V3 Software Updates

[Dan]

I just spent all night going threw the code of v3 and making everything alot more efficient. The site sit show now load at least 2 times faster on average if not more. I plan on doing several more of theses efficiency upgrades to v3 over the summer if i get the time in btween working on dwite and other projects. This will be the biggest increase in speed most likely however.

In addition to the speed update, i also changed how viewing posts looks when you are not logged in to the site at all. This cleaner look will allow the site to be index faster and better by crawlers like google bot. You will only notice this change if you are not logged in to the site. I also changed how we deal with some of theses bots so they will not index the site as fast, witch should make things faster for real users.

I have also made changes to how avatars will work. Now avatars have to be upload to the site and can not be remotely liked to. You can either upload an image from your hard drive or give the link to an image that is already on the web and it will be coyed to the compsci.ca server. Users that currently have remote (linked to) avatars will not be effected by this in till they update there avatar in there profile. In till there there avatar will still be an outside link to an image. This change was done to increase the overall loading time of post pages, control how big users avatars are more acurently (in both dimtions and file size) and to prevent a possible security issue. This was also done to prevent CompSci.ca from puting excessive loads on other servers that the remote image may be hosted on.

For thos of you who block off site images to block avatars you can still do this with out blocking all images on compsci.ca by going in to your user control panel -> profile settings -> and then selecting not to show avatars (it is the last check box on the page under the avatar setings).

It is possible that all theses changes to the v3 code has created new bugs, if you find any post them to this topic or use the bug reporting system here: http://compsci.ca/bugs/

Update: I also made it so sigs will only be show if you are logged in to the site. This is to stop spamming of links in sigs for PR and to make posts index better in sreach engeions. If you like not seeing sigs, you can set an option in your profile to not see any sigs when you are logged in too.

[Amailer]

Excellent, though to actually see if there were any significant changes in the load time, I'd have to be on my school computer, so, yeah, lets see tomorrow.

[CodeMonkey2000]

Well, loading the home page is much faster, but navigating the site is still slow :S