Closing of 'too large' topics.

[RearEndCollision]

First, and foremost, I am not attacking the method of doing this, nor the rationale behind it. My only real question is focused towards the actual good it's doing with the way it's currently working.

 

From what I understand, when the topic gets too large, it takes so much to keep it up and running and seemingly makes mini black-holes of network space; which of course leads to more and more of the annoying "500" messages.

 

So, the real question is don't the topics in question, mostly in the PGC, still suck the network space and whatnot even though they are locked? Sure, no new posts can be made, bu all the ones that did are still there and the entire topic is still being housed in the network.

 

I could be wrong about the details of this, and why we close the topics, and if so then disregard this as a misinterpreted thought process. If it is the case as I am thinking, or close to it, why not just delete the said topics so that they aren't even taking up the space anymore? For the PGC in particular, I think it'd be best to give say a ten day warning of the topic locking and a twenty day warning of deletion; this would allow leaders to transfer and save all needed data and from there to just let the soon to be old topic just sail away.

 

The only I can think of that would actually be lost in this process is posts that count towards post counts, but that doesn't mean anything in reality.

 

Any thoughts?

[Luke]

The issue is the people viewing the topics, larger topics put more load on the server when they're viewed - now admittedly locked topics still get viewed, but not once they slip onto the second page etc, it certainly reduces it fairly quickly. The problem isn't to do with the space it's occupying, it's to do with the activities carried out by the server when it serves up these larger topics. Like with most of the problems here on GTANet it falls down to the sh*tty coding of IPB, the inefficient hacks and stuff we're using and the lack of a millionaire funding the network or google donating a server farm.