Inefficient websites suck!

I ran into this Danluu blog post the other day, and found it fascinating. He performed a set of benchmark tests on all the major forum software, and then discussed the modern trends of inefficiency as well as how the entitled attitudes of developers contribute to it. Everything in the post is pretty much spot on, from my own experiences.

What really satisfied me was seeing the actual benchmark results (just a bit of scrolling down the page) and discovering that MyBB, the forum software Inyouchuuverse is built on, is one of the most efficient services out there for devices to connect to, even older ones. The one real downside to it is that it doesn't serve up a mobile layout for phone users, something the search engines wouldn't like about us.

That said, the fact that MyBB is open source means that if it doesn't do I want, I can just take a page from Lord Nightmare's playbook and rip out part of it and replace it with bits that work the way I want them to. With all the source code out there for reference, I can't imagine it would be too difficult to put together a mobile layout that could be served to users connecting from a phone. For that matter, there's a "MyBB Mobile" framework that allows the easy creation of a connected app with notifications and everything. Admittedly, though, that's a big project for a small community, so I'm not sure I'll be going that far.

Now, if that link looks a little bland, that's intentional. The creator decided to strip out pretty much all the CSS after discovering a bunch of inefficiencies in Octopress, the blog platform he was using. The page is a bit hard to read at first, but after I'd read through a few screens of it, it all just started to feel right. I don't foresee our site turning into "default 90s style" if you will, but there's a lot of food for thought in there as to what should really matter when presenting information online. Honestly, it gives me a ton of ideas on efficient designs, and now that I'm rediscovering web programming, there's no telling what will come of all this.

That last link included a very interesting resource, webpagetest.org, which connects to a website and breaks down every connection and every bottleneck. So, of course, I turned it loose on Inyouchuuverse.

Based on the knowledge that MyBB is pretty darn efficient, I wasn't too surprised with these results. Indeed, the entire page loads in about half a second. One thing I did find interesting was that the biggest resource drain was, of all possible things, the logo in the top left (1/10 second to download), with some jquery taking up a close second. I will admit there's a part of me that wants to swap out that PNG for the original SVG source, although at this point I doubt this forum could load much faster than it already does. Which makes me happy!

Well, I joined Bluesky a while back because it looked like a promising alternative to that one social media service that's now run by people with immensely hateful worldviews in pretty much every way. Unfortunately, it seems you trade one problem for another - because bsky is now seeing increasingly broken functionality. The Discover page dies with a permissions error, my avatar doesn't show up on the sidebar, and perhaps most amusingly, I get an error trying to view the comments on their official post that announces they're having technical issues.

Poorly and/or hastily designed web sites certainly grind my gears as you can tell from the first post. But the consensus among bsky users right now seems to be that the problems stem from the "developers" implementing software functions using AI generators, or "vibe coding" as the world seems to love calling it. Or, in other words, begging a friendly-sounding computer interface to write code for them, which they don't understand because it's either nonsensical and/or they never knew how to code in the first place, and then throwing it onto the production database and hoping for the best. It remains to be seen whether the management realizes how stupid this is.

Anyway, I suppose this makes for a good reminder that your webmaster here at Inyouchuuverse hates generative AI in pretty much any form. I'll be working on this site a lot more after my conventions are over in early May, hopefully getting some new features and aesthetics going, and rest assured that AI will not be involved in any part of it.

EDITED: Service has been restored and the issue is being reported as a DDOS attack. It's certainly not a good look when they brag about developing with AI and then have tons of technical problems for a month, but I will still take care to avoid spreading misinformation. Assuming that was in fact the cause.

In other news, as of slightly renaming this post to make it fit in the little last-post-preview column on the home page, I discovered a stupid thing where the exclamation point at the end is getting cut off for being too long, and thus replaced - by a three-dot ellipsis. Which takes up MORE space.

I don't know if I'll be using that function with the new theme or not, but if so, that's stupid and I will fix that.