There used to be 3 pages of posts...
Do the administrators really need to delete posts just because theyre old?
black and white movies were better
I dont think they need to, but I assume the forums are taking up quite a lot of space on the servers, so purging older dead threads is quite a common way to maintaine the server performances.
I might be sad for us, but then again, the site wouldnt be performing as good if they didnt.
share
"The yelling will cease and the killing will commence!"
I suspected this was happening, but wasn't sure. What a shame. I'm shocked that they would need to do this given the fact that all of these discussion boards are just text, which takes up very little space.
shareVery true, each post doesn't take up that much space, but when you add them all together they will take up enormous amount of space.
Consider this;
According to http://www.imdb.com/stats you have 2,431,135 titles, and 5,068,922 persons.
Each have a board of lets say 10 threads (average, some have none, some have hundreds, a few has thousands), and each thread has 10 replies.
On average we have posts that about 1000 characters (a little less than the size of this post).
Everything is just conjecture for easy calculations now.
The calculations would look like this then:
(Number of boards:10)*(Number of posts on each board:10)*(Characters in each post:1000)*(amount of pages with boards:7500057) = 10*10*1000*7500057 = 7.50006E+11.
Translated into actual storage we divide first by 1024 to get kilobytes: 7324274414.4
Then divide it again by 1024 to get megabytes: 715261.1732 and then one last time to get gigabytes: 698.49
That's almost 700 gig of only text, and not even including the community boards.
Then of course you have things that automatically optimizes this though, such as compression and the like, and my "taken out of the ass" averages may be off, of course, but I hope you understand my point.
Some might find me morally challenged or morally ambiguous. I prefer morally creative.
Yeah, that's a lot of text, to be sure, but what's the big deal? I wouldn't think it would be a problem for a website of this caliber to warehouse, hell, even a few terabytes of data on their servers.
shareThat is also very true, but the larger the database the slower it will run. If it was for storage I don't believe it would be a problem, but the data needs to be active as well.
Now, the database are probably divided into segments as well, so we get smaller instances, and the website itself will refer to the correct segment instead of having it all in one single big place, but even so it needs to be maintained somewhat, and removing threads will be the best way. If a thread haven't been active in a certain time they can with a good assumption say that the thread is dead, and no longer needed.
Then we have the cost effective factor as well. To have a couple of terabytes it will require more servers to keep it serviceable to users. That will cost more money, and they need to get that money from somewhere, which normally is adverts. With more adverts to pay for the extra cost, people will like the site less and less, and leave.
Its a balance, and you can argue about if the right balance has been struck or not, but there is a need to keep a commercial database trimmed.
Some might find me morally challenged or morally ambiguous. I prefer morally creative.