WTH do the forums run on a potato?

Why are the forums always overloaded!

Is it because it’s the month of WTH?

My plan was yesterday to create the same topic, but due to connection issues I was not able to do so

WTH is it so overloaded that I can’t even vote for this…

+1

Wait…I think this is on me… >.>

<.<

Hello World

So, yes and no. LOL.

Higher traffic is causing the issues, very likely due to WTH. But as we’ve all seen in the past (I’m sure), these issues crop up occasionally.

We have a bandaid in place - it will not resolve all the issues but it means that you will be less likely to see forever loading during higher traffic times. Instead, you will see a 502 immediately if the request cannot be handled.

We have more work to do here! So, while we still run on a potato, it at least shouldn’t be so obviously potato-quality.

@MissyQ I have lots of potatoes you could use, let me know if you need more hosting capacity if you are setup for horizontal hosting.

My crews are going to look at me funny tomorrow when I start saying, “Get the potato out of your a**” instead of, “get the lead out of your a**”.

It is because Discourse sucks so hard.

It is probably one of the worst forum platforms ever developed.

Most of the time if I see that a forum is hosted by Discourse I just don’t participate (personal choice and opinion) but with Home Assistant there just isn’t another forum.

Why does it suck?

Too much white space. White space EVERYWHERE.

Due to the above, low information density. Discourse displays in 3 pages the amount of information a UBB or similar forum would display in 1.

Relative time stamps. Topics are posted “1H” instead of a specific date and time. So inaccurate.

Data use. 25MB of data is downloaded just to display the first page which contains, what, 1K of text at the most?

Infinite scroll. Infinite scroll is one of the worst inventions in UI. It breaks scroll bars. It breaks page down sometimes. I can’t use the END key. There is also a 2nd set of scrollbars implemented when viewing a topic just to fix the fact it breaks the browser scroll bar.

That’s off the top of my head.

If the backend of this forum is so bad as the UI, no wonder it is so problematic.

Not that I’m defending Discourse, but you DO know you can hover over that “1H” and get the actual timestamp, right? Sure, you need to be using a mouse, but it does work.

Seems to be a different side of a progress: when the engine was upgraded some time ago (a year ago? do not remember) I started seeing frequent glitches like
– community cannot be open in FF - but can be in Chrome;
– cannot be open both in Chrome & FF.

A perfect example of the trend which hides useful necessary UI elements for reasons of…I don’t know…thus requiring extra work to achieve the same thing.

There’s so much white space that the date/time could easily be placed underneath the relative timestamp in a smaller font.

I’d be less annoyed at the relative time if the “Last Visited” bar worked consistently instead of about 10% of the time. Even UBB or phpBB from 20 years ago could show topics/posts from last visit.

I just tried to vote on it and got a 504 error.

All is fine here!