Invest in better servers

[Eco]

Ever since B/W came out in the US, Smogon has been a mess.

No, I'm not talking about the BS Bans and whatnot, but something that affects most of us.

The website itself has been taking ages to load, making forum surfing and posting time-wasting and tedious.

The Smogon PO server is constantly lagging and timing out, messing up tournaments and the server itself. Along with a bunch of AFKers constantly clogging up traffic in the server. Why don't you guys Auto-Kick after 10-20 minutes?

Please tell me you guys are doing something about it, as its getting to the point where I'm going to might as well look for a different competitive website.

 

[darkie]

Thanks for the advice. We are currently looking at internal options to help alleviate the stress on the servers to help both PO and the site run more smoothly.

 

[Rising_Dusk]

I've actually been watching the server and it hasn't been lagging or timing out today or for awhile. I had to shut it down at 6AM this morning to update to the new server version, and then spent a few hours after that troubleshooting, but that's literally the only downtime we've had in the past week. If you have been suffering these issues, it's probably because of some compatibility issue between your computer or internet and PO.

Furthermore, there is a limited number of users on the server because I literally cannot run it any better and our alternative can do no better either. We don't get paid to run the server, and we don't make enough money on our own to just go buy a new computer for Smogon purposes. This is true of pretty much every person who has been working their buns off to make the site enjoyable for users such as yourself, and as much as I know it is frustrating for you and others to suffer through the lag, know that we are trying the best we humanly can with our non-existent fiscal resources to improve the situation.

Lastly, there's no way to tell server-side if a user is AFK or not, so an AFK kicker script cannot be implemented in the server.