Not going to sticky this one as there’s a lot of stickies up there already…

So today we have our 2nd big meeting with the WP VIP engineers. They’ve given us a performance report on the new site (on it’s new server) and on the whole it’s good. They have highlighted some issues with software that are causing page load delays, especially when the site us under moderate load (Lots of people on it at once). Basically they’ve pointed us at the parts of the software stack that we need to focus on. With a bit of coding and adjustments to cache and cookie settings (bloody cookies cause havoc to us all) we should make some big steps in the next few days.

These improvements are what we are now working on. The new site MUST be fast – that’s the principle goal of the launch. Once it’s fast and stable we can then start working on the features/design etc.

One heads up I can give you.. The system that registers if you are full members AND you don’t want to see the embedded videos in forum posts has been identified as a source of poor performance. That might cause some of you to see those videos when you have set your preference to not see them. This should be temporary while we put in place a better way of handling this.

Also, if you are a logged in member and ads appear (Hopefully this won’t happen but…) then please be assured this will be a glitch and temporary while we make it more efficient. So please bear with us while we work on these things. Theoretically this shouldn’t happen but I thought it best to give you a heads up, just in case.

I’ll report more after today’s meeting with an eta on launch etc.

ps. T-shirts are in production and we should have them here in the next week or two.