Actually, although some sites use other means of flood control as well, most forums do have active posting limits. They generally are set somewhere between 15 to 60 seconds with the average running around 30 seconds unless higher settings are needed to help prevent flooding. 30 seconds is our normal setting but I had to increase it during the playoffs in order to help our server cope with tremendously high loads we were seeing on CelticsBlog.
Please try to understand what I'm saying? The 90 second posting limit is not a bug. It is a setting that is not going to be changed during the playoffs and especially not during games. It is only imposed in the hopes that it will help our web server not be knocked offline or damaged due to excessively high server loads during peak activity periods.
Do you know what I mean by 'excessively high server loads'? I mean people go nuts over here before, during and after the playoff games and anytime during the playoffs when some breaking news about something comes out. They start posting frantically and refreshing their browser pages every couple of seconds to see if something new has been posted or something else has changed. As a result, our server starts slowing down due to the heavy load it is coming under. When the site starts slowing down, those same frantic people start clicking on things around here even faster and harder out of frustration. Of course, that makes the problem even worse by literally sending over 1,000,000 MySQL database queries per minute to our server for processing.
Our server can't handle that kind of load. We ask people over and over and over to PLEASE slow down during these very busy times and wait at least one minute between pages refreshes and posting but some fail to listen or try to help out the situation at all. Because of that, I had no choice but to increase the time required between user actions in the forums. By no means is that setting enough to insure that we won't end up offline, it is just one thing that can help prevent that to some degree.
I've watched our server loads during peak periods in recent weeks and have come very close a few times to shutting the website down manually for awhile before we ended up with server and/or site damage. Better that than no CelticsBlog at all, right? Which would you rather have, a 90 second posting limit or no CelticsBlog -- because that's at the heart of what we are talking about. So, is it understood yet that the 90 second posting limit is simply a current necessity we have here that will be changed back in the off-season to what we normally use or do I need to explain this further? I'll try if need be.