RootsChat Performance: how can we help ?

[loo]

Good suggestions, Julian.
I was afraid I might lose the "new replies to your posts" if I shut everything off.  Without that, there'd be no hope for keeping track of anything!

[Brambletye]

Just a thought - is there any way of getting a more specific search on RootsChat? I transcribed a 17th century Will for someone today, I found her posts by accident in the Common Room - afterwards, I thought my ability to read cruddy old handwriting might be of use to others, but it's no use my searching the site for "Will" to see who needs it - it's going to take all night! as it will find every instance of William on the entire site, and as we all know, most of us have more Williams in our family tree than we could shake a stick at...

...how about being able to search for whole word or part of a word? that would cut out the William factor - and a boolean search would be even better, so we could exclude terms as well.

How about it, guys - any chance?

[Lones]

Hi Brambletye 

You could post an offer in the common room, then people who need your assistance could contact you.  It might be easier and give more people a chance to see your offer  .  Just a thought 

Cheers

Lones

[Brambletye]

Good idea, Lones, I can offer my services that way - but if I wanted to do a search on my own account, for, say, Dorset and Will, or Kent and Will, to see if anyone has any old Dorset or Kent Wills that might help me, if the owner has not yet transcribed them to extract any names of possible use or has examined them and found them not worth posting a full transcript, I'm stuck unless I can track them down - and I'm still going to get all the men in Dorset or Kent called William, and all the people with the surname Dorset or Kent on their tree with a William in the family...

[Tony Payne]

Some good ideas - we all get a bit complacent these days if we have broadband, forgetting the diminishing number who still don't.  And it's a combination of your internet connection as well as the load on the RC servers of course that slows things down.

Maybe we should post (or already have) ways to decrease the size of a picture/avatar.  That will help a bit.

Definitely I found the email notification just annoying.  Either you get nothing or on a busy thread you just keep getting 1 message after another.  It's so easy to just log in and see if you have new responses to your threads or new PM's - like others have mentioned.

I don't think there is a single solution for speeding things up - it's very much as Berlin Bob said a matter of etiquette that we all should stick to.  But etiquette is only ok for the more experienced user - like everything else, it take time to learn.

Hopefully things settle down again...  It's fine right now...  Just perfick..

[Berlin-Bob]

Hi

the "search" facility on RootsChat is not the best,
and this is one reason why I started the "RootsChat Topics: ......" Series,
and later, the RootsChat Lexicon.

The thought was, that many people have similar queries, so if we gather together links to the most informative postings on any subject, then members can look here first, thereby cutting down the load on the "Search RootsChat" routine, which is very resource hungry.


I've now moved the lexicon and the "*** A Catalogue of RootsChat Topics ***" to
http://surname.rootschat.com/lexicon/index.php
to make them easier to use.

If you have any ideas, how to improve these, there is a link for suggestions on the lexicon 'home-page'. 

Bob