how the forums are displayed on the main page

Hi Milo, the babble section on the front page has been changed temporarily because with the increased traffic, the code which populated that list was too much of a drag on our resources and slowed the site almost to a standstill. It has been changed until we can correct the problem. Sorry for he inconvenience. Can I suggest bookmarking our active topics page?

Increased traffic? Are more people coming to rabble or do you mean more people are posting to babble?

Catchfire wrote:

Hi Milo, the babble section on the front page has been changed temporarily because with the increased traffic, the code which populated that list was too much of a drag on our resources and slowed the site almost to a standstill. It has been changed until we can correct the problem. Sorry for he inconvenience. Can I suggest bookmarking our active topics page?

Too bad there's no way for babble to get a bit of income - say one penny - for every visit from everyone, with a maximum levy of,  say, ten cents a day. That would go a ways towards maintaining and expanding the site, no?

Do we have an idea what has brought more people here? Are they still coming here now that the election is over?

Is the TAT box separate from what was discussed initially above?

Maysie wrote:

I'd like to know why the babble TAT box hasn't returned to rabble's front page.

2dawall: The election surge in visitors continued immediately post election, but I haven't heard the stats for this month yet, so I suppose we'll see. As for the first question, we can only speculate--but I imagine it had to do with the terrible and unsatisfying job the MSM was doing covering the election.

@Maysie: It looks like an automatically updated babble TAT box is no longer an option, since its drain on site resources is too strong. A weekly (or so) box curated by Rebecca and I is on the way, I'm told.

The coding that mined babble for new page updates was slowing down the site as a whole--if you remember the horrible, eye-gouging lag we experienced during peak election periods, you'll know what I mean. The tech folk figured out that by removing the TAT window, it removed this problem. Curating a weekly box is a less than optimum but workable solution. Obviously, both Rebecca and I, as well as the rest of the rabble staff, are invested in bringing traffic to babble--but we have to make do with the solutions available to us.

But its really just a technical issue; would there really be any other indication that something else is afoot?

Caissa wrote:

One could read this decision as Rabble being ashamed of Babble.

We have to obey the policies as they were stated. That is part of the agreement when we registered. I may not agree with all decisions but implicit in registering is that we accept the conditions. Given how often the mods themselves participate its unlikely they want babble squelched.

Snert's first two sentences are true. I presume you are disagreeing with his conclusion in the third senetnce.

Are these questions read as too direct or rude or something somehow negative? I am really just trying to determine what is what so that a method of repeating the growth spurt can be repeated.

2dawall wrote:

Does rabble have the ability to determine if those new visitors who came to rabble did so from a search or from a specific link from another webpage? Do we know if anybody actually handed out those special election leaflets and if that drew anybody here?

I ask the questions as to my mind we most certainly want to replicate whatever actually drew more people here.

Maysie wrote:

Was the babble TAT box always a drain on site resources? I'm not even sure what that means, by the way.

I can explain this (speaking as a Drupal developer with no connection to Rabble):

To generate that list, the list of most recent active posts, all the posts are being looked at, and compared (last updated time on the post or last updated time of most recently updated comment), and then the 50 most recent posts are displayed.  There are tricks that can be done to make this faster--like, rather than looking at ALL the posts to find the 50 most recent, instead the process could look at the 50 most recent posts updated in the last week.  Clearly this is going to be a much smaller list to compare.  All posts would still need to be looked at, but the operation to see if a post was updated in the last week is a much faster operation than having that post in the list to sort.

There should be no reason that the block would take longer to generate than the page.  But, it is still an expensive (in terms of server processing time) operation.  To process that operation every time someone looks at the TAT page, well, that's probably 0-2% of rabble hits, so the effect on the server is minimal.  But, to process that operation on every single page, well then all of a sudden every page is going to load 3-5% longer, and 3-5% of Rabble's total server processing is going to be for that block.  When traffic spikes, it's then a bigger spike.

I don't see any reason why this block couldn't be cached for anonymous users though--and I imagine anonymous users make up a large part of Rabble's total traffic.  The block could be set to regenerate once every hour.  That means that the hit to the server would happen once every hour for all the anonymous users.  It would continue to regenerate fresh for logged in users on every page hit though.

I suspect there might be some broken telephone somewhere...probably the traffic spiked, there was a panic, they removed that block, things went back to normal, crisis averted.  And then the Babble autogenerated TAT block got viewed as a BAD idea, and that was that.

It would be pretty trivial for babble techs to create a Babble TAT block that is cached for anonymous users and ONLY displays for anonymous users.  Such a thing would be negligible in terms of resources.  If such a block were only to display for logged in users on a specific Rabble page--maybe the front page, but not on any other page, then this probably wouldn't slow things down too much.

My guess is that Rabble mgt would love to promote Babble in some kind of a block like this (and it sounds it is coming, but manually curated)--but that there is some confusion about the technical details involved in making a workable auto list.

Hey 2dawall, sorry for the delay--I don't know why I kept missing this. We do have access to this information--or, rather, the publisher does, and she shares this with our development and promotions staff, and occasionally us. babble's Active Topics page and Canadian Politics forum remain two of the highest direct page hits on the site. We don't know how "new" visitors get here, because there's no way to tell through our stats. We do, however, learn this from our surveys--but that data is limited to whoever fills them out, obviously.

To clarify, we can find out how users land on our site, but we can't tell if they are new or not. Currently, our traffic is down from last summer, but last summer was a very busy one politically (G8, etc.)