Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
Issue: 66   Editor: Nyxxisaurus


Tale of the Mystery Lag Nyxxisaurus
It seems Bootleggers has been visited by the "Demon of Lag" these past few months and no one seems to know why. We have seen BSF2000 and Sabin on several times and surely they too have experience the lag we have all come to hate. The severity of the lag almost makes playing the game unenjoyable. To be honest, I feel like I'm running on a 36k dial-up modem here.

At first, everyone complained that it was their Internet Service Provider, but I tested out other websites, such as CNN.com, ebay.com and even tried playing some flash games along the way. I didn't want to believe that the game I spend "x" amount of hours on per day is suffering from such a horrid lag.

So I sent out my team to do a little investigating of our own, we ARE journalists after all. Being nosy and prodding into others business is our job and we strive on stories where research is needed. We asked ourselves... What could be the biggest contributor to such a lag on a game where graphics are almost non-existent?

THE FORUMS!

There used to be a time, back in the Bootleggers days, when I'd remember Moderators and Help Desk Operators cleaning the forums completely. They always left a cute note when they were done, "I love a nice clean forum! Enjoy!" Well, Mr/Ms. Colored One, I liked a nice clean forum as well-- so what happened to those anyway?

Thanks to the wonderful scripting by the Administrators, whenever a Help Desk Operator or Moderator visit the Help Desk to answer tickets or just to check if there are pending ones waiting for them, something called an "Auto Prune" is set off. This Auto Prune is here to delete any topics made in the forums that have expired. The script is set to delete any topic made in the Classifieds, which are older than 3 hours; Game Forum, 12 hours; and Off Topic Forum, 6 hours.

These were set by the Administrator according to activeness in the specific forums. Believe it or not, the Classifieds do get more action as far as forum posts per hour than the Off Topic and Game Forum do, so it is only logical that its topics get deleted quicker-- not to mention that any Classifieds topic found on the second page is rarely looked at anyway.

So does the forum pruning work? Yes, it does. It does what it is meant to do, which is delete topics from the forum when the time alloted for it to be there is expired, but do the topics get completely deleted? No.

We did some investigating. We took an old topic, still on the forums from each forum. We waited the allotted time for it to be expired and found it not to be on the forums when the hours passed. However, when we actually took the URL from the specific thread itself, we could find the topic completely, posts and all. This was only found in the Classifieds and Off Topic Forum. This could be crippling on the servers causing the extreme lag we have faced for quite some time.

We pondered why this would be so and the only logical reason could be due to moderating purposes, which is clearly a perfect excuse. When someone is reported, a Moderator has to look deep into the thread where the offense was carried to complete a ban that is concrete and has no possible way of being overturned via the Appeals Forum.

However, when is a topic no longer needed and should be completely deleted from the servers? It is unknown if those topics have an expiration of their own or not, but there should be. You need to keep in mind, however, that posting in these old topics, if you could (we are unaware as we are not trying this), is considered spamming and you WILL get muted and banned for the offense. So stay safe and do not test this out.

If this is the reason of the lag (and can only be confirmed so as true by the Administration), our research has been proven to be worth wild. However, if it is not we will continue on our journey, hopefully it isn't a long one and the lag won't get the way of our tedious conquest.