This topic contains 168 replies, has 22 voices, and was last updated by 
maskinwi 6 years, 9 months ago.
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Not critical, but I notice that while the WGA State park module that is called “biomes” shows the caches we’ve found, when I go to the finders list, we’re still sitting at a smaller number and of course, most important of all….our profile doesn’t show the new souvenir we earned recently! 😉 Does one part update automatically and the other stuff is done by an admin by hand? If that’s the case, no big deal. If it’s supposed to all go automatically….well, it might need a look sometime.
Thanks for pointing that out. I think the importer was not working correctly, but it should be now. BTW, the importer runs once a day.
I’m still hacking away at the To-Do list. I think I have the most critical ones taken care of.
The biggest thing has been getting the whole site stable and responsive. Moving the website to a server with enough memory took care of the stability problem. I’ve made lots of little tweaks to keep things moving along at a decent pace. Page load time has gone from 8-10 seconds to less than 2 seconds. It would be possible to get page load times to less than a second by using page caching, but that caused the weirdness with “logged in” vs. “not logged in” and “WGA Member” vs. “Non Member”.
For any techies or chronically bored that want to know what’s been done behind the scenes and the results:
- Moved website to new server with enough memory. This change alone cut the page load times in half.
- Turned OFF all page caching. This added a second or more to page load times, but it was causing too many issues.
- Installed and enabled a PHP cache on the server. Each page on the website is actually dozens of PHP scripts. Each script needs to be read from storage, compiled and interpreted by the server. The cache compiles all the scripts ahead of time and keeps them in memory. This change clipped a big chunk out of page load time and decreased the load on the CPU to almost nothing.
- Utilized a “Content Delivery Network” (CDN). A CDN takes some of the load off the server by serving static content (pictures, etc.) from their servers instead of ours. The CDN we’re using also adds another level of security and keeps some of the bad guys from even being able to access our website. This change took about a half second off page load times.
- Re-arranged the site menu. Strange as it may seem, the site menu takes up nearly 1/3 of the current load time. I was able to squeeze out another 1/2 second without losing any functionality.
- Relentlessly blocking hackers and scrapers. A large percentage of our server’s resources were being used to feed content to page scrapers and harvesters. Several MILLION IP addresses have been blocked from accessing the website as well as several entire countries. We don’t have any members in China anyway…
Thanks for sticking around through a couple of difficult months, and thanks for pointing out things that need fixing. Please continue to do so.
Great job! (I didn’t understand a lot of that, since I am more chronically bored than techie, but I can see that a lot of diligent hard work is represented there.)
THANK YOU!
There were growing pains but it is a really nice, stable site that continues to grow and give us more than should be allowed for the price of membership.
Following the signals from space.
The WGA logo is not showing up on the banner page or any of my cache pages new, old or other cachers geocache page descriptions I checked. Would it have anything to do with images being stored off site? Just throwing that last part out there.
***Opinions expressed are mine alone and will change based upon new information. ***
That’s worth looking into. Shouldn’t matter, but I’ll check that out.
I’ve been using the older logo that I pull from my older listings and I think that’s been working. I couldn’t get the one here to show for our new listings, which is why I did that.
I’ll watch to see if I missed the importer’s run for the state park finds, since we did find another one yesterday (and should get a new biome souvenir, hip hooray!) Amazing how motivating pictures on a computer screen can be, isn’t it?
noticed date/time on the recent logs: active caches, active cachers is not correct
Disclaimer : Always answering to a higher power.
unable to edit points on the LCG entries after the cache is off the list. (tried to add replaced cache points on a February entry)
Disclaimer : Always answering to a higher power.
Ok, I found the problem with those dates. I’ll get those fixed in the next few days.
Member submitting their events:
Instructions say Use the Date Picker. The Date Picker doesn’t appear thus not able to submit event as a non-admin.
I know sweetlife puts in the events he find but it would be nice to have it work for us all.
Following the signals from space.
Are there no longer committee forum topics? I was looking for the membership committee forum just to catch up but don’t see it or any other committee forum since the move.
They are there John we need just to go an re-enlist those that are interested. I’ve been way too busy for the job that pays the mortgage but I hope to start catching up with those items. Thank you Mr Historian (opps, did I let something slip?)
🙂Following the signals from space.
The link to Cache of the Month previous winners does not work.
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