You've reminded me why free boards like invision and phpbb are awful. Overly large post headers, stupid icons spam, avatars, signatures, etc.

This site is suppose to be pretty bare bones and based off the gotfrag layout/system. Because of how basic it was meant to be, starting from scratch was arguably easier than having to cut out all the excess features, reskin the boards to their specs, etc. It also comes with the benefit of being pretty optimized because there's no vestigial database entries and what not from the bloated free forums.

And yes, tftv could probably handle the feature at a small to medium performance cost. However I doubt enigma wants to trash on the current speed of the forums (it's pretty fast if you haven't noticed). If anything, think of it as a test feature that could potentially become a normal feature, though I doubt anytime soon (once enigma starts implementing an archiving system and gets a bigger server then maybe).

Also, tftv+ is mainly just to support the site, as there's really no way to make $5 "worth" it on an online forum. But if the site continues to expand maybe it'll be possible to add more features to the mix and make it a bit more worth it.

PS. I do think gold names would be better than blue names for tftv+, just so legacy invite keeps something. Maybe add a css hack for outlining text with gold and invite color, but it looks kinda ugly (hope browsers eventually support true outlining text).

Keep up the good work Enigma, this site is is great.

I'm not saying its the way to go, and I know that the aim here is for a more simplistic approach, but you can still achieve that with a few more features or perks. Anyway those icons don't clutter anymore than the current post starts, so... And there are great smf or phpbb forums, their functionality is great even if its still a bit cluttered, but you can still achieve a minimalistic look as well with those "free board like invision" which by the way is paid and costs 175$ minimum a license.

Yeah, sorry but no. I have a SMF forum with 5k users and the forum has faster loading times than tf.tv. And there are plenty other examples. It just depends on the optimization or maintenance the site has.

While I agree with the main goal being supporting tf.tv, I think there are plenty ways you can make it worth $5.

I think the way to go here would be to have it work automated with ESEA / ETF2L API for prem / invite players, and I don't see why a small icon should matter anything, sure name color is simpler, but since its for + subscriptions now, you could have just a small icon or text saying the player is a invite/prem player

oh god its 2005 all over again

I don't get how adding something can improve performance, and I doubt that adding an extra query will be non-existent. A small performance hit could be .05 seconds, could be .2 seconds who knows (I haven't myself made a benchmark for this scale a website, but obviously it's going to add a few fractions of a second at the very least). There would still be a performance hit. Also, I'm pretty sure this is run on a VPS. Depending on the capabilities and limits of enigma's provider (I think it's linode, and he's using cloudflare to help distribute), it could be worse than it should be.

Also, whatever on the invision part. I used a "free" invisionboard provider (though it is a proprietary board anyways dunno how much source is given out) but either way most of those boards have very similar layouts and features that aren't needed. The question is could you easily achieve this exact look using those forum providers, and would throwing out all the work already put in be worth it. I mean I like teamliquid's style and this site's/gotfrag style where there's at most 1 icon next to the person, then legacy stars (which aren't necessary but whatever). Aesthetics are pretty important for a site like this, and people don't want enigma to fix what isn't broken.

ESEA doesn't have an API. The best you can do is make a webcrawler (which probably isn't that hard, but it's still work to be done). Dunno about ETF2L but I doubt they have one also.

Why not list them? Exclude anything that involves icons/headers in threads though (even the i49 donator header kinda annoyed me visually). I'm sure enigma's open to good ideas that don't conflict with some of the design goals of the forum.

I don't know what TFTV uses, but as a software developer and a former data warehousing specialist I can tell you that most of the performance degradation will likely be coming from the DB.

Virtually for anything, you WILL have to trade functionality for performance/space/etc at some point. So more stuff you tack on, this could potentially include an ever so growing number of joins, etc. As the site acquires more data, that will slow the performance even more - potentially far worse than linear time, depending on the data modeling.

Even if DB is normalized smartly, indexed properly, and queries optimized fully, at some point what I said above WILL force a re-design for optimization purposes if DB acquires enough data. (I doubt that TFTV will get to that point for a looong time though, and at that point the hardware should get some serious upgrades)

So right now, adding on additional functionality might seem like much to you right now, but taking poor action right now could easily blow up on enigma's face later.

TL: TL+
The opinions expressed by our users do not reflect the official position of TeamLiquid.net or its staff.

TFTV: TVTF+
The opinions expressed by our users do not reflect the official position of TeamFortress.TV or its staff.

HMM.

that's really just outright not true and quite an unfair comparison to begin with.

I took a quick look at the page render times on the SMF main site forum and they're all slower than the sub-40ms render times on tf.tv. whatever delay you're experiencing with tf.tv is almost certainly caused by cloudflare's CDN (necessitated by the recent DDoS threats).

the user base on this site is also much more active than your typical forum's (a typical day averages about 1000-2000+ new posts) and almost every single one of tf.tv's ~8000 users is a singular active identity (because of mandated "real" steam account login). in many regards this site is utilized in an almost chat-like fashion rather than a bulletin board.

it's also a bit disingenuous to suggest the site should have this feature and should have that. i'm not going to pretend by any stretch of imagination that tf.tv is the paragon of forum software, but for what it was designed for--a fast, minimalistic medium for the tf2 community to connect--it does its job fairly well. for better or worse I coded tf.tv from the ground up and haven't had the resources or time to match an experienced forum software development team.

I love this community and I'll continue doing what I'm doing regardless of what comes out of this but god damn is it disheartening when comments imply it's my responsibility to do all that I do for tf.tv and indebt myself to the community simply because I make a few bucks off ads.

^wake up dont believe the illuminati^

FWIW I implemented this feature on a custom message board solution awhile back. It may not be as complete as the way Enigma did it, but IIRC, the way I did it was:

Have a table named LastViews, with the columns:

(user_id, thread_id, last_post_seen, timestamp)

(user_id, thread_id)

form the primary key. So when a user views a given thread, we can quickly look up what the last post they saw was, and take them to that. If that row didn't exist, then when they're taken to the first page, and we can insert such a row with the last post on that page and the current time. If that row did exist, but there are more posts now, then we update the row with the last post on the page and the current time. (Basically, we performed an upsert with one SQL statement. I forget the details, it was awhile ago.)

To avoid the table growing too much, we decided to only keep those rows with a timestamp in the last week. So we built an index on timestamp, and basically had a cron job that deleted all rows with a

timestamp < (now - 7 * 24 * 60 * 60)

. This only runs fast if you have the index on timestamp. It wrote out the last time it ran to a log file, along with how many rows it deleted, and then we had the monitoring tool Monit ensure that this really was being updated every hour.

Anyway, not sure if that's how you're doing it, and clearly it's done, but just to throw a solution out there that worked well for us. And props on the constant improvement to the site!

I'm just saying from experience from what I tested, tf.tv is fast, yes I won't deny it, it's pretty fast for a forum of this magnitude in fact but I have seen faster forums running other forum systems including my own forum,, I was just answering to the previous guy, I didn't even imply tf.tv was slow to begin with

as I said in the first post, it was not meant as a personal attack or any attack of any kind, its just me trying make some constructive criticism of what I saw. If you don't like or want feedback I can just turn around and dont come back to this thread, I'm the kind of guy that likes to give feedback and scrutinize things to make the best out of them or at least try to help doing that, I don't see how that is bad or mean in any way. As I said I love everything that was accomplished so far but there is a long way to go and Im just trying to help along.

Regarding tf.tv plus, as I said, I think it's a pretty steep subscription, reddit gold or even tl plus that you mentioned yourself are more affordable and offer plenty more perks to it, this alone should justify the initial point I made about not being happy with it.

1. Ability to add streams to favorites (and when they are on favorites show them at the top of the list regardless of viewers)
2. Alert system for events or games (could work through e-mail alerts or steam) trade.tf has a pretty cool alert system (http://www.trade.tf/user/go_alert) that works through a tf2 bot that whenever there's a update to the game the bot sends you a text message on steam.
3. Customize number of posts per page, particularly extending to 100 posts or something like that.
4. Customize the number of upcoming events, latest articles, forum activity, community news that appear on the sidebar.
5. If there was a pm system + users could have an extended inbox or messagee limite (of course this isn't the situation atm)
6. Subscribe or favorite threads
7. Also not applicable to plus users only but everyone able to gift tf.tv plus to another user, as tl+ and reddit have.
8. A icon/badge showing you're a + member, name colors are cool and all but honestly I think this would be much more of a perk. besides, a favicon size badge won't mess with your minimalistic approach unless you have some kind of OCD
9. Private forum for plus users
10. Plus-users only giveaways or lotteries.
11. As I said before introduce other pricing plans like semestral or yearly subscriptions with a discount relative to the absolute price of course.

I could go on, but this is what I got so far. I'm not saying I want all of this and I want it now, I'm not delusional, but I do think the subscription value warrants a few more perks to be worth the 5$ monthly. Of course most of this is not coded atm or even possible at the moment but here are my suggestions

so dont buy it

???

idk man you are on a tear as far as pulling shit out of your ass and laying it down as fact

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I do love making reasonable and constructive posts and get downfragged and replied with shitposts like yours. I thought this was supposed to be a feedback thread, welp.

how can 5 bucks a month be steep?

It is, relative to the other options mentioned by enigma himself in the plus page (reddit gold or TL plus). Both these are cheaper and offer more perks.

you've made me change my mind, I'm unsubscribing until enigma implements the following:

- Badge indicating in which league and division I'm playing
- Number of friends in steam
- Number of +frags I got in my last lft thread
- Number of matches won vs number of matches played in my tf2 career
- Total amount of money I have spent on tf2 community events
- Number of women I've had sex with in my life
- How attractive I am to both opposite and same sex relative to the rest of the community

until these functions are added to tftv+ I see no reason to collaborate with $5 dollars a month, it's just too steep compared to some other sites I don't use or care about.

when you stumble onto a stream and someone has a subscribe or donation link, do you give them a hard time too?

no one is twisting your arm here, relax chief

Twitch TV's subscription model has plenty of justifiable critics too.

what about gold black gradients

lets be honest, the only reason people tried to get good was for those blue names

Watch the number of invite players drop

would be willing 2 pay 10$ a mo if i had rainbow name + forum badges n shit, no lie

8.95 /mo for just rainbow name

NOBODY GETS PURPLE.

Criticizing the cost of something that is completely optional and doesn't hinder the functionality of the site is a joke. I have and will continue to support TF2 as much as possible. If $5 a month helps that cause, good.

Invite level donator strats

can i pls have a twitch hoodie

No

edit: oops.

I wish I could use money on the internet

doesn't seem worth it for 5$ a month, based on what features you receive