solunvar

Right, this one hasn't got anything to do with the content of the site, but with the engine supporting the archive. I understand plans are in the make and/or already started to program a better/optimized engine for the archive. That piece of knowledge, together with the 'fact' that the server's apparently under a lot of strain , got me thinking about ways things could be made more efficient. At the moment (and for the foreseeable future), I haven't a clue how things are handled (on the php-side), but I have noticed several aspects that could lessen the load somewhat. For instance, merely browsing through the site implies that you load every single page completely. I'd think that, especially where the stories and their texts are concerned, a more asynchronous approach could be more beneficial. The only parts that need renewal on those pages are after all the story body and navigation, not? I'm not sure whether it's like this here, but fanfiction.net implemented it a while back: a waiting queue for stories (and other information) to appear in the main indexes and search parts of the site. Basically, what they do (I think) is make an index file of the archived stories every ten minutes or so (=one query per category every x minutes) and show those in their browse section. Chapters added in that time frame can still be accessed, since that's a separate query for the database to process. There's probably several other things that I or other users might think of. I just figured: might as well offer my suggestions - who knows, maybe something comes out of it. Aside from all of that, if you need people helping out, I'm always willing. (I study Applied Informatics, though I'm still in my first year, so any PHP know-how comes from personal tinkering rather than official lessons I've had.)

All right, so if direct review replies can't be done... What about implementing some kind of way to automatically hide author replies in a chapter, but make it so that the replies can be extended when you click on it. Don't know if that was a clear explanation or not, but I'll give an example: ---story information/disclaimer/?--- Review Replies //clickable ---story/chapter text--- //Clicked Review Replies @user1: Thanks for reviewing @user4872: Whatever. I know it's possible to do something like that. Some Javascript, and some kind of code for authors to insert, like [responses]blabla[/responses] which in turn gets parsed by the PHP interpreter and translated into the necessary code. Of course, it's a system that relies on the authors to apply it, but it seems like a good compromize between having your replies and preventing stuff like chapters whose actual story text is half a page long, while the replies to reviews go on and on and on. Personally, I don't mind if people reply to some reviews in their chapters, but there's a limit. When you're reading, you want to read, not scroll through an endless of information you're not interesting at the moment. (Maybe later on, when you've read the rest of the story/chapter, yes.)