hi everyone,

I just wanted to make you all aware of upcoming changes to Mind-Brain.com. The time has come, I believe, for a maturation of this sites design and content, and a greater emphasis on its original goal...

well im down with that, but what, practically speaking, does it mean?

and since ive sucessfully gotten this reply page to open, i wanna mention that there seems to be a terrible slowness happening again.
hey, whadya think about mysql and vbb?

hi Veda,

I'm working on the slowness problem now.

Btw, sorry if some of you experienced a recurrent refresh loop of the forum pages.... .There are still domain name issues that are being resolved (hopefully this weekend), and in the meantime, typing in 'mind-brain.com' will take you to 2 different locations (or servers).

ok what the fuck did yall do
y cant i get on my name and actully stay
i login and then i get in i go to anywere and im loged out again!!!!!!!!!!

what the fuck is goin on!!?!?1

Now on to your questions!

[quote author=v3d4 link=board=4;threadid=3292;start=0#msg15778 date=1069366511]
well im down with that, but what, practically speaking, does it mean?
[/quote]


What it means is that Mind-Brain.com will become more focused on its goal of organizing a community that is directed towards the expansion of consciousness and awareness, and an exploration and discussion of various methods for doing this. Our consciousness, as a species (and individually), is evolving, expanding, and we must assume responsibility for fostering that expansion, and directing its growth .

There is more I want to say about this, but in my next post.

[quote author=v3d4 link=board=4;threadid=3292;start=0#msg15778 date=1069366511]
hey, whadya think about mysql and vbb?
[/quote]

Both this forum, which is based on Yabb SE, and VBB, employ mysql. I think VBB is an excellent forum that I should look into more because I don't know that much about it or whether it's free.

there are technical issues being worked out at Mind-Brain.com, Kaysie, which should be resolved by this weekend. Everything will be worked out in time.

OK, I believe that the forum is working as normal again. If anyone experiences any problems, or has any missing posts, please let me know.

hi everyone,

I believe everything is working fine now, and should continue to work. If anyone experiences problems of any sort, please let me know.

As it turns out, when Mind-Brain.com went down for a few days around Nov. 13th and subsequently came back online, I searched around for a new webhost, and even transferred Mind-Brain.com to a new server. However, I have reached the conclusion that there was nothing wrong with my old host, and so I'm back on the old server. In fact, the new server that Mind-Brain.com was on (for a couple of days), seemed slower than the old one, and also was considerably more expensive, and so I decided to switch back.

Now, the reason why Mind-Brain.com went down a couple of weeks ago is because of the high volume of visitors (it was around 4000/day during the weekdays), coupled with the php coding of the site, resulted in a very high server load. I was told that Mind-Brain.com was using up well over 60% of the server resources at the time it went offline. To prevent this from happening again, I have taken steps (and will be taking steps) to reduce server load. For instance, I have removed the listing of visitors logged into the forum because this requires the server to search a database for the visitors currently logged in, thereby creating what I considered to be unnecessary server load. Thus, I have removed the listing of people logged into the forum for the time being.

In retrospect, this may be a good thing, because of privacy issues. That is, some people don't want others knowing when they're logged on, and so for them, this is a good thing. I would be curious to hear other people's opinions though, about whether showing who's online or logged into the forum is something that's to be desired, and if so, then whether it should be shown on every forum page, or on just one page.

As this thread indicates, there will be other changes in the coming weeks. If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know. I have thought about streamlining the forum in an effort to make it more efficient, quicker, and more functional, though I'm still open to suggestions about how this should be done, and to what extent.

Anyway, I hope everything's working for everyone now, and that if you have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to post them here or to IM me.

thanks,
Shawn

o, i kinda liked seeing whos online. maybe just on the index page? maybe a 'whos online' button? meh, i guess its not that big a deal, but if your code is tidy and efficient overall i dont think it should be a big strain.
-about vbb, i think its one of the greatest forums avalible, its open code and infinitely configurable but its not free, and its not exactly cheap. somebody said its free to nonprofit orgs but i donno. if you were thinking about upgrading the forum software id wait a while, and check out the next version of vbb when it comes out. (its in beta testing now). but yabbse seems pretty good, it worx, and as they say if it aint broke dont fix it.

about streamlining the forums, well if it were up to me this is what id do:

• put feedback, updates and newsletter together
  
• put philosophy religion and enlightenment together again
  
• neuroscience, consciousness, and psychology all together in one
  
• abuse, family issues, relationships, addiction eating disorders and all related together in one general guidance and support forum. id call it 'mind brain and heart' or something
  
• id keep poetry and art the same and keep short stories
  
• make a general any topic forum for everything else. politics, jokes, whatever doesnt fit in with the above would go here. a place to move weird posts that dont belong anywhere and a good place to post whatevers on your mind about anything. 'mind brain and viscera' haha
  

i dont kno about music and song lyrics and quotes, becuz theyre pretty popular and it just seems a shame to throw them into the anything goes forum with political discussions and potty humor. same with the peace forum, tho it hasnt been too active. me, i wouldnt wanna give up on it just yet, even tho i havent even posted anything in there, but i think it would get more use/attention if the rest of the forums were pared down.
also id keep the welcome one open but id decorate a little, maybe add some shag carpet and a lot of lava lamps. groovy! :-*
of course if everybody said "you suck veda, thats terrible" i might not trim down quite so drastic, but right now theres only 759 of us here and i really dont think we need this much specific compartmentalization. but id expect membership to grow, so i'd keep all the mods and let em divvy up the forums equally, and make a password protected moderator's forum so they can all talk to eachother.
-neway, thats what id do if it was me.

other things- i really dont like that row of dropdown menus along the top of each page. when im going for my refresh or history button on my browser, as my pointer passes over them the menu drops down and always stays there, like it gets stuck or something, covers up the forum date and time and my private messages notice and is just kinda annoying. but maybe thats just me.
-one of my posts went missing, "v3d4 veda" but thas ok i guess becuz i had a picture to go with it but i couldnt get the uploader to work and nobody read it neway.
thats all i can think of for now. otherwise i reccomend ya just keep on keepin on 8)

Another BB worth considering might be :-
http://www.phpbb.com/

And there are more scripts available for a multitude of web site wants at :-
http://www.hotscripts.com/PHP/index.html

Possible hosting sites :-
http://www.hostsearch.com/direct_php.asp

Veda has a good point about the top row of buttons.
Using a tabbed browser like MiIE means the mouse passes over these buttons as it moves from a 'tab' selection back to the page being viewed. It invariably 'opens' the cascading menus of the top level Home page which then cover up parts of the page.
For me, though they disappear as soon as the mouse has passed them. It may only be necessary to add a delay to 'onmouseover' or something like that.

Good luck with whatever you have to do to keep us all online and talking to each other!

All the best Bill.

[quote author=v3d4 link=board=4;threadid=3292;start=0#msg15824 date=1069790839]
o, i kinda liked seeing whos online. maybe just on the index page? maybe a 'whos online' button? meh, i guess its not that big a deal, but if your code is tidy and efficient overall i dont think it should be a big strain.
-about vbb, i think its one of the greatest forums avalible, its open code and infinitely configurable but its not free, and its not exactly cheap.
[/quote]

I think having a who's online button, or having the info just on the index page, are both great ideas, and one of them will be implemented soon, maybe tonight. Maybe I saw the wrong vbb website, because the one I saw did not look that great. Do you have the url for the vbb website, Veda, or a site that has a vbb forum? I like your other ideas, and will take them into serious consideration. I'll get rid of the drop down menus at the top of each page. Do you know why the uploader didn't work? I'll look into it to see what the problem could be.

Bill, thank you for the url's. Hotscripts is an excellent site for scripts of all sorts, particularly perl and php. I don't think I've ever heard of hostsearch.com, but will check them out. It's hard to even know whether a host is good or not unless you actually talk to them and explain to them your problem. That is, what happened with Mind-Brain.com a couple weeks back wasn't a bandwidth problem, but rather was due to the php coding coupled with the large number of visitors, which produced too much load on the server's cpu and resources, and consequently, was shut down by some security mechanism in place, on the server. Webhosts normally advertise their packages in terms of how much bandwidth and hard-drive space you can have, but this doesn't tell me whether their servers can handle the load produced by Mind-Brain.com. I think the best thing to do, since it's not a bandwidth problem that Mind-Brain.com is facing, is to redesign and streamline some of the php code in order to ease the server load. This is really the only option left to me, short of removing actual content and pages from the site, which I'm very hesitant about doing. About PhpBB, I had considered this board before switching over the new php board. In fact, my choices were 1) Yabb SE, 2) PhpBB, and 3) Invision Powerboard. I settled on Yabb SE because it seemed to be the best board, both in terms of speed, functionality, and style. I'm not sure if switching to a different board will solve the problem, but I do think it's worth looking into how much load these different boards produce, and I guess I could do this on a local server, like right off my laptop or something. It's an interesting idea. Thanks.

sorry, every time i said vbb i didnt mean vbb (which sux) but i was talking about vbulletin. take a look at vbulletin.com and also look over here at http://www.vbulletin.org/ the unofficial resource with all kinds of hacks.
i cant say itll work better than yabb, just mentioning it as one i have used and like a lot.
gosh i cant believe i said that, "vbb is so great! bla bla" : well what can i say, i was on drugs man. ;D

QUOTE

redesign and streamline some of the php code in order to ease the server load.    This is really the only option left to me, short of removing actual content and pages from the site, which I'm very hesitant about doing.

dont remove anything. heres a quote from one of my favorite nerds on that very subject:

QUOTE

Trying to trim the database by hand is a waste of time -- there really is very little upside but a lot of grief. Databases are meant to hold lots and lots of data -- even if a percentage of it is junk.

i dont kno what the deal was with the uploader. ill try it again if you promise to comment on the beautifullness of my post and the beautifulness of the picture.

and i wanted to mention if you have a ton of trouble with your code and whatnot, if you need, let me kno becuz i kno a guy.

hi Veda,

yeah, vbb does kinda suck. Vbulletin, on the other hand, is pretty cool, but after looking over the features of the forum, I would still choose Invision Power Board, because of its additional features, like seeing where everyone is in the forum. There are things I don't particularly like about this new forum (as a result, I've made up a To Do list of changes I'm going to make, which I've posted somewhere around here), but hopefully I'll change that by playing around with the code. It's not that I would ever edit databases by hand (unless you consider using MySQL statements as editing by hand), but have, and will continue to modify the source code, which is written in php, and which is relatively straightforward to manipulate and change around in order to customize the forum and add additional features.