No one at this forum lately?

[ThePentiumGuy]

hey

 

ever since this forum was bought by iNET (i dont mean to be 'rebellious', but im just trying to state a fact), i havent really seen a lot of people at this forum

 

is it because the heavy interface takes a toll on the 56k'ers? or the increased formality.. or?

 

i mean i've been here for a year almost, and i certainly remember last year there were a lot of active people around, now this forum seems almost .. empty (with the exception of a few people)

 

is it just me? or is anyone else thinkin the same thing?

 

pent

[Robby]

You're absolutely right, I don't know the reason for anyone else, but I'm working 90 to 100 hours per week. :(

 

And yeah even with high-speed the pages are quite bloated.

[sjn78]

I found the same, like Robby, even with high speed connection, it does take a bit for the pages to load.

 

Plus, sometimes I can only get here once a week if I'm lucky because of work.

 

Maybe there is a new secret underground forum that has free beer for members.

[wessamzeidan]

One of the reasons I think is that now there are alot of .NET resources on the net, articles, sample code, libraries..etc. If some one is stuck on some thing that he can't solve, before posting his problem here, he'll look for articles and code samples that solves his problems. If he doesn't find, then his choice will be to post his problem in a forum.

When this forum first started, .NET was a new technology, so there wasn't much about it on the net....which is not the case now

[PWNettle]

And yeah even with high-speed the pages are quite bloated.

 

*shrug*

 

The pages here fly for me at home (cablemodem and an AMD64) and at work (who knows what the connection is - our network weenies are always messing with it - but it's usually fast...and an AMD2600 or something).

 

The sister site, XTreme VB Talk, continues to thrive despite the ownership change using almost the exact same forum structure (I *think* there are some slight differences but I'm not an admin so I couldn't say for sure) - so, I don't think the ownership or forum/page layout is a factor.

 

I'd consider these forums underutilized. The good thing is that a lot of intelligent and talented people have been and continue to be here to answer questions so it's a valuable resource regardless.

 

Paul

[Bodybag]

I used to visit this site a lot.But i started feeling a nasty vibe on it.People would start giving snotty answers to questions.Then there was the bragging going on as well.So i just didn't log in anymore.

[Banjo]

One of the reasons I think is that now there are alot of .NET resources on the net, articles, sample code, libraries..etc. If some one is stuck on some thing that he can't solve, before posting his problem here, he'll look for articles and code samples that solves his problems. If he doesn't find, then his choice will be to post his problem in a forum.

When this forum first started, .NET was a new technology, so there wasn't much about it on the net....which is not the case now

PWNettle's point applies here too. VB6 has been around a lot longer than .Net and so there are many, many more articles on the web. Even so that forum still thrives.

 

The page bloat issue is slightly harder. XVBT is much larger and has much more inertia. I think that the slow page load times are having a more influential effect here due the small size of this forum.

 

We are looking at the possibility of coming up with a slimmer style but that is a large undertaking that iNet are not interested in doing themselves. As Robby should, he and most of the Admins have many constraints on our time. Just bear with us.

 

Paul:

How fast is that cable modem? I'm on a 1mbps ADSL line here and there is a noticable amount of page loading going on.

[Rick_Fla]

There is a hack for vBulletin, I use one on my site, that will give good ideas on load times per page that they could easily install to check the times.

 

Doesn't the VB6 site also have .NET forums as well, I remember looking for something and got a .NET answer over there.

[Denaes]

I used to visit this site a lot.But i started feeling a nasty vibe on it.People would start giving snotty answers to questions.Then there was the bragging going on as well.So i just didn't log in anymore.

 

I was a bit put off by a lot of the anti-VB sentiment I got from 2 or 3 users. Any question about VB and they'd start going off on the shortcummings of vb programmers and how they havn't learned how to program property... Which I guess would be a dig at vb6 programmers as they had to do some things differently, I don't see any relevance in the least as I'm programming vb.net and there are only a handfull of differences between C# and vb.net (and none that I've ever needed to use).

 

Sure there were some snippy answers when someone would post a question stating that they searched but may not have known the proper terminology to search for it (its so damn easy to search for something when you know were to look!), and people would be kinda snotty and provide a link and show that they searched for... apparently showing the lack of effort on the questioners part because they didn't know the proper keyword to search for.

 

That's prevented me from asking a few questions here... at least the VB boards arn't anti-VB, and if you stick to the .Net portion they normally arn't anti-.net either.

 

I think I prefer these boards on the whole, but until the last few days I havn't been posting.

[Arch4ngel]

I'm on this board since 3 - 4 months... And I think that there's a lot of information that can be gathered.

 

However I must say that there's a lot of articles and doc on the net right now.

 

My opinion is there's too much help over the web so a forum isn't the first place to look at.

 

Love this forum !!! :)

[Rick_Fla]

Agreed, there is a lot more on .NET than there use to be, but I think I still come here first when I have a problem. Yes, there has been a few times where I thought the answer given was a little snotty, but also at the time I could have been so fustrated at not being able to figure out the question, that I took the responce the wrong way.

 

I think someone mentioned being just giving links as an answer, I don't think this is a bad thing. Sometimes they are links to this forum, but on the same topic they are asking about, no use re-writing the responce. There have been times I have been pointed to the MSDN Lib, which has helped, and if I still don't know I repost that I was still lost, and have gotten more help.

 

So I am not sure why it seems slow to those who have been here a long time, I get an answer pretty quick when I do have problems, I have a few that never got answered, but not worried about 'em too much to stop coming here.

[PWNettle]

Paul:

How fast is that cable modem? I'm on a 1mbps ADSL line here and there is a noticable amount of page loading going on.

 

I'm not much of a benchmarker so I don't know off the top of my head...I just ran speed test at PC Pitstop a couple of times, which hopefully is somewhat accurate, and hit ~3350Kb/s average. That site said cablemodem speeds are typically 1000-3000Kb/s. As with any internet connection there are a lot of potential factors that can affect speed. (Download test performed on a 3354 KBytes file which is far larger than anything you'd typically get hitting this site - the 'home' forum listings page is ~70Kb not counting graphics which should be cached for regular users).

 

I think processor speed can be a factor too...since the data has to be rendered once it's received.

 

Geographic location could be a factor too.

 

*shrug*

 

 

So I am not sure why it seems slow to those who have been here a long time' date=' I get an answer pretty quick when I do have problems, I have a few that never got answered, but not worried about 'em too much to stop coming here.[/quote']

 

By slow I think they mean that there aren't that many threads started asking questions. Given the newness of .Net and volume of posting at the VB6 site one would think there'd be more traffic here. The questions that do get posted do receive quick answers because there are a lot of knowledgeable people lurking and willing to help.

 

Paul

[Banjo]

Is that 3.5 megabytes or megabits (don't you just hate the acronym people :)). Either way you have a significant speed advantage over most users. If it mbits/s then you're 2-6 times faster than my home connection and if it's mbytes/s then multiply by 8!

I think that might explain why page load times aren't a factor for you. And of course, I'm on a 512kbits/s connection here so I'm ten times faster than the poor dialup users. I know a couple of users who have mentioned being really fed up with accessing the forum on a dialup.

[PWNettle]

Kilobits...so Megabits I think. Fast...but not THAT fast! :p

 

I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't have cablemodem, dsl, or some form of high speed access availability in their area. :(

 

Paul

[Derek Stone]

We never will either. The 20% of us (according to the statistics I've seen) that live in the last-mile areas don't and will never get wired broadband Internet access (I do not consider satellite to be a viable option, and WiMAX is yet-to-be). The providers can't justify the expense will little return, and I can't say I blame them. For something like this, the federal government should be stepping in with grants. The Internet (and networking as a whole) is far too important to have anything less than a 100% geographic saturation, both for business and education.

[Denaes]

We never will either.

 

Not totally unrelated, a client wanted high speed access, either dsl or cable modem, but she had her buisiness apart from the block, almost on a little mini block in a funny traffic intersection.

 

The DSL would have cost her 5,000 to connect (they could have done it over the phone poles, but required special permits) and cable was estimated at 50,000 minimum. The cost to dig up a street on a buisy intersection.

 

The closest store is about 150 feet away. We were joking that it would be much cheaper to get them DSL/Cable and run a powerful wireless network signal across the street :p

 

Right now she still has Dial up, and ironically doesn't want the ISDN upgrade which would be mad cheap. :D

[Banjo]

Oddly, here ISDN is much more expensive than ADSL. No idea why.

[divil]

50% of internet users are still on dialup. It requires a lot of patience to bother to navigate this place with a 56k modem.

[ThePentiumGuy]

o_O!50%??

 

wow.... and i thought 56k was becoming obsolete

[Arch4ngel]

At work I can download up to 1 Megabytes per sec. (I'm working for a main ISP :p).

But at home I can download up to 800Kilobyes per sec (Buying from their main concurent)

 

So at both home and work... this website is realllllllyyyyyyy fast :)

But I'm some what impressed that 50% of all user only have dialup. But I'm sure that most of them don't need more. Let think about your grand-father or grand-mother... they don't do a lot of internet... and most of the time... they only go see the news on the net :)

 

So... I might think that dialup is still needed... well... until High-speed provider lower their prise !!! :p

[Robby]

I have 2800 Kbits/sec (350 Kbytes/sec) at home and I still find it too slow. :(

[PWNettle]

50% of internet users are still on dialup. It requires a lot of patience to bother to navigate this place with a 56k modem.

 

I can believe it since people worldwide use the internet and high speed access probably isn't quite worldwide and it costs more. I'd guess that for a lot of users that dialup works fine for their needs. 56k and hitting the forums from Europe is undoubtably slow.

 

I have 2800 Kbits/sec (350 Kbytes/sec) at home and I still find it too slow. :(

 

That seems odd, but perhaps geographic location is a factor for you...or maybe you have a slow PC (unlikely methinks). I mean, you must not be seeing that speed when you actually hit this site.

 

Paul

[Arch4ngel]

Geographic location might be a point... but me and Robby are from Montreal... it's not that far... and I don't see slow web site that are hosted in USA (unless they have a high usage and everyone else is using the bandwidth).

 

Might this be PHP that process information too slowly ? Kinda ironic no ? Forum that talk about .NET using PHP :p

 

Don't know if PHP might be in cause...

[Robby]

My location should have nothing to do with it, even while I'm on VPN it's the same thing, my VPN resolves in NJ and/or VA, all other sites fly compared to this one.

I host my own site in AZ and that's an extra couple of thousand miles further and it's still lightning fast.

[Arch4ngel]

I agree with Robby. Had same kind of experiences...

 

Questions to admins : Is the PHP script is "lightning fast"(Quoted from Robby) or it lags some times ?