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What's Happening Behind The Scenes?

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anthony

Founder
Just so you don't think things aren't happening... here's what has been going on the last couple of months, and still has a further month or two of final work and tweaks.

There is a new style being tweaked for 2017 roll-out. It is more minimalist than the current one, very clean and decluttered further than our current theme. The current theme will NOT be removed, it will be available as an optional theme for all members to use if they desire. The new one will simply become default.

Why? Like all good things, minimalism for the masses comes with sacrifices, thus premium members who like to adjust their colours and personalise their theme, the new one won't allow it, but the present one does.

Many of the features have been getting updated, minor issues fixed and small tweaks happening to correct issues. We had an issue in the admin panel that alone has taken me months of frustration to isolate and fix.

Things are happening, even though you don't see most things.

Screen Shot 2017-02-16 at 8.29.59 am.png


The new design moves to a fully mobile style menu. Why? Because this sites audience is now 73% mobile users. This leads us into the next work.

More performance. For the last couple of months I have been building up a new server with a minimalism approach too. If it doesn't need to be on the server, then it isn't, hence its all about performance and end user page loading.

Currently we use a highly optimised Apache server running a very bloated Cpanel software. There is so much bloat it just isn't funny. The new server runs NGINX, MariaDB, PHP 7.1 and has the bare bones mail software to process SMTP an IMAP mail from the sites.

The mycombatptsd.com site is currently running on the new server. Without ads running, the benching between both sites gives an average 1 second page load on a desktop -- more importantly, it provides on average a 3 second performance on mobiles. Remember? 73% of our user base is mobile traffic now.

Oh... the new server build is NOT yet optimised. Once this site makes it onto the new server, it will then get optimised once under real world daily use. That may shave another few hundredths of a second from page load. Doesn't sound like much... but it is for real world use. Over 50% of users abandon a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load for them. For mobile users, for most sites online, including this one, that's a crapload of users who never give the site the time of day to load, thus moving onto the next result.

This is why performance is so important from an administrative view to get new users here, which then creates more community, which is the entire purpose of this site. Little to no responses, people aren't helped, supported, thus go elsewhere. Speed is everything, hence the work going on behind the scenes.

The new style is as much about performance as the server work being done.

So... that's some of the stuff going on behind the scenes right now, let alone what our volunteer admin and staff are doing daily to keep the site running and as protected as possible from all the noise the web has.
 
For members... if anyone is interested to help test a demo install on the new system, please visit Link Removed and use the word, test, as both username and password to access.

NOTHING YOU DO THERE WILL REMAIN WITHIN 24 HOURS

Registration is disabled, so only registered members prior to about 48hrs ago can login once in the site.

Please post, upload images, basically give the demo site a run through to see if you can find any problems that arise.

Please note, that demo install sits on a limited specification server for the purpose for me to test things... it should be zippy, but limited zippy depending on how many go on there at once.
 
The site is now over on the super performance setup... however, it is not yet fully optimised. I have to now go through and do that for the specific styles, starting at the Wordpress articles and then both forum styles.

It should be super fast though, regardless of your location in the world or device. It will get faster once done and I will update this thread when complete.

If you experience any issue, drop cache and cookie first, and if it continues, please report it via raising a ticket immediately.
 
Sorry... forgot about the search system upgrade that was discovered the yesterday. Required the search system to be updated, and the site doesn't work well if left open whilst search is offline.

The post database is currently rebuilding, slowly. I must change it over to a secured version of search once completed, which will take a few minutes.
 
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Ok... had a major issue with the search rebuild... worked through that, sorted. Back to now needing to optimise the setup for maximum performance... aka... speed.

Now stable with search... should be all good. The optimisation work I perform over the next 24hrs should not impact anything further, only slight performance improvements again.

Sorry for all the issues... but we're now on my custom built high performance server which should be a huge boost once optimised for all members and guests.
 
Please be aware that lots of different server services will restart over the next 24hrs as I tweak settings for optimal performance. The server should not be down at any point, merely you may happen to do something at the exact moment a service restarts, i.e. mysql restarts and online numbers start at zero, you attempt to post at that second and a double post occurs, you change a page and get an error as nginx restarts, so forth.

Service restarts happen in a second or less typically... you shouldn't notice them, but you may do something at the exact moment I do.

Purely FYI for all members and guests. If I need to take the site offline for any period I will send a five minute alert first.
 
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