PFD Forums, R.I.P
November 9, 2009 by Food Dude
closeAuthor: Food Dude
Name: Food Dude
Email: pdxfooddude@gmail.com
Site:
About: I am passionate about food, passionate about wine, and passionate about anonymity. I have a wide-range of food experience from my earliest years growing up in a food-obsessed family. During college, I worked in the restaurant industry on both sides of the house, later in the wine industry, and finally traveling/tasting my way around the world. My first few years in college were related to agriculture, so if necessary, I can prune your orchard, manage your vineyards, or back your baler through one side of a barn and out the other, without any problem. This site is a labor of love – I spend my own money reviewing restaurants because I am passionate about food and want to share my experiences with others. Whether you agree or disagree, you can always count on my unbiased opinion. I don't take free meals, and the restaurants don't know when, or if, I am coming.See Authors Posts (518)
Filed under News/Discussion
Lots of emails today wondering what happened to the forums. Short story, my health is an issue, so I haven’t felt up to promoting them, they only average about 1,000 reads a day, and they were an additional load on my server. Compared to the main site, they weren’t worth the trouble. There are to many other good options out there for food discussion. However, I kept all the data, just in case.
As I’ve said before, even though I’ve moved to a dedicated server, there are times it struggles under the load, especially when folks get to work, and then during lunch. I’ll be making a few changes this winter to the structure of the site and how it works behind the scenes, but I’ll also be posting little news bits in separate articles. This will result in less people all clicking on the same story at once (plus I like it better that way).
FD – are you running wp-cache?
Oh yes, with all the cache options. The problem is the cpu load surges to over 2, because people get a few errors, then they refresh, other people start getting errors, and the whole house comes tumbling down.
Now then, where’s my duct tape.
FD I’m sorry to hear about your health. You perform an important service with this site. I, for one, am sorry to see the forums die. Sometimes there are burning, not burnt, food questions to be asked, restaurants to share and comment on and others to help. Just won’t be the same without the forums. However PFD remains my favorite site for discussions about food, restaurants, etc…
Any recommendations on Portland food forums to start visiting?
Seems forum traffic overall on the three main Portland sites I go to (here, portlandfood.org, and Chowhound) has been very low the last few months.
I actually find myself visiting Yelp quite a bit lately, for making decisions like “never been to Du Kuh Bee or Nakwon, which one should I try first?” or “don’t feel like dealing with the Wong’s King crowds, what are people saying about Legin dim sum lately?”.