IMPORTANT: New Forum Alerts System

[EEVblog]

I was going to post this elsewhere but because it may be related to the recent events I figured it probably belongs here.

Since the restart the first dozen or so entries in the who's online list display as "Unknown Action", this was not the case prior and neither were the clash of time stamps, previously it was very rare to see coincidental time stamp entries.

I can jump on another computer and post an image capture if required, here is a link below but be sure to select members only in the show box on the right hand side.
 
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/who/

Yes, I see it. It only displays that for known users, not for the guests. 

[bitseeker]

Thanks Gnif, uninstalled, no point trying to polish a turd.
It seems that every plugin (and SMF itself) seems to have been written "poorly"!

Yeah, many moons ago, I adopted an SMF-based forum for a time and had to take care of issues with it. It is an adventure.

[bitseeker]

For open source and zero cost SMF is still hard to go past. Add ons and hard coded mods always need to be considered a weak point in particular when a version change in imminent.

I have seen some commercial forum abominations too. Limited/no upgrade options due to the code being closed source unless you shell out more $ for 'enhanced functionality'.

Either way it is still Dave's bottom line and since the server change the forum has been running pretty smoothly from the front end at least. 

Yep, EEVblog is not exactly a small forum. SMF has its issues, but it's been running pretty well.

[Dundarave]

Re: plugins for the site, as you've found with the Alerts plugin, sometimes make "novel" use of the database, as in making queries that the initial DB installation config never took into consideration.

In this case, I would speculate that the plugin was probably making full table scans for one or more reads or updates/inserts, which resulted in bringing the site to its knees.  I'm willing to wager that a few well-placed table indexes would have resolved the issue.

Not that I'm keen on the Alerts plugin anyway, but eventually you'll add some other plugin to increase the site's utility, and when you do, testing out the queries it creates and adding indexes as appropriate would be a prudent thing to do.