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New Hardware, Groups, User Timezones & more
Jun 21, 2010 at 12:51 AM
in None
Performance Updates
We view speed as a feature and have always aimed to keep MMO Guildsites running as fast as possible. Over the past few weeks we've made a lot of changes to improve performance even further, including migrating to new hardware (intel's new westmere platform), switching web servers from Apache to the faster Nginx, further tuning our database, and enhancing all potentially slow running actions (such as processing images) to run in the background and not block requests.
After all these changes we feel now would be a good time to ask how you guys feel the site is performing? Everything looks good in our logs, with requests being sent out at great speeds, however real user experience can vary a fair amount, especially for our customers further away in europe or australia; so share your experiences with us, how has the site been running for you?
Groups Update
The groups section has received quite a few enhancements, including in-place editing and the audit logs (and will now show up in "What's New"). Additionally, we have a new feature for the Groups, a Wall:
Seeing how groups are used, and that for the most part they represent smaller teams within a guild (such as raiding or arena teams), we felt the discussions may be overkill in most cases, and a shout-style wall would be more appropriate, so you can get some quick discussion with others in your team going. The wall also includes notifications for new discussions and members who join, making it easier to see what's new.
If you're using groups, let us know how you feel about the new wall feature; is it helpful, missing features, or are there any enhancements you'd like to see for it?
User Timezones
One of our more requested features, User Timezones, is now live. If you go to "My Account", and then the "Account" tab, you can set a timezone for yourself. This will override timezones set on sites, allowing users to see times for events and other content in their own timezone.
Improved Ventrilo, Teamspeak and RSS Blocks
The Ventrilo and Teamspeak blocks previously worked by reading the info you enter and being cached. A script then ran every 20 minutes updating the cache for all the voice blocks. This method meant that information from the voice blocks were often 20+ minutes out of date, and as we have more active sites, the amount of blocks to be updated grows and the script takes longer to complete, making the info even further out of date.
These have been changed now, so that when you view your site, it checks if a cache exists for the voice blocks, and if not an ajax request is made to fetch the status, which then gets cached for 5 minutes. This means the voice blocks should now show much more recent information and be a little more useful =) The RSS blocks were updated to also use this new method as well.
In addition, for TeamSpeak, the "Unknowns" that would appear in the status blocks are now hidden, as these appeared to mostly be scripts checking status and not users.
That's all for this update, we hope you're enjoying your summer =)
Thanks for the update.
btw i hope the TS box will work cause I don't know why in our site it does not work.
I then tried to use the tsviewer stuff but i get a message that says javascript disabled.
So I really do not know what to do ^^
F
Hi Ethaniel,
Could you send an email to staff@mmoguildsites.com with your TS server info (and mention if it is a TS2 or TS3 server) and I can try to assist you with getting it to work =)
While the Events calendar _page_ is showing times in my selected timezone, the Events calendar _block_ on our home page is still using the site-defined timezone; is this an oversight?
Hi Tamsk,
Ah thank you for mentioning this, the events calendar blocks were being cached with the site's time zone, which caused it to ignore user time zones; this should now be fixed =)
email sent :) hope to get it working cause it is still not working...
F
Still waitin for DDO features.
DDO char profiles and a few other features are still on our todo list; we have a few more general updates to go live, then we'll switch back to game-specific ones and the DDO updates should be near the top of that list =)