After the forum software upgrade, we've decided to start from the clean sheet and reset the "most users even online" counter on the forum home page. It is accompanied by the change in the system "session timeout" setting which shouldn't affect the user base now that the unread threads are kept unread even after a long period of inactivity.

I kind of missed it - it's been a few days since we passed 13,000,000 posts mark (currently 13,016,979 posts). Thanks everyone!

A few hours ago RCGroups has achieved two big milestones - we passed 12 million posts and 1 million threads, on the same day!

Our previous record for the number of users online has stood for almost an year, and was beaten on April 1st with 5219 simultaneous users accessing the site. Yay!

Our forum search (which is powered by the most excellent Sphinx search engine) has been updated to the latest Sphinx version. As a result, "find all threads started by" and "find all posts by" search queries are now being handled by Sphinx, meaning they'll run faster (significantly faster for a "find all threads started by" search for the prolific members).

Another obscure new feature is that you can now run a search by user name without any keyword - it will be the same as if you'd click "find all posts by" link on member's blog, though with your default search preferences.
The neat thing here is that you can also throw in some other search criteria, e.g. specifying "For Sale" thread category and "show results as threads" will list all For Sale threads started by that member.

A few hours ago we passed the 9 million posts mark:
Thanks to all members who helped to break this record!

Hot on the heels of the previous two "posts in a single day" records (I, II) comes another achievement - the RCGroups members have posted 8267 forum messages on January 21! Way to go!

Our previous record was beaten again on Jan 2nd when we broke 7600 posts per day, thanks to our members!

75 posts ago RCGroups hit 8 million posts mark.
Here's a brief timeline:
Jun 2003: 1 million
Mar 2004: 2 million
Dec 2004: 3 million
Jul 2005: 4 million
Feb 2006: 5 million
...
Sep 2007: 8 million

Here's a new feature - when a new movie file is uploaded, a thumbnail is extracted from it and saved along with the movie duration. Here are some examples:
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=720349
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=720358
http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=720469

I plan to apply this treatment to the already uploaded movies as well, preferably in off peak hours as the thumbnail extraction process is quite CPU demanding.

Yesterday we broke another record: 4185 online users.
Though I'm still scratching my head about the sudden activity - there were no usual suspects like digg or engadget involved this time, and nothing in the logs that would stand out. So it's a bit of a mystery for now.

I know it's never enough of forum activity for some people (*wink* *wink*), so the forum addicts will find the Forum Spy helpful. Note that it's currently just a sneak peek, and for the cool fading effect you'll need a non-crippled web browser (read: FireFox). Microsoft Internet Explorer doesn't properly support HTML elements opacity, and Opera has its own opacity problems, too.

YouTube is an easy way of sharing your videos with the world, and now that YouTube links are ubiquitous on the forums, we've added the convinient feature - auto converting YouTube video links to the embedded YouTube flash player. No need to leave the forums to watch a video clip now, and you can see its original title and duration, too.
Older posts containing YouTube links will be converted tonight.

Update: added an example

General Lee flying RC car (0 min 57 sec)

Update II: Google Video links are now getting the similar treatment, except that there's no sane way to get their title and other video info:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...99648996501943

The "Coming Soon" page is the only major feature which was lost during the transition of the articles from the old system to the forum format half an year ago. Today it is finally back to the 'zines home pages for everyone's viewing pleasure.
And while the old page was generated semi-manually, the new list is an accurate and real-time representaion of the upcoming articles queue.

What the onslaught of Engadget readers couldn't do, the aftermath of the New Year holidays did - we broke the previous online users record (3871 users) which stood for 1,5 years. And today there were 3944 online users on the forums! Thanks everyone involved! :)

Tags: RCGroups, record

As you may have noticed, the URLs for the forums are more user-friendly now (and search engine friendly, too). Surprisingly, the source code changes needed for this weren't very intrusive, and there were no template changes at all - the forum pages are generated as they were before, but before the final output an additional search and replace stage involving a sophisticated PCRE magic is applied. From some subtle details, it looks like vbSEO (a commercial vBulletin addon) is using the same approach.

Next step: convert the thread URLs into the same format.

Tags: vbulletin, SEO, PCRE

This week lmopar69's RC airsoft gun got a nice exposure on the Net. First it was linked from the Hack A Day, then picked up by Slashgear, and finally, yesterday it was featured on Engadget. In result, yesterday we've been just 30 users short of breaking the previous online users record! Thank you Laine!

Check the video of the gun in action here.

Digg it!

Attached is a nice bandwidth graph showing the effect of the yesterday's invasion of Engadget's readers.

Tags: RCGroups, airsoft gun, slashdot effect

Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams recovers from the incurable voice disorder by virtually hacking his brain. His story is amazing! It just shows how little we know of the human brain inner workings.
Congratulations to Scott! I can't imagine how happy he must've been after getting his voice back!

Our forum search engine has been updated. Most of the changes are internal, but there is one very visible change which should increase the search usability (I hope).
Previously the search results page just printed the first 200 symbols from the post as a post excerpt (when showing results as posts). Now the post excerpts on the search results page are more likely to include the search terms, e.g. when searching for "hand launch": So we are another step closer to Google, Yahoo and the company :)

Tags: vbulletin, forum, fulltext, search, sphinx

The next two weeks is a vacation time for me. So no new features and forum breakages for the two long weeks!