Powered
<p>Hola roughfishers - just a heads-up, we're going to be trying out some website changes over the next couple of weeks. Unfortunately the site is getting so much traffic this spring that it exceeded the one-million-script-calls limit on the server I rent for roughfish.com. Upgarding beyond that would be prohibitively expensive, so I'm experimenting with some tweaks that will make it less intensive to run. Unfortunately this means some of the "bells and whistles" have to move off the front page so they don't get called up everytime any robot or user or web search hits the front page. The "Random Species", "Recent Lifelists", and "Users Online" were some of the worst culprits here, so I moved them off the front page. I'm also planning to do something with the forum, so that you might have to click a link to get to recent forum posts rather than just having them on the front page. Once that's done, I'll have to see if the traffic is low enough per day to survive. There's always a huge spike in June, so I'm going to have to get all this ironed out before then. Bear with me, and let me know if something is broken. Peace out!</p>
Well on one hand congratualtions, obviously people have been getting the message!
Thanks Boss!
I try and tell everyone who fishes about this site, great resource, great stories and pics, and great people. Thanks for all the work you guys put into it.
I'm loving that the Notable Catches are still on the front page. They are always great to see. Like, look at what's up there now: you got a beautiful Buff, a stunning Longnose Sucker, and an awesome Sturgeon. All prime examples of what makes this site great. Beautiful variety.
It is a shame that the Random Species had to go, but what must be done must be done.
Fishn sure is neat
I like how you changed everything, but I personally really liked having the recent lifelist entries close to the "recent activity"- I feel like they got a lot more attention/visibility there.
But that's just my two cents- what has to be done has to be done.
I liked the Random Species, too. I don't necessarily know which of the page elements were producing the bulk of the 800,000 script requests, but the alternative would be having the site shut down right in the middle of June and no way to get it back without spending a ridiculous amount of money. I'm going to toy with some different configurations and hopefully find out where all those hits are coming from; if it turns out the Random Species Page wasn't the culprit, then I will certainly put it back up there.
I also am getting a little sick and tired of all the robotic spam traffic out of Russia and China; my robot countermeasures block them from posting most of the time, but even so it's almost 20% of the web traffic on the site. Almost 1 out of 5 dollars we spend on this server is spent sending our images to poorly-written non-human agents so they can try to spam us with Rolexes and wedding dresses. If I have time I am seriously considering completely blocking those two countries. It's not like we have any users from there.
I would block China and Russia without a second thought, Corey.
Eli
Not to be rude or disrespectful to those countries but not much about this site has anything to do with them.
I check this site multiple times a day, GUILTY! but it appears as though China and Russia might click more than me. I would suggest outright banning those 2 countries if it is relating to 20 percent of traffic and all of it is spam.
On a side note I would also put up a donation towards site admin costs in exchange for some sweet roughfish swag.
http://thebeardedangler.blogspot.ca/