Site Maintenance: Inactive Users Purged
I’ve been looking into some performance issues on the site lately. As we’ve been active for more than 16 years, it’s probably no surprise that some old gunk has collected in our database.
As a visitor, you may not have noticed this as we have a few layers of caching in place, but the origin server is sometimes having a hard time keeping up with the traffic.
One of the culprits or the high load turned out to be our users table – it contained over 60,000 users and over one million user attributes. While in itself those are not huge numbers, WordPress apparently isn’t the most performant platform once your numbers grow!
There really is no reason to register for Blendernation unless you want to submit an article or a header graphic and in fact, a large portion of our userbase turned out to be spam accounts.
Today, I removed all accounts that have no content attached to them, and we’ll continue to do so on an ongoing basis.
I’m also looking into changing hosting providers to move to dedicated hardware (we’re on a shared server on DigitalOcean now). This may also be the perfect time for a redesign (if you have suggestions or ideas, leave a comment!). Experiments have already started and I’ll keep you posted on the progress!
I would like the option of bookmarking posts!
Your browser and other apps can already do that – it’s not something I will add to BlenderNation.
It would be helpful if the articles could be (visibly) tagged to help standardize filtering and searching for content.
Sometimes I just can’t seem to find the right wording to match the content of the article that talks about the video that shows how to do the thing, but if the thing were tagged with “procedural material” or “geometry nodes” or “add in,” or “artist demoreel,” it would make it easier to find that content.
It wouldn’t bother me if you had dedicated affiliate ad space… er… commercial community highlights… as a supplementary option of full articles, which get pushed down the list as articles come in.