420blog

Why Things Have Been Slow Lately

Over the last few months, 420chan has experienced surges in popularity. We’ve experienced growing pains before, but unfortunately this is the first time we’ve hit a major bandwidth-related issue.

I’m going to point a few things out that will probably surprise most of you.

• The music board, /m/, accounts for 4 percent of all traffic use
• The comics and literature boards, in terms of data transfer, use even less
• 75 percent of served requests are thumbnails
• Normal browsing traffic comes to 82 percent of overall use
• Flash accounts for 1 percent

We are already load balancing all stylesheets, javascript, banners, and other miscellaneous content on an external VM. That alone has already made the situation less drastic (we’ve been doing it since around march of last year).

Basically, the only way to improve the situation is to throw more money at it. We’re paying for a 37mb commit (95th percentile) so there is a fair amount of room to grow. There will be more on this in the coming days.

There may also be downtime tonight for some major maintenance. A backup board may be provided to occupy yourselves with.

We’re also on the cusp of launching multiple new sites/services over the next 2 weeks. Spyder Lake Online Gaming and TaimaTV are nearly ready for primetime.

UFC 109 Stream Tonight

A friendly reminder that we offer free streams of all UFC, TNA and WWE events for 420chan users.

High traffic events are secured using an irc-based authentication system. Joining the event’s channel (#wooo or #mma on irc.420chan.org) and saying !buttfucker will be the key to the stream.

For more information on this particular event, visit /mma/.

This uses our private, proprietary flash video delivery network, that will eventually be used for TaimaTV in the coming weeks. It’s been used for 4 events so far and we’re quite happy with the system.

Enjoy the fight!

New Boards, An AI, Recent Changes, and Other Info

First things first, there’s four new boards that have been introduced. Three of them were highly requested, those being /1701/, /dr/, and /nra/. There was also one other board, it’s a little more unique than the other. It’s a board with a chatbot built-in, and is called Netjester’s Closet. The bot that resides on this board learns everything that is posted to it. I’m sure you’ll all have a blast with it.

Other things, we’ve been doing some major overhauls in the way certain aspects of the boards are being handled. A few weeks ago we unified all the boards into one “master” board script. This means we only need to change one file for all the boards to be updated. The last few days has also carried some heavy architectural updates, the stylesheets are now organized in a much more sane manner, making future additions a breeze. The porting process is almost done, a few issues remain on the Classic stylesheet.

The postform was changed in several ways, it’s now more consistent between browsers, and a bug was fixed where early clicking of reply links would leave “Comment” at the start of a post.

Taimapedia has been a great success, with close to 1000 articles to date.

The store had to be delayed a little while due to some personal troubles involving money and a crappy employer. It’s still on track, however.

I think that’s everything. We hope you enjoy these updates!

Taimapedia – The 420chan Wiki Is Here

Taimapedia is the 420chan Wiki. We’ve been working on it on and off for the past little while, and are now opening it to you all. There’s already Wiki/Board crosslinking set up, you can enclose a word in ~tilde~ characters to link to an article on Taimapedia.

Feel free to use Taimapedia for all of your board FAQs, guides, and information on topics relative to the boards. There’s already plenty of activity going on, so join in!

The 420 Store – Daily Update #1

It’s been over 24 hours now since I let the public start poking around the store. How are things doing? Let’s have a recap.

• Three separate bugs related to payments were found and fixed
• Several missing countries were added
• Drastic speed improvements bringing page load times from 15 seconds down to 2-3 on average
• Lots of whining

That last one brings me to my next point. E-commerce solutions are a gigantic pain in the ass to work with, especially when you’re doing it all yourself. The amount of work required to add a single shirt design to the catalog involves repeating the same steps 40-50 times to account for every variant, as every size, gender, and color difference is counted as a separate product. Those 40-50 variants take close to 2 hours to add and set up. Multiply this over several designs while you’re still working on dozens of other things at the same time. Not only is launching an effort like this expensive, it’s also a ton of hard work.

Speaking of expensive, a lot of people are complaining that the prices are too high. Most of them aren’t noticing the bold text stating “All prices are in Canadian Dollars”. Subtract about $4-5 from the items and you have the price in USD. The other group of people are assuming we have a large pool of funds and the equipment to make selling shirts for $13 an option. We’re just starting this store, and the entire purpose of it to begin with is to replace the old tired routine of having to ask for donations to pay for the place every month. This is our way of giving back to you, for supporting us. This is also why we refused to use anything like Cafepress – that would be taking the easy way out. No real effort involved, it wouldn’t really mean anything, and that’s exactly what we want to avoid. We’re working our asses off for you.

Some of you, however, still want the ability to donate. We have something planned to accommodate this.

Sometime this afternoon there’ll be new threads posted about the store, and we want to collect as much feedback as possible as we add more items. Constructive feedback, not dumb crap.

Lastly, as soon as the majority of the current planned catalog is added, we’ll begin to display the store more prominently. Some people were wondering why we haven’t announced it on the front page or put any banners up or anything. We want it to be complete, first.

The 420 Store is Now Open

http://store.420chan.org

This is a slow launch, making sure everything’s working before adding the full product line. Shipping rates are also much more sane now.

I’m going to wait a few hours before posting threads about it – I want this to be a gradual launch.

If there’s any problems or your country is not available, post a comment and I’ll get it added ASAP.

Update 1: More stuff added.
Update 2: Payment issues fixed, forgot to change from the developer account to the real one. You can all try again now without issue.