I've noticed that BigSoccer has added some pull-down menus to the site (Europe England Americas USA Women Other World). Is this the reason that the site is now as slow as it's ever been? This is just two cents from a guy who absolutely loves this site: People don't come to this site for the HTML bells and whistles. They come for the content. The slower the site is, the less it will be visited. I suggest you guys take to heart the lesson of Yahoo and Google-- in the case of a very large, heavily used web site, less design can be more. Simplify, don't complicate. Thanks and best wishes.
Thanks for your input. As you know, we're constantly trying to make the site easier to use. We're currently investigating their use and well may remove them based on user feedback and experiences. While I would agree that Yahoo keeps things nice and simple, I think that you would also agree that anyone with a computer understands how drop-down menus work. Thanks.
You're welcome, however my point isn't about ease of use. It's about how fast (or slow) the site works. With the addition of the drop-down menus, there's a noticable increase in the time it takes each page to load. Now maybe I'm wrong and the drop-downs make no difference overall. But -- I can actually see the **Europe England Americas USA Women Other World** menu taking extra time to load.
I agree with you in that I would put speed is about ease of use. Clearly a slow site is not easy to use. We haven't been able to duplicate the slow loading so we're trying to figure out if its the menus, the browser, the processor speed or something else. What we're trying to find is a solution where we maximize ease of use, meaning a fast site with navigation that allows you to easily and quickly find all parts of the site. The one problem is that the boards have gotten so large that many get buried. We're trying to find ways to make them easier and faster to reach.
That's cool, i appreciate what you guys do. fyi, I am using Mac OS 8.6 on an older iMac, and IE 5.1, but will be upgrading to a new machine by week's end. If there's any difference in the speed I'll let you know. cheers.
Each and every time a page comes up now it sits for about two seconds getting something from ehg-foxsports.hitbox.com. I go along with the others who say that the boards have slowed down significantly of late and hope you'll try to speed things up.
I've been having problems with BigSoccer for the past week here at work and another regular user, melbrown, just said that she is having problems as well. I have DSL here at work but am on a slow ass older computer. When I go to click on a link or post or whatever it takes what seems like forever for the page to load. Contrast that with home use of BigSoccer where I'm on a low level DELL laptop but using dial-up and the pages load quick.
They're off now. Please let me know if this cures your problems. We have still yet to replicate the issue on our end.
Things are much faster today than last night when I posted on the bug report thread. I'm using IE. Your guess is as good as mine on what version I'm using.
Ditto. FWIW, I think it may have primarily been a Mac thing. Specifically a Mac IE thing. On my PC at work, no significant slow-down - on my Mac at work, loads (IE). On my Mac at home (NS7), no slowdown again. I presume the dynamic dropdowns were some form of Javascript? That always gooses the 5.X of IE on a Mac.
Safari handles it much better than IE. If you're a Mac user and you've got OS X, take Safari for a test spin and I would imagine you'll be happier. Folks with PCs were reporting slower load times as well. And Matt is correct, IE 5.x for Mac is a real piece of crap.
And I've completely stopped using BigSoccer with Netscape on my UNIX machine. The table rendering takes for-ever.
It's an IE thing. Explorer with BigSoccer is horrible on a Mac. Safari or Opera are no problem - it's like a whole different world. I found it was the other way around on my PC: Netscape (an older version, anyway) was almost unusable, while IE was fine.