There we go, upped the limit to 50!

Huh! I just added a new forum to my ping group and it put itself on the bottom of the forums without a problem :( How long would you say that it's taking?

AND we were keeping track of all of that information in a million places. Cults aren't used, they are broken. Instead of making them the same thing as groups, we're moving their functionality to forum groups and putting limits on them.

What I like:

The idea of people who create a thread (ie: on threads like deadlines) being able to ping people who've put themselves down as interested and only those people. That would get rid of the use cases for a TON of forum groups - just making functionality better on the forums.

Thank you for the feedback everyone! I pushed these after they'd been in testing for a significant amount of time. I've temporarily removed the limit until we find a way to get most of the forum groups (ie: ones that literally exist on just one thread) moved elsewhere. We already have a function for a lot of them (the "friends of username") in being able to ping all of your friends to a thread.

The limit should be lifted in a few minutes once it's pushed to all of the servers :)

Limits have to start somewhere... Limiting user shops will be a week long issue, disabling shops and forcing people to move items. It's much easier to add a limit to something when it's launched. I'm sure you understand that it has to start somewhere.

Ah, right. It's the subeta way!

You mean building all of the exact same functionality that people use into the forum groups, making it so that people can create and join multiple groups (the most requested cult feature) and create forums that integrate with our existing forums?

Not really the easy way it - it's combining two features that had replicated features across them and turning them into one feature called groups.

Until all of the core cult functionality is in forum groups, they continue to exist.

Ah, right. It's the subeta way! The forum groups weren't broken before, let's make sure they are now!

Except for pinging which is broken because forum groups have existed without limits :).

What I mean is for threads like, say a CW thread. You subscribe to it but set it so that only the creator of the board can ping you there. That gets rid of the use of half of the CW forum groups.

Anyway, for the purposes of this topic. The limit, which was the point that a lot of people were making, has been removed for now until other options are explored.

All of the existing features of forum groups are present in the revamped version. There will be a site update thread when more changes are made.

Haha, no. We aren't changing any functionality for the user shops. We're going to say "You can't add any more items, you've got x over the limit" and that will make users themselves probably be motivated to move items around themselves to other shops.

It's not a punishment and we'll obviously do everything we can to make it an easy transition, but the reason the site crashes when you quick stock 250 items and the idea of moving all those items is terrifying is because of the massive shops breaking the site.

So, the average number of groups that a member is in (that is in at least five groups, I felt like not including that would be disingenuous) is 11.553112215079. I know that a lot of you posting here right now are power users, and some of you are in 250 groups. There are 7 users who are in more than 200 groups. That is out of 13,688 users who have joined more than 5 groups in their entire time on Subeta. This is not just a minority, this is the fringe of the fringe of the use cases of the forum groups.

So while I understand where you are all coming from, people who are in that many groups are on the fringe. They're on the fringe and they are breaking the system. Limits are important, and limits are going to happen. I'm really sorry and it sucks that some of you will have to change how you use the forums, but it's pretty important that we start implementing these kind of changes.

Not really. It's part of the total "get all of this users items" query and doesn't really add any additional to the query (outside of miliseconds) because of how the items are added into the wardrobe. It doesn't give 1 to every user in the group, it's just one cell in a very small table saying "this user has access to this item".

Unlimited groups aren't going to be a thing anymore. I hope that my explanation suffices, but with every post the forums have to scan for pings, check all of the users in those groups, etc. It's a stressful process on the database and it doesn't help when people are in 250 groups, half of them inactive and infrequently (if ever) used.

The point of this is that I'm listening to what you're saying. But a thing I have to say a lot lately is that you don't have all of the information. All of the posts saying "you don't understand how this feature works, you should just stop touching things" forgets that I can actually see all of the pings made today. I can see what forum groups are the most popular, which ones have the most churn, etc. I appreciate how all of you use your forum groups and that helps inform my decisions, but there are people using them in other ways. There are people who only join two groups that have nothing to do with CWs, but are just forum groups for friends that could be served in an entirely different way.

Again: I really do appreciate the feedback. Lets keep it civil, though.

So, basically, when a post is made the code has to scan for pings (#) and then get the information for that group. That means it has to scan the forum_group table for that group (and the more groups there are = the more scanning the database does to find it). Then, it checks the ping settings for that group (can the owner only ping it? admins? etc) and then hit the forum_group_users table to get the list of users for that group. It has to scan the entire table, so the more groups you are a member of (the more rows there are) it has to scan through to get all of the users.

I can't really think of a real world example, but basically, the more entries there are the more searching the index has to do to find all of the members. Meanwhile, if you make a post with multiple pings it's trying to do this for multiple groups at the same time AND push your post to the forums. I was trying to think of a library analogy or something, but I've got nothing!

And so this is a problem that we have a lot now - which is that (like I've said) we wanted to be the site without limits. We want you to be able to join 500 forum groups if that is a thing you want to do. Unfortunately we realize why other sites put limits on things like this. Why even massive companies like World of Warcraft put limits on how many people can join a guild, because there are just technical limitations to things that I just didn't understand when I started Subeta and now I'm horrified that I have to put limits on existing features because it sucks for everyone.

It's really frustrating for everyone now because I spend my day being really nervous about the database, having to spend way more (both in time and resources) than a site our size should have to, to support our really bizarre database setup because we've never had limits. And it's even more frustrating for users because it means as we add features (or revamp features) we have to add those limits in. It's just got to happen.

Because that information is already there. When you're replying to a topic, it's already loaded all of the posts and people who've posted on the thread. It wouldn't be injecting any new information into the database, or require any additional searching outside what is already indexed from you looking at the thread.

I don't think I said this up there, but it was obviously a huge mistake to push this out with the limit. I pushed it without an announcement because right now it's (mostly) just a visual change on the old forum groups. All of the same features are there + avatars and a free item for people who make a group now so I didn't think it really needed an announcement. Obviously the limit was crazy (was it 5 to begin with, or 10?) and has been removed until I work it out, so they're basically the same forum groups right now. The limit isn't coming back until its been worked out how we can make it work for everyone and still not kill the site.

Gah, I'm sorry! It was removed for gold accounts but not for regular accounts, which was further down the page. I've just removed it and pushed it to the servers. It'll be a few minutes before it's fixed.

I mean, it's just how databases work. More rows of data = more rows to search through when you do a query to fetch data. Data in MySQL databases doesn't exist in an easily searchable way (even with lots of indexes) and the more rows you have to search through to find information (like users in a forum group) the longer that query is going to take.

What you have to remember that just because there are 800-1200 people online at any given time, doesn't mean those are the same people. The average amount of time spent online on Subeta is 15-20 minutes. That means that even if there is 800 people online throughout most of the day, chances are most of those are different people than the 800 that you saw three hours before that.