SubSonic: New Forums Online
The saga continues 
. A while back I mentioned that our forums sucked and I wanted to see what people were thinking about what we should do. It was pretty one-sided:
Stop reinventing the wheel and fix those damn bugs!
So that’s what we did. Sort of 
.
Last night I seriously geeked out and rolled our forums over to CommunityServer 2007.1. That’s what we were on initially, and without sounding too negative, it wasn’t a fun experience.
There were a few bumps as we went offline for about 4 hours last night (I was up until 2am my time) and our site crashed this morning again as something whacked out our user’s table – but aside from that it’s been pretty simple.
Why Did You Move In The First Place?
The main issue is bandwidth usage. CS uses a lot of ComponentArt’s stuff and I loathe CA with a passion. I think it’s technically awesome stuff and looks great, but when your page size grows to 600K – you’ve got a problem.
More specifically: every time I tried to post to the forums, I had to wait 4-5 seconds for the page to load, and when I posted back it took another 4-6 seconds to load that cruft back to the server. You might say my bandwidth sucks (and I’d agree – who wouldn’t!), but it’s not just that – the browser takes time to load all that crap!
In addition, I didn’t need all the things that are in CS, and looking at other forum systems out there I began to wonder how much perf I was sacrificing to the 80% of the application I wasn’t using.
The latest version (2007.1) is mighty fast and I’ve been impressed with it as I cruise the MVC forums. I think Rob and Scott have done a great job in fine-tuning this beast!
I’ve also got a bigger pipe on my server now (Bob Marley kine) and I’ve decided to switch my preferences to using the Basic Editor and not TinyMCE. I’m not a fan of TinyMCE really – It’s a lovely editor – but it used to rewrite people’s code and splash it down our pages. Very annoying.
The Future
As you might remember from some of my MVC posts – I’ve been working on a sample forums app that I’d like to use as a reference app for SubSonic and MVC. This takes time, and I didn’t want the pressure of getting our users to a usable forum to influence us.
I’ll be sure to update people as we progress - for now, if you’ve left our forums cause they sucked, please visit us again – we’re all fixed up .
