Abandoning the Social Network and Q&A Idea
A few weeks ago, I added some social network functionality (Buddypress) to my site as well as a Question and Answer module. You can read about the features here. Unfortunately, the social network plugin added about 5 seconds of load time to my site, and despite my attempts to speed it up, Buddypress is just slow. Caching plugins seem to pose problems with Buddypress, too.
The Q&A plugin required user registration to work well (registration was needed to assign points to users and to attribute posts to users). Unfortunately, opening up user registration made my site vulnerable to sploggers (spam registrants), and although plugins cut down on this, the Q&A plugin proved to be quirky anyway.
I decided to lighten the load and return to the basics. My loading speed is more normal, though my host (Bluehost) likes to throttle the speed occasionally, and I'm not convinced the budget hosting provides good server performance.
Anyway, thanks for participating in the social network and Q&A experiment. You don't have to log into the site any more to comment.
About Tom Johnson
I'm an API technical writer based in the Seattle area. On this blog, I write about topics related to technical writing and communication — such as software documentation, API documentation, AI, information architecture, content strategy, writing processes, plain language, tech comm careers, and more. Check out my API documentation course if you're looking for more info about documenting APIs. Or see my posts on AI and AI course section for more on the latest in AI and tech comm.
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