First thing first. We've been having some load issues with the server and I've been trying to track down the root cause. I'm pretty sure the culprit lies in some buggy scripts that people have written that are inadvertently pounding the server with mass requests.
That being said, I've been going through the logs and have blocked some of the worst offenders over-querying the XML. If you have been blocked, but you feel your usage is legitimate, then please email me and we can work things out to figure out what needs to be done.
I have NOT gone through the regular page logs yet, I'm sure there could be some people querying regular pages and parsing that data. If you are one of those people I would HIGHLY recommend you check your scripts to make sure they aren't doing anything crazy.
Second, I'm *finally* going to be changing the color levels. I know it's been a long time coming, but as we all know with processing power increasing, so does the points. Hopefully one day this week I will be able to make the change and see how the new numbers pan out.
Third, in case you didn't notice, we have a database with well over 1.1 BILLION rows of data! What I'm planning on doing is making a complete backup (safety first), then pruning out a BUNCH of the old data. First I'm going to try and simply remove old rows where a person's points did not change, simply their rank (i.e. inactive users moving down the list). Past that I will be pruning out data to keep a maximum of one record per-day per person (i.e. reducing potentially from 8 records a day to 1). Finally, if the table is still too crazy big I'll probably just lop off the oldest data first until I can get it back down to something manageable. Realistically you shouldn't notice any change in numbers on the pages.
I'm sure I'm forgetting something else, if I remember what it is I'll be sure to make another post.
