Question

A suggestion for making Os somewhat faster

Answer 1

1. Delete the uncessary chat boxes which people rarely use to talk , unfortunately all the chats are not used for educational purposes anyways but still the chats which are not used at all can be deleted

2. There is no point in having millions of users where only half are active. An account not accessed for some amount of time must be deleted. Or if this policy is already present The time must be reduced. This would also reduce spamming to some extent

3. Os would be definately faster if it used basic HTML design and not over complicate things.

4. Adopting new image formats, such as WebP and JPeg XR, can also help reduce image weight by 20 to 50 percent without sacrificing quality. I read According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images.

5.Are the Plugins of this site updated

6. By , Minifying JavaScript and CSS. By removing unnecessary line breaks, extra space, and so on, you will speed up parsing, downloading and executing. This simple task can cut bytes of data from your page, and every little bit counts.


Although these are some suggestions from me , Its upon the moderators and @Preetha to look into them and make OS a faster community

Answer 2

The point i) has already been considered and is in the list :)

ii) point : Deleting accounts is not possible, as if an account is deleted, the data related to it will be deleted also. So, it will affect the other users' Smart Score (if the other users have got medals from the user, then those medals will be reduced. etc.). Hence, deleting an account is not possible.

Not sure about iii) , iv) , v) and vi) points. But, I'm sure the admins/mods will have a look at them

Also, thanks for your suggestions, these may prove really helpful. :-)

Answer 3

Regarding the second point , would it be possible to delete an account without sacrifising the medals ,fan etc

Answer 4

Not sure, if you just delete an account, I guess, everything will be deleted! That's what deleting an account means.

Answer 5

1) is certainly out of the question. The chat boxes aren't meant to host conversations related to the particular subject. It's a way to socialize. OpenStudy is like study social media. The users need some place to have a conversation with other students. The chat is one of the main things that make OpenStudy so appealing and addictive. If we remove that feature, OS would become less popular and we'd lose users instantly. So no way.

2) What's the problem with inactive accounts? It's not like they consume a lot of server space. Like kush said, the way the system is build, it's not possible to delete an account. only manually by deleting the account in the database, which would screw a lot of things up.

3) OS uses scala language in a lift framework. The reason for the lag is scalability issue, and this issue will be fixed this summer.

4) The cause of all the lag is not the amount of data, it's the amount of users. This version of OS was released about 2 years ago. Since then, there have been little to no maintenance or updates to the site. Also the number of users has exponentially increased as OS gained popularity. In other words, the site wasn't build for this massive influx of new users every day, especially now around final exams weeks.

5) No idea, ask @preetha

6) It's true the scripts on the site are a problem. If one of them crashes, the entire site goes down. Also some of the scripts are unnecessary. Like loading MathJax in a question without any \(\LaTeX\) code, or updating the smartscore every second. That's also one of the things that wil be looked at while the site's stability will be improved this summer.

Thanks for thinking with us though :) A little more patience is needed. OS has a small dev team and updates won't come as quick as they come on big sites like facebook or google.