intfiction.org

Peter, my impression is that Thanksgiving is more family-oriented, and New Year's Eve is more friends(/significant other)-oriented.

I'll buy that.

Also, New Year's may be supposed to be more prospective as well as retrospective -- you make New Year's Resolutions, ring in the new year, and ring out the old -- while Thanksgiving is perhaps more present-oriented, or not future-oriented in any case -- you give thanks for what you have now.

In practice, Thanksgiving is a time when you make truly nightmarish journeys on airplanes, get together with your family, eat a large meal in the late afternoon/early evening, and then fall asleep, while New Year's Eve is a time when you get together with a bunch of people in your city or the one you went to for your winter vacation, stay up late, drink a lot, and kiss someone at the stroke of midnight.* That is to say, what tove said.

*As ever, your mileage may vary (I don't do that kind of New Years' Eve now that I have small children.)

On a subject totally unrelated to this topic, has anyone figured out why the search feature sometimes doesn't work?

It's been a while since I hosted a phpbb board or even thought about the internals, but the occasional "can't search" situation is likely due to the site re-indexing its search term database. It has to do this regularly to avoid searches destroying system performance.

If it isn't, it's probably doing some other kind of background maintenance that impacts search. Hard to say without seeing any details.

I'm getting the "you cannot use search at this time" message all the time now. The site seems a bit sluggish overall as well, it takes a couple of seconds for any page to load.

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Vorple UI library — Beta testing site — Blog

Ditto here.

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Glimmr: Advanced Graphics for I7
blog | download | bug-tracker

And here. It is now more common to be unable to use search than to be able to use it.

This is getting out of hand. I think the problem is load on the server. phpBB checks the average load in the last 1 minute. If it's too high, search is disabled. This is configurable.

But it might indicate a non-forum related problem on the server running the forum. Someone should check what's going on there. Could be some process being stuck and using all available CPU.

The high quantity of on line users tends to be around the IF Comp Season, so it could just be that a lot of users keep up to date with the comp.



But then we'd all want more!

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"Will you stop breaking the fourth wall? It's costing me an absolute fortune to replace it!"