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Site Administration DataThe site is continually growing - and sometimes, shrinking. Unfortunately, the latter presents rather serious problems. Yeah, a little less traffic on most sites won't kill it - but on this site it could be fatal. (As for problems with more members, well, I'll get to that later.)Imagine you are a 25-year-old college student in the year 1985. You just graduated as an avid computer technician, and are very interested in the newly-created thing called the "Internet". You read about things called Domain Names, and are one of the first 250 people to register a name. What name do you register? Business.com, Game.com, or even Pets.com. Perhaps, Computer.com even? And by freak chance - Finance.com or Law.com. You like your Business.com, even though you paid $15.25 as an annual registration fee - actually you registered it for TWO years because you have great faith in the new Internet. Now buzz back to reality. You are now reading this article, and know that SOME member here owns Business.com, Game.com, Law.com, etc. And indeed they are taken. These were among the first 100 names registered on the game, and most of the first 50 members or so are INACTIVE. To a different, more popular site, this hardly matters. The problem is, that on this site, if a member becomes inactive, and NEVER visits the site again, over a 2 or 3 year time span, the member's funds would eventually run dry of auto-renewal fees. But this is too long - suppose somebody sent you a NICE offer for one of your names, one that was NOT rejectable. It was too good. You missed out, and the economy suffered. This is the problem at VirtualDN. How do we solve it? We've implemented a few new, automated features that deal with this. First, each member must update his/her email address once per month. If it changes, you will be required to choose a new one within 2 weeks or so or your account is de-activated and your domains dropped. Your account will be deleted. This is necessary for the next few procedures. If any member's account goes inactive for 3 weeks (21 days), a top-priority email is sent to the user's email address on file. If the user fails to login again within another week, the account is deleted, domains dropped, and all your efforts, however hard they may have been, will be lost. Also, changing your email address in your control panel requires another activation before you login again. Then there's the problem of getting TOO many members TOO quickly. This hasn't happened yet, and we hope it doesn't, but here's what could go wrong... If, in just one day, 100 people register and become active, over 400 or 500 domains could be registered that day. It would be IMPOSSIBLE to moderate all those domains, the forums, and the bandwidth. The computer automatically organizes members by their activity - less active ones are set on a lower priority as for accessing the server upon login, which can only be changed by activity. This is because bandwidth is limited. Back to Articles Index |
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