An issue that has troubled us for awhile has involved the fact that when the server hosting Westeros.org-proper is down, this can lead to the server hosting the forums to act this is very slowly. This is due to the fact that some of the sidebar content—the latest news and the recommendations—is pulled from Westeros.org, and the attempt to complete the loading stops up the rest of the board until the connection finally times out. Previously, when this happened, we had to manually turn off the calls for the news and recommendations so that the rest of the board would act normally. Of course, this depended on our being aware of the problem and available.
After learning some elementary but new to us PHP, we believe we’ve worked out a way to prevent this from happening from now on. It may cause very minor delays in those cases where Westeros.org is out, but we’re talking a couple of seconds rather than minutes, so it’s a definite improvement.