Hi everyone
We know that there has been a rise in how often the High Demand error screen has been displayed lately, this is due to a few search engine bots spidering boards on the network. We understand that they may be frustrating for some people, but patience please, everyone, the monthly spidering (particularly of Yahoo and Googlebot) should be over soon.
If the server is busy at any given moment, it will affect all boards on the server, not just an individual one. If there is a lot of people & search bots on the server at any one time, the high demand screen will appear until the server load goes down. What tends to happen is that once there is a heavy traffic buildup, instead of waiting a couple of minutes, as the message suggests, people click the link to the page they are trying to access over and over again - this only makes things worse.
If you want to help out the cause, we've come up with a few good ways which everyone can do to help us limit the amount of times the High Demand error screen is displayed:
A good way to help loosen the load on the BbServer is to reduce the number of posts displayed per page in threads. For example, if you currently have the 'Posts Per Page' feature set to display 20 posts per page, reducing the number to 10 or 15 posts per page would help.
Another good way to help is, if you currently have any forums on your boards which are open to guest viewing, to close them so that only registered BbMembers can view inside the forums, that way, the search engine bots wont be able to view threads inside those forums and cause the high demand errors.
You could also consider putting your boards onto MBA Mode, so that guests only see the application screen.
We're not sure if it's feasible at this point to completely block Bots accessing the servers, but it would certainly reduce the load by factors.
As for merging servers - I'm afraid we simply don't have the money to operate lots of servers any more. Bandwidth and server costs are rising, and income from adverts (and the exchange rate with the dollar) is getting worse. We're very sorry for any degredation in service, but the bottom line is that we just can't afford upkeep on so many servers any more.
You could also consider upgrading to
bbBoard V2, our downloadable message board product. We now offer
hosting from as little as $10 per month, and the minimal plan comes with 40 MB of disk space, 16 GB of bandwidth/month, 1 catch-all email account, 1 subdomain, 1 FTP account and a bbv2 license which is automatically installed for you.
Please don't start new threads about the High Demand error screens, we understand that the error screens are frustrating for some people, and we apologize for any inconvenience caused by them, but the spidering will soon be over
Thankyou for your time,
The BbBoard Support Team
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