SearchIRC Updates

Jason · Posted: Jan 09, 2004 8:44pm Post subject: SearchIRC Updates

MOTDs are now displayed properly. There was code that parsed the IRC control codes that also stripped away extra spaces, this code messed up MOTDs that relied on spaces for the ascii formatting.

Also, SearchIRC will now be accepting ads from IRC networks. Read more here

Jason · Posted: Jan 10, 2004 11:33am Post subject:

SearchIRC now has:

1,460 IRC networks.

1,000 channels in the Chat Directory.

1,924 registered SearchIRC users.

10,095 cached MOTDs (Totaling 17.4 megs)

2.8 - 3.1 million page views per month (Does not count sister sites like IRCImages.com)

Mary · SearchIRC Admin Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 696

Close to FIFTEEN HUNDRED IRC networks. Amazing.

U · Eleet Joined: 18 Jun 2003 Posts: 521 Location: IRC

are those all active though? or are some sporadic?

Wiggle · Newbie Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 81

I believe they are active, because in another post they explained how they remove a lot of networks every day, and add a lot Smile

.

Jason · Posted: Jan 10, 2004 5:58pm Post subject:

We remove dead networks from being monitored, but we still keep them listed so that people who want info on a network can find it, regardless if it is active or not.

It is close to 1,500 total, including deactivated networks. About 1,000 are active right now.

Mary · SearchIRC Admin Joined: 03 May 2003 Posts: 696

There are surprisingly few "dead" networks. There are far more networks that have merged with another, or have become part of a metanetwork, or we don't index due to abuse or by their request, and there are about 100 networks every day that have temporary dns problems or are unreachable. Eliminating ALL of them leaves us with about 1000 active networks - but even though thats a good estimate when we type it out, it will probably change by the time you read this. :)

U · Eleet Joined: 18 Jun 2003 Posts: 521 Location: IRC

Ok, cool, I just found it surprising that 1500 seperate networks were running. I know alot of people have started them, but I also know that alot of them don't last too long. The figure just seemed high to me.

Jason · Posted: Jan 13, 2004 11:07am Post subject:

The remote javascript stats now have an embedded class called "searchirc". So in your css styles, you can create a class called searchirc and change the text and link colors in the javascript's output.

Jason · Posted: Feb 01, 2004 6:35pm Post subject:

Forums have sigs disabled. People were using them to add huge graphics and tons of text with wacky colors.

On the good side, I've enabled avatar uploading, so you can now add your own avatars. Just click here to get started

Jason · Posted: Feb 07, 2004 12:21am Post subject:

Channel reviews are now embedded into the search results, no more popups.

Jason · Posted: Feb 07, 2004 8:47pm Post subject:

The network updates section now has a new option, allowing admins to select the categories their network fit into. Once we have enough admins updating this info - we will add a new option on the networks page allowing users to browse networks based on category, rather than just on size and name.

Jason · Posted: Feb 08, 2004 12:18am Post subject:

New automated mass network addition tool created. It pulls validated networks from queue, adds the network, emails the admins and updates the queue to reflect the addition.

This should speed up the network addition process, as well as giving us a way to inform network admins that their network has been added, and how they can add info about their network to the site.

I also found and fixed a bug that was only happening on about 2 networks. What happened is they screwed with the 251 numeric, having that numeric display a ton of info the numeric doesn't usually show. The indexer then exited that network because it didn't know what to do.

Jason · Posted: Feb 15, 2004 8:20pm Post subject:

As you can see from this example:
http://searchirc.com/network-alpha/S

Networks with a rep assigned, now appear in bold. Thus bringing more attention to the networks that are active and care about what their network information says.

I also reformatted the way the data is presented in the opening network page. (Example: http://searchirc.com/network/SyrolNet). This layout works best when a network has filled out information. When there is no feature/category set for a network, it doesn't look all that great, so this layout may change in the future.

..and finally, a new page that shows how SearchIRC looked like in the past.

Jason · Posted: Feb 24, 2004 5:00pm Post subject:

Two things to note:

1) I'm noticing some spotty random "lag" when changing pages on the site. The lag is usually 2-3 seconds before the page loads. I've verified that this is caused by the new kernel we're running. Dropping back to an older version stopped this activity, but due to exploits in the old kernel, we cannot run it.

2) We're likely going to be upgrading hardware on the site in a week or two. The dual xeon server is starting to get stressed out with the large numbers of users who visit every day.

Since I plan on changing operating systems when the site changes servers, item #2 will take care of item #1.