Hello fellow SnitchSeekers!!
It's time once again for an update on what's going on around the site. This update should be a little shorter than most of my previous updates as I'm more on top of them, lately. tee hee
First of all, I want to thank KevinG for all the hard work he's been putting in to help improve site performance. One of the things he's done is to enact that dreaded Peeves error message. I know it's annoying but, it's actually serving an important function. When the server gets too busy to handle all the requests it's getting, the site will spit out the Peeves message. This helps prevent the server from flipping out and giving us those pesky database and sql errors that take the site down for several minutes to half an hour at a time. So, even though Peeves is irritating, he's certainly better than the whole site going kaplooey. Hopefully as we continue to boost site performace, we'll see less and less of these errors, as well.
(Note: You can help us boost site performance if you're a Firefox user who has modified their browser to send out a bazillion requests at a time to supposedly help pages load faster. Turn this feature OFF when browsing SS as it will only help to hand out more Peeves messages to other users. Thanks.)
Now, onto something that's been annoying me. As one of the perks for being in a Fan Club, I gave FC members the ability to request PM confirmations. However, I notice this option being abused. I'm assuming this is because you guys weren't aware of how it works so, I'm going to explain it to you.
After you type out your message and hit submit message, a little dialog box pops up and asks you if you want to request a read receipt for the message. The options it gives you are ok or cancel. If you press ok, you'll be asking the person you're sending the message to confirm their receipt of the message. If you press cancel,
your PM will still go through, you just won't be making the person on the other end confirm your message. I can see how the cancel would make you think you're message won't be sent but, that is not the case, think of it as a 'No" instead.
Having explained that, it would be nice if you only used the message confirmation feature for important PMs that you want to make sure someone has read. I find it really annoying to get simple 'Hi' PMs with the confirm receipt thing cause it pops up a dialog box for me and is just one extra step that I don't need while going through my PMs every day. I'm sure other people find it annoying, too. I've been tempted to take away this feature but, decided to just add this to my update and ask you guys to use care when using the confirm receipt option.
And finally, the first round of "Who is your (wo)man?" has been closed. Touz and the staff are tallying the results but, as there were more than just a few posts, it's going to take some time. Don't expect to see the results until after Monday (it's a holiday over here in the US this weekend). Thanks to everyone who participated and we look forward to seeing you in the semi-final round.
Oh, just kidding, I have one more thing. I've heard a lot of questions from people who post like mad in the TP about how their post counts went down. The surprising thing is that a lot of these requests are coming from people who read the post explaining you need to submit how many posts you had in the TP threads and wait for them to be kindly added back by some of our admins. Yes, the threads were deleted. Yes, you lost a lot of posts. No, we haven't gotten around to adding back all those posts. Yes, we will get to them eventually. However, if we continue to hear complaints and questions that aren't quite complaints about how you're losing posts when things are deleted, we will just turn off post counts altogether. If you can't gain posts, you can't lose them and therefore, you can't complain about it. We're being very generous in adding back spam posts from the TP when we don't do the same for people making "legitimate" posts in the school and other places around the site so, I don't think a little patience on your part is too much to ask. Thanks.
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Minister of Magic Update 
yayness 
The O.C. 
Remus Jhon Lupin 
