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SI - Site Forums : Silicon Investor - Legacy Interface Discussion (2004-2011) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: excardog who wrote (1208)	9/26/2004 1:04:14 PM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 6035

Was this change financial choice? Financial and functional. Financial because this has to be a viable business. None of us associated with it can afford to run it as a hobby. The cost of simply keeping it running is too high for that. Functional because, despite the "don't fix what ain't broke" comments I've seen, the old version was more than a little "broke". It had a huge appetite for bandwidth (about 4 times the amount of bandwidth this one uses, which is why so many people are commenting on the speed of this one), important features didn't work, barely worked, or worked intermittently, and it was very stale. It lacked a lot of functionality that I couldn't add without bringing it over to this platform. Also, the database backend was on its last legs and we'd had a number of emergencies with it including a huge outage that, in total, cost us several thousand dollars (not counting missed ad revenue) to have people fix. It seemed every time we turned around, something else was signaling imminent catastrophic failure of the system. Including comparatively little but potentially catastrophic things like the most important server complaining of a failed power supply, and my being completely unable to find a replacement at any price. It goes beyond that, though. As I'd mentioned before, the site itself had been on autopilot/ignore for years. No new features were being added. No problems were being fixed. And the business model was the most broken part of all. Pay-to-post worked when the internet bubble was inflating. It hasn't worked in years. The site had taken on expensive non-message-board features (email, portfolios, charts, research, etc) while the prevailing wisdom was that eyeballs mattered more than anything else. The model had become a huge albatross around the site's neck. I don't think most people truly appreciate that if we hadn't acquired the site last year and put in all this work to change it both as a site and a business to what it is now and is becoming, it's very unlikely the site would be running right now. So, a long way to say that the change is both financial and functional. As it was, the site had only a past and present. Now it actually has a future, and it's so bright, I gotta wear shades. :) Is there a way to save more than one board? I don't understand this question. You can add SubjectMarks to as many boards as you like, and they'll all show up when you hit the SubjectMarks button, if that's what you're asking.