h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was trawling around in "Ask" on my lunch hour, looking for any interesting updates, and found this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F2131439?thread=3130415 What do you all think? I personally think both ideas are good ones. With luck, neither change will affect me, but it would certainly help put a stop to all the single-smiley (or worse yet, multi-smiley) postings and messages consisting of "hi! how r u?" and the like. Ignoring garbage postings doesn't mean they don't still waste bandwidth. Now if only they'd deal with trolling...

I think it's a really good idea.

Sledgehammer. Nut.

The nut in question is bandwidth. A better solution would be More Bandwidth.

It doesn't affect H2G2. We are a haven of fellowship and happiness compared to some of the other boards!

I don't like the idea of a posting delay. Conversations shouldn't be limited like that. If people want to engage in a fast and furious convo here on H2G2, then off they go.

I think it's better if suspect researchers have more restrictions though. Not so sure about new ones. Trust people at the start, and if they abuse that trust, then take action.

>A better solution would be More Bandwidth<

I agree, but perhaps the issue is that more bandwidth isn't in the budget. (And I'd consider paying a subscription fee for premium access or something, were it an option, but I certainly could not do so now, due to the site being unavailable every night between 8:00 PM and ?)

While I'm inclined to agree with Woodpigeon and Edward overall, I still see how these two ideas would help.

What other ways are there to deal with single-smiley postings and other wastes of bandwidth?

>>What other ways are there to deal with single-smiley postings and other wastes of bandwidth?

Hmmm. An analogy: do mobile phone companies prevent people from texting loads of smileys really close together by delaying SMS delivery? No they don't. Thye just sort out more network space/time, whatever it's called (God I'm untechnological )

BUT...sometimes single-smiley postings can be legitimate. Did I not see a certain person post a solitary only recently? It was witty, in context.

Also...I suffer terribly from l'esprit d'escalier...there's always something which I wish I'd added before hitting Post.

Besides...bandwidth is a) inexpensive and b) falling in cost by the minute.

Plus...the Beeb need the bandwidth for high-volume audio/visual media. If it can cope with that, it's not going to be troubled by a few forum postings.

OK. Good points... any previous communication from Higher Up had indicated that bandwidth was expensive and they couldn't afford more. (And yes, Edward, your single smiley posting was witty under the circumstances... )

It's just that I keep hearing that it's the researchers who aren't contributing license fees who are the BBCs biggest problem in regards to maintaining this site. I'm inclined to disagree for two reasons: (1)a good many non-UKninan researchers are responsible for a lot of very intelligent, in-depth discussion and some darned good Guide entries (and I'd consider myself average in that respect), and (2)wouldn't it then stand to reason that there are a good many UKnians who pay license fees who simply don't access this site at all? Wouldn't there be some offset there?

Additionally, would there maybe some way to allow researchers to remove their own individual journal entries? After a few weeks, I don't need mine any more. I realize that other people might have engaged in conversation there, but it would free up bandwidth regularly and have other benefits as well.

>>...(And yes, Edward, your single smiley posting was witty under the circumstances...

Er...it was *your* wit I was praising.

Deleting the entries would free up memory - which is even cheaper than bandwidth - but not bandwidth itself. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic from reading and posting, so an old thread lying dormant doesn't affect the price of fish.

http://www.ubuntuforums.org is getting a lot of traffic following a major softeare release. It now makes you wait 30 seconds between searches. It's crap! - although in this case justifiable, because as with all things Linux its voluntary and run on a shoestring.

This kind of thing works, though. It doesn't even out the traffic. It just lowers the overall traffic by sending people off in frustration!

>>Deleting the entries would free up memory

Yes, delete old Ask h2g2 entries so no idiot can them several years later

>Er...it was *your* wit I was praising<

I don't remember being witty lately. That's the problem with wit... it never happens when I intend it.

I dunno if old Ask entries could be deleted (maybe something no one has posted to in X amount of time?), but I think we definitely should be able to eliminate our own journal entries, if we choose.

Aren't they removing some abandoned Upsaces?

And couldn't they remove some of the one or two sentence "entires"? Obviously not all guide entries are meant to be taken seriously or to impart serious knowledge- otherwise we'd have no entires about any kind of religion- but I've seen a handful which consisted of nothing but a sentence or two and a couple of smileys...

Traveller in Time using substantial bandwith
"Bandwith is not the problem, like said earlyer, the BBC has huge bandwith consuming projects. Memory or storage is not the problem either.

It is the fact we are all drawing the information from the same list, this list can only be read by one process at the time. Even worse is making any contribution. By adding a posting to a thread all informed accounts get the information on their MP list.

The bottleneck is contributing something to the site, this takes a lot of processing as well as writing on several places in the single database.

Then why not split up the database ? As far as I know that is about the only thing they did not try so far. The technical team has made several improvements in the efficiency of the dna system, and with success ! For some hours after each upgrade we could notice an improvement in speed. Only to be used by more accounts and more postings the next day.

One of the things the message boards have problems with is the 'moderation queue', they close boards for a day or more to let the moderators get up to the front again. Each time the system is improved the bottleneck goes somewhere else.

And as we never manage to produce a thousend postings per hour on HooToo, the delay should hardly be noticed. We are 'busy' when posting more then a hundred messages per hour.

Though I have heard the idea of newbees on pre-moderation before, we had something alike discussed concidering submitting entries to the review forums. "

>Then why not split up the database ? As far as I know that is about the only thing they did not try so far<

Excellent idea, TiT!

Traveller in Time on his head
"The system would clog up again in just a few days.

The current limit for the message boards is the moderation queue. "