IC.2 - one year on

Posted by Tanos on Wed 18 Jan 06, 11:20 AM

Today is the first anniversary of the IC.2 system going live. This "new look" IC included a lot more features, a total rewrite of the stuff under the bonnet, and a redesign of the layout to be more friendly to new and casual users of the site.

For most of IC's life, since 1999, the site had used a homegrown database system to store membership details, posts etc. While this pretty much worked, it had a lot of limitations that stopped me doing new things (like networks and chatrooms) and it was becoming harder and harder to maintain. So I spent a good chunk of 2004 rewriting all that to use a "proper" database and new features like the Networks, Web Boards and current Pictures galleries. The resulting system went live on 18th January 2005.

The graph near the top of this post shows the number of posts to the web boards and weblogs per day for the last year. We've had to provide 10 times as much capacity during this period: from about 200 posts a day in January to spikes of 2000 on busy days now.

I've also included equivalent statistics for bondage.com's Europe+UK forum, which was the busiest UK BDSM forum this time last year: if you cover up all of the graph but the first centimetre or so, the world looks very different! But b.com was already undergoing a general decline, no doubt due to it's pricing policy (new users have to pay before they can post), partisan moderators and it's very very "busy" layout (IC's layout was partly designed by getting lili to explain why she found b.com very difficult to use.)

One of the most interesting features of the graph is how IC's posting rate is influenced by events: so there's a trough after KinkFest II followed by two days of over 2000 posts per day. It's also clear that introducing the chat rooms did move some activity off the web boards (a good thing - since chat puts less strain on the server) although the posting rate is climbing back up again.

The outline plan for 2006 is to maintain the current rate of growth, with new hardware as necessary, and to do some of the peripheral features that I've mentioned in Website Help from time to time. But with the addition of the private chat and chat rooms in November (which still need some fine tuning) we're pretty close to having a full set of features.

Edited Wed 18 Jan 06, 11:22 AM by Tanos