Category Archives: Announcement

The article comments have been putting quite a load on the server for this site, so I deleted all but the past couple of months worth. Hopefully this will help the server from getting overloaded as it has been again. You can do your part by actually commenting on only the story — only once, avoiding arguments, avoiding propoganda, avoiding threats, etc. If that advice doesn’t work, I’ll have to disable comments.

If you registered an account sometime before 6 AM EST Tuesday, then you’ll have to re-register. Also, all comments were removed during that period. There was an error in the database that occured sometime today when the server was overloaded, so rebuilt the database based on the save earlier Tuesday.

To keep the server load down and prevent further crashing, I’ve been disabling user comments during peak traffic hours (ie. weekdays during working hours). The site will be moving to a larger server in a couple of weeks so this won’t be a problem in the future.

I had to shut down article comments for now as the server has been getting overloaded. I’m working on moving to a bigger server but trying to negotiate something affordable. Thanks for your patience.

You may notice that there is a white screen momentarily before the pages load on the site now. I’ve installed a new script that detects whether visitors have an ad-busting program installed. If they do, the page doesn’t load and they are requested to turn off the ad-busting program to visit the site. As many saw last week, this site crashed several times because there were so many visitors. Hopefully blocking people who are stealing server resources by not viewing ads, the only form of revenue for a content website, will help alleviate some of this problem. If you have a website and wish to block ad-blocking visitors, visit antiadbuster.com.

Well as if this site could handle even more traffic, Yahoo news now is linking to the Mariah Carey winning poll – since Associated Press has now picked it up. This may mean newspapers will run the story, more people curious come on here, and we’ll continue to crash. For now I’ve disabled poll comments, story comments, and changed the number of visible articles until things can become more manageable. Thanks for your patience.

Yes, I know that it has been impossible to get on this site lately. The last few days I’ve had trouble with my dedicated server, mostly that I’ve running it near capacity… So it didn’t help when this site was featured in the New York Post in today’s edition (that remove a pop star’s music from the face of the Earth poll), and likely some editions yesterday if the traffic spike, without any referring links, was any indication. Hopefully things will settle down after a few days and I can continue to run this server close to the breaking point, instead of over the breaking point.

It looks like rebooting the server did wonders on the server that was really chugging the last few days. I’ve heard for someone that they’re still having trouble accessing the site using the AOL browser from last night when we were down for a few hours. There shouldn’t be any reason for this, but it is another good excuse not to use the AOL browser to surf the internet, just for content within AOL. Use Explorer instead as a separate application and support Microsoft’s monopoly.

Thanks everybody for submitting news items, but if I could make a suggestion… Please check the news by using the search engine or glance through the recent items to make sure it hasn’t already been posted. Also, items that are just copied and pasted won’t get posted. You need to summarize in your own words and link to the original story.