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.

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!

There’s a new function called the Discussion Map. This shows you every reply to a post. You’ll find the Reference links beside Quick Reply.

The extension now works under HTTPS. It’s been available for a while now, originally meant for staff purposes but is also used by some tinfoil hat wearing users.

There was another feature I was trying to work in for this release but unfortunately the original author of the script never tested it on 420chan, so I’m still debugging it myself.

Oh, those aforementioned bugs, I can’t figure out for the life of me how to make jQuery events fire outside of their normal scope – this is related to spoilers not working right in expanded threads.

Don’t use the 420chan Extension? Go here to get started!

As of last night I switched on our advertising server. I got sick and tired of dealing with shitty rates, people that had no idea what was going on with their ad network, advertisers taking advantage of people by putting out malicious ads, and plenty more I’d rather not ramble about. 4-5 months ago we were making less than $200 a month on ads. About 5 dollars a day. Anyone that’s been here long enough knows that this is way too little to cover our costs, and pretty insulting considering the number of impressions they get.

The bottom line is, we now run and control our own advertising. We can now deal with every person that wants to buy advertising time, one on one, and make sure that they are getting a proper audience while also putting a bit more money back into our pocket. We can also deny any advertising that we don’t think is a right match or is too annoying for our audience, which was a large problem before.

I hope that some of you wish to take advantage of our new offering, and mutually benefit from it.

We can ban you from the boards very quickly and easily if you abuse it, so don’t.