Addressing Site Issues And Down Time And ThomasG Email

Unfortunately TW has crashed several times the past couple weeks and was down for extended periods,
this is a big jump after many months of stability.

We are still running on old technology and data storage and access remain the major pain points.

A few minor revisions have been made to help keep the site up and running.
They include removing the "Your Unread Posts" link in the forum (sorry but it's an incredibly intensive operation and brings the server to it's knees), adjusting the number forum replies (which will remain well above the average number of 5 per topic), and some file storage and database clean up.

We're still behind in a lot of your "wish list" items like the schematics, but just keeping up with all of you busy thereminizers and working on keeping the site up on line have taken up all my free time lately - and I have to same some for theremin practice! :~)

Again sorry for any inconvenience from the outages, hopefully this will help.

[b]Thank you![/b]

(...for all the time, effort, money, brain, lost dates, unhealthy food, sleepless nights...)

...thank you for making Theremin World possible.

jeese thanks
just trying to keep it up.

BIG thanks for all the work that you've put into the site! That goes for everyone involved, too!

It's a shame to see "Your Unread Posts" go. It was a pretty handy feature, but I'll manage. :)

Dern, for all those big bux we're paying you'd expect ZERO downtime!!!!

Seriously though, if you guys need to take up a collection to raise money for upgrades, I'd be willing to pitch in a few dollars.

Philip Neidlinger
Richmond Hill, GA

"Seriously though, if you guys need to take up a collection to raise money for upgrades, I'd be willing to pitch in a few dollars."

Me too!

Too right - I probably 'owe' you people something for the ability to float ideas, get feedback, and promote / advertise my future products.
This site is extremely important to me, and without it, I do not think my Theremin venture would stand nearly as much chance of getting off the ground.
So PLEASE - Dont go under! Issue my business an invoice for $50 for services you have provided, and I will gladly pay it!

Thanks everybody!
As soon as I can afford a new hat
I'll start passing it around - :~)

carport888, sorry...
I've been working on optimizing the "Your Unread Posts", but the SQL statements involved are just unbelievably complicated and my last live test of it still hung the site. But am keeping this on the cooker!

As time allows, mostly I have to focus on any more improvements I can find to optimize the data access layer on this older platform. Until we hit the big time, it's all a spare time effort... Will keep y'all posted.
thanks again - John

Well, i don't know how old this forums software is, but if the sql statement for unread posts is just that inefficient, it might be a solution to change the software to a new one ?

I know that would change the whole rest of the site and therefore would be a huge effort to do, but in that you also could change the html code to an up to date version in usage of html and css. (Because the html-code of these pages is really ugly, but that''not seen by usual visitors, i know that).

As a student in computer science i know a little bit aboutthings, but i'm concentrating on my diploma orals atm, so i just can spend ideas or look over some new features and test some th, i can't help working on the page. perhaps when i'm through the whole studying thing i might be able to help technically.

I'm sure at least a few folks here think I've been ignoring posts they've made in response to some of my postings.

Unfortunately, for some reason, I am not recieving e-mail notifications from the forum server even though I check the checkbox everytine when posting.

I'm with comcast, and I've confronted them about the possibility that whatever server thereminworld is hosted on is being blocked by them, (I can recieve e-mails from TW admins), but Comcast denyed it flat out.

At this point, I don't know if it's an internal problem with TW, it's hosting provider, or Comcast, but in any event, please don't think I'm ignoring y'all. It's all I can do to go through, and manually sift through mine or other postings to see if there's a comment that I need to respond to, or not.

Thanks.