No Sidebar Member List

Tony

Staff member
I would like to know what you think about there not being a sidebar member list on the main forum page? The guy who keeps our server running did this same mod on his site and he says it speeds up the site quite a bit over the long term since it stops a lot of queries in the database. At least I think that is what he said lol. All I know is, it is supposed to make the site a little faster to navigate, save some bandwidth and IMO look cleaner as well.

I want to hear your opinions on this! Post up and let me know what you think.
 

RandyDSok

Well-Known Member
I do enjoy seeing the list... but it's also not that important. At the same time, I don't see how it'd make that much difference either way ( resources wise ) since the server still needs to know who is online to keep track of which connections to keep open.
 

Tony

Staff member
Randy, it is all about how many times a page has to request something. Yes, the member list is still there, you can still get there by going to /online/ in the URL. It is negligible as to how much is saves, but my main reason for doing it is to keep the site looking clean. I will say this though, after seeing it for so long, it's like something is missing lol. Kind of like when we were on vbulletin, I would just flick the scroll wheel on my mouse and head straight to the bottom to see who was online. I did that for about a month after going to xenforo before it clicked that it was at the top lol.

But all I did was put a xen:comment tag around it so the database sees it as a comment and not code. If we don't like it, it's super easy to bring it back. Just wanted to try it out.
 

Tony

Staff member
Okay, I could not stand it, I had to bring it back. Thought I would try it and see if I liked it any better and quite honestly, I got used to seeing it so much that it just looked out of place without it here.
 

Tony

Staff member
Really, load times was the least of what removing it does. It just stops a few things from being called in the database which overall makes it a little faster. Maybe not for that one page, but if we have a lot of members on here, with it not requesting those items over and over again, it could speed up (very slightly) the other load times as well. But quite frankly, this site is not large enough to really worry about small stuff like that just yet.
 
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