Interview with Shawn Hogan (Digital Point)

James said:
Thousands of questions for you Shawn, but I'll ask only one:
How fast is this XF install with so many plugins?
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Well, it's faster than stock on *average* because so much of what I've done is geared towards speed. There's master/slave DB support, a post caching system so it doesn't need to parse posts for every view (that ends up being HUGE when viewing threads). There are actually less images used (since I'm doing 100% CSS based gradients), so that's less HTTP requests. I also design stuff to scale. So take this image I posted earlier...

Image%202012.08.07%2010:54:31%20AM.png


The portal page took 0.06 seconds to render and the 5 queries needed is static no matter how many items you have. 2 queries are for the user/session, 1 query is to show the "who's online" block, 1 query to figure out how many total items there are (for pagination) and then 1 query for the items themselves.

If I designed things badly, the Twitter block would slow the page down exponentially... but we aren't retrieving things via the Twitter API in the same process thread as the page rendering, so...

Event listeners DO fire in a less than ideal way, so that could certainly be improved like so: http://xenforo.com/community/thread...-type-into-single-php-file.22301/#post-281417 But my dev setup is firing event listeners "normally", so it's could be faster in that regard.
 
8thos said:
Why not? No one expects you to be on here 24/7 like Brogan was and we don't mind if you log in and not do anything at all like the Kier bot's currently doing.
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Maybe if I didn't have about 5-6 years of my own projects that are on my to-do list (and that timeframe keeps growing since I think of new stuff faster than I can build it... and I build stuff fairly quickly).
 
digitalpoint said:
Maybe if I didn't have about 5-6 years of my own projects that are on my to-do list (and that timeframe keeps growing since I think of new stuff faster than I can build it... and I build stuff fairly quickly).
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Ohhhh. Is that why you release few modifications?
 
8thos said:
Ohhhh. Is that why you release few modifications?
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Well, there are a few reasons...

1. It just takes time to package properly (like actually use phrase system for example) and then there's the time it takes to support people.

2. A lot of times end users are annoying (heh)... Like you give them something for free and they piss and moan that you aren't going to add something obscure they want to whatever it is.

3. Then of course there *is* the competitive advantage... even if the first 2 items weren't an issues, I'd still keep a couple unique things. After all, I *am* trying to create a nice site that does something beyond what every other site in the world does. Not everything, but a few things...
 
digitalpoint said:
Well, there are a few reasons...

1. It just takes time to package properly (like actually use phrase system for example) and then there's the time it takes to support people.

2. A lot of times end users are annoying (heh)... Like you give them something for free and they piss and moan that you aren't going to add something obscure they want to whatever it is.

3. Then of course there *is* the competitive advantage... even if the first 2 items weren't an issues, I'd still keep a couple unique things. After all, I *am* trying to create a nice site that does something beyond what every other site in the world does. Not everything, but a few things...
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Number 2 is part of why I stopped trying to learn how to create addons and stuff. If I continued I would've probably start getting rude and I'm not trying to get banned. As far as competitive advantage goes, I am not attracted to your addons that the public can see and use, I'm more attracted to the back end stuff like draggable threads. Would you ever release that or does that follow under Number 1, 2 & 3?
 
8thos said:
Number 2 is part of why I stopped trying to learn how to create addons and stuff. If I continued I would've probably start getting rude and I'm not trying to get banned. As far as competitive advantage goes, I am not attracted to your addons that the public can see and use, I'm more attracted to the back end stuff like draggable threads. Would you ever release that or does that follow under Number 1, 2 & 3?
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Well I'm not releasing *anything* until I'm done with everything I need to get done for myself. Simply because it takes time, and that is time taken away from doing what I need to do for my own stuff. And if I start doing that, I'll never be done.

That being said, it's been so long since I did the drag and drop threads, I can't recall off the top of my head what sort of dependencies it has or if it would become an annoying support issue (like if it's able to do everything with hooks or if there were any template edits needed). I'll dig into it (and others) more when I get my stuff done.
 
digitalpoint said:
Well I'm not releasing *anything* until I'm done with everything I need to get done for myself. Simply because it takes time, and that is time taken away from doing what I need to do for my own stuff. And if I start doing that, I'll never be done.

That being said, it's been so long since I did the drag and drop threads, I can't recall off the top of my head what sort of dependencies it has or if it would become an annoying support issue (like if it's able to do everything with hooks or if there were any template edits needed). I'll dig into it (and others) more when I get my stuff done.
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I'm glad I'm not alone in that.

I make notes and such, but sometimes things change and you forget what you did or how you did it. OR more so, that when something goes "bump", you have to recall what is there that could affect that spot. Cause if you don't... You fix 1 "bump" only to get another (or more).
 
digitalpoint said:
Well I'm not releasing *anything* until I'm done with everything I need to get done for myself. Simply because it takes time, and that is time taken away from doing what I need to do for my own stuff. And if I start doing that, I'll never be done.

That being said, it's been so long since I did the drag and drop threads, I can't recall off the top of my head what sort of dependencies it has or if it would become an annoying support issue (like if it's able to do everything with hooks or if there were any template edits needed). I'll dig into it (and others) more when I get my stuff done.
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I use both the admin forum on my site and my local xampp installation to take notes of everything I do because I know I'll forget. You should try that. When I start a project I try to record everything I do, even the fails. It's just a simple cut-n-paste. I think most people don't do it because they think they have to be organized or whatever. I don't. I just copy-n-paste and post it for later viewing. I can piece what I did again later. I learned this as a novelist. Record everything you do no matter how minor or trivial it seems. It comes in handy later.
 
digitalpoint said:
So I built an importer that can do it in about 30 minutes (including stuff that normally is ignored like moderator/deletion logs, daily stats, "friendships", Facebook Connect links, user upgrades, what threads/forums they have read, warnings, bans, etc.)... Which is almost 18M posts, 620k users, 2.9M threads, etc.
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Can you share it? :)
 
Interesting read here, thanks Shawn :)

There's master/slave DB support, a post caching system so it doesn't need to parse posts for every view (that ends up being HUGE when viewing threads). There are actually less images used (since I'm doing 100% CSS based gradients), so that's less HTTP requests.
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I'm also looking at migrating to XF and our forum is pretty big (327k users, 23M posts) so if you want to share some of your big board add-ons...let me know!
 
swatme said:
so what digit figure is your adsense now considering 99% of your members are techie and dont click adsense :)
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Well, we get a lot of CPM AdSense ads (paid per impression) since you can do CPM ads in AdWords if you specifically call out the site you want to advertise on. We get about 100,000 unique visitors per day just from people coming in via Google search (which usually are not members). On top of it, when we started selling ads direct with Digital Point Ads, we made about 4-5x more than we did with AdSense (without adding any placements).

Take all that into account, we do okay with advertising and still get thousands of AdSense clicks per day. :)
 
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