Answers to FAQs not in the FAQ., page 3

I just made this because a lot of people have been asking these questions latley and it might help them out.

Q. Why am I logged out when I click the Site Home button/link to ATS?

A. You are not logged out. The Site Home button or the Link to ATS is taking you to the homepage where the most flagged/popular/staff picked threads are shown. Once you click any button, like the Board Home button, or the Recent Post button it will show you as logged in.

Q. Why do I have negative ATS/BTS/PTS points?

A. There are a few ways this can happen.

1) You have received a warning which took away more points then you had.

or the more common one.

2) You bought something from the ATS Store and bought it using Combined Points, which means it takes an equal amount of points from your ATS, BTS, and PTS point totals.

ex. You have 30 ATS points 10 BTS and 10 PTS.

You buy something for 45 points using combined points and it takes away 15 points from each, leaving you with 15 ATS, -5 BTS and -5 PTS points.

Q. What happened to the Views Column?

A. From the Admin himself...

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord

In reality, the "views" tracking is indeed an item that is a "luxury" and was beginning to introduce some problems.

As most people who work with high-volume technology are aware, simple database writes can often take up to four times the processor cycles as read queries, even read queries that touch on more data than a simple one-column update write... such as incrementing the view counter for a thread.

I ran a test by removing the view increment for guests, and db server load immediately decreased... so now it's implemented across all sites and we're no longer tracking views. You may notice other very large boards have adopted a similar approach.

The issue of incrementing a view-tally on every page load is not an issue on small-traffic and/or small-size sites. But as our threads table continues to grow in size with more than 262,000 topics, it has become an increasingly processor-heavy operation to open the large table, read the current views, write the views+1, then close the large table each time a thread is viewed. Now consider that our threads are getting close to 200,000 views a day, and you start to see our problem.

So, now that we're not incrementing a view-counter, views are no longer shown.

Thats all the Q and A's I could think of right now.

enjoies