DarkShadow, Daelin, DeadDogNoGoWoof, Mecheon, Rui and VGsatomi

Where this is good in saying who the moderators are, wouldn't it be easier to just put all those names under one specific title? Or just simpily remove the moderators names?

Anyway, Alvatar has a point with "minimum standard of quality" we really need a to the point standard, IMO all the resources that are posted here is to go through a line of two or three chosen people, if it is okay from two then it passes else well you know what would happen.

I presume that something along these lines has already been put into motion, if so then i stand by it.

 

[Samuraid]

To enable GZip, simply place the following PHP code at the top of all your pages (before any HTML output occurs):

ob_start('ob_gzhandler');

I have bad experience with this. There is problem with browsers witch not support GZ compressed pages. Also this helps with traffic, not with performance

You are correct about the bandwidth/traffic, but it actually does slightly improve performance as well, mainly because it decreases the time the server must keep a connection open to send HTML data.

The GZip I mentioned should not have trouble with any browsers because it automatically checks the Accept-Encoding and User-agent headers to see if the user's browser is compatible with GZip data. The link on PHP.net I provided in the previous post says this very clearly.

[EDIT] : for better performance is good to use pear package Cache - http://pear.php.net/package/Cache

In PHP is also memchache but I have no experience with it.

memcache is good. Opcode caching (like APC or eAccelerator) is also a good idea.

Also, it may help to do a few EXPLAINs on the SQL queries this site uses as some of them may need some indexing to reduce slowness and locking problems.

 

[moyackx]

Hi:

I want to make a suggestion, could you put a delete request button in the map section (like in the skin section), but only avaliable for the author, because sometimes (or many times) people abandon their projects in order to make others. What do you think??

I think map section is overcrowded of buggy maps, there should be a kind of control for that.

 

[Nasrudin]

As far as I know, people are allowed to delete their own maps.

 

[Alvatar]

It is not bad idea to place delete request - or at least button for reporting broken link. Writing PM takes loooong time