Investment

» iivkovic - Notice to our discussions participants

Dear S101 members,

As indicated in the title of this thread, S101 is changing. We have added "Comments" feature for all Contributing Writer and Feature Writers' articles, while rendering all current discussions as read-only. This is why members are no longer able to add new posts and/or replies to existing discussion threads.

One of the reasons why S101 chose to depart from the discussions format and opted for the comments feature lies in the fact that S101 is primarily a web publishing site, managed and designed by writers, and that we would rather devote more time to writing articles and talking about what we write, than spend it moderating discussions.

The second reason is that discussions have lost their "value" in terms of space required to maintain them on our servers. We are now publishing over 800 articles a week and receive almost 8.5 million unique visitors a month. We are in the top 500 - 2500 (depending on which stats you check) English language sites and we are gaining fast. As you can imagine, the site has been built by many programmers over the course of it's relatively long history and much needed to be cleared away, reorganized, split and rewritten to optimize for speed of page delivery and so that public-facing pages - articles, blogs, profiles and homepages - are as little impacted as possible.

In order to scale for better performance and growth, we have reworked database organization (such as having discussions in read-only format) and bought additional primary and back-up servers. Testing of these new proceedures and hardware has necessitated some "read only" periods on the site, during which members could read our pages, but could not log in. Thankfully, the site speed has already improved significantly, but modernization will take a bit more time to reach full implementation. We truly hope you'll understand and continue reading our pages.

Thank you,

-- posted by iivkovic

Permalink Print Discussion How to subscribe to feeds