A little about MLS..

During my teenage years and early 20's, my hobby was computers. I messed around building PCs and playing games for hours. As I started getting into computers for work, their fun factor started diminishing. I'd sit in front of a computer all day for work, then I'd come home and sit in front of the computer all night. I decided that I needed to find another hobby. I'd received a train set as a boy and loved it. I played with it non stop. I found that I still had an interest in model trains. For some reason this time however, I was drawn to G Scale, or Large Scale trains.

I started frequenting an online forum about large scale trains. In June of 2000, that forum unexpectedly shut down leaving about 1000 of us stranded without a place to shoot the breeze. At the time I had just started working for Ikano and had the ability to quickly throw something together. I found some forum software, put it up and sent some emails to my buddies letting them know of the url. Word quickly spread. 7 years later we have around 6,000 registered users, with about the same number who visit regularly and never register. It's grown from being a forum only to an online magazine with articles, contests, polls, classifieds, and more. We're the largest, most popular web site on the internet about G scale trains and small scale live steam.

myLargescale.com (from here on known as MLS) started using the classic ASP based Snitz forums. As the membership grew and wanted more features, I developed additional functionality and connected it to the forum database tables. Here's a run down of all applications that I either custom wrote or adapted to use my hacked Snitz forum.

• Membership Model (Paid members see less ads, get web space for photos, an email address on my server, paid only content, etc.)
  
• Chat
• Forums (Of course)
• Classifieds
• Vendor Listings
• Logo Shop (cafe press links, depending on membership level send you do different shops with different prices.)
• Photo contest
• FAQs
  
• Webring
• Banner advertising (Regular banners and forum sponsorship)
• Others I am sure I'm forgetting

After countless hours of development, I had a great site going. The members who come and participate in the forum are amazing. They are really the reason for the success of the site.

As the site has grown, some problems inherent in the system have become very obvious. The first problem to really get noticed was my article/content delivery. When I wanted to post an article, the author would send me a Word document. I would spend 40 to 60 hours copying and pasting, reformatting and splitting up the article and fitting it into my template. A 40 page article took me almost a month to convert. I needed some sort of content management system. Most of the commercial systems were way too expensive for a hobby site, and there weren't a lot of open source solutions that really fit the bill. I actually drew up plans for and started to code my own system, another hack at the tired Snitz database.

Another problem has been user management. My custom solution got developed enough to get the users taken care of, but I never really finished the admin piece. To this day, I am still firing up Query analyzer and updating the database directly for a lot of the functions I do on a regular basis. Not very efficient.

Next, is performance. This has really become an issue over the past 12 months. MLS is running on 8 year old hardware. It's a dual PIII 833 mhz with 2Gb of RAM. OS is Windows 2000 Server with MSSQL 7.0 running as the database. It's redundant hardware with 4 disks in a RAID 10 configuration. The Snitz code isn't necessarily the most efficient, and the database has grown to about 600 mb. Not large by many standards, but for an internet forum, it's pretty big. The slowness is most noticeable when someone searches the forum. It'll bring the website to a crawl and the server to its knees.