Hi, this is Nate from the Internet Brands tech team. I guess there are a couple of issues in this thread to address.

First, the issue of the popup ads -- those ads were being run by an ad network that we're trying out on the site, and we explicitly told them not to run popup ads here even before we let them start serving ads onto the site. I've seen them myself, we've let them know to take them down, and they claim that they have taken them down. If they continue to show up, go ahead and post here to let me know, because we really don't want them on any of our sites.

Second, the server migration -- DVDTalk.com is now on Internet Brands servers (which it darned well should be after all the time "in the shop" this afternoon/evening). There are still a couple of bugs (mostly related to DNS), but hopefully things will ultimately be a bit quicker.

Honestly, I'm not sure that this move is going to totally fix the locking up issue -- the basic problem that we're running into is that when vBulletin forums accumulate a certain number of posts, members, visits, etc., the search feature has too much information to read to happen very quickly, and it ends up hurting performance for people that are doing regular forum activities like reading threads, submitting posts, etc. Think of it kind like standing in line at a cafeteria (imperfect-but-useful analogy alert) -- most people going through the line pick one or two things, and the line moves really quickly. But then someone comes through that wants to look at the nutritional info for each type of food, smells it, tests the texture, and just generally takes forever. He's just one guy, and he can only take up so much space at a time, but the line behind him is still going to stall. And eventually there are going to be people that get sick of waiting and leave the line altogether (i.e. posts that fail, etc.).

A couple of our developers at Internet Brands have put together a pretty sweet search system for vBulletin forums that doesn't put any load on the regular database (so it fixes a lot of performance/locking issues), and at some point we're probably going to deploy it on the DVD Talk forums too. It returns results really quickly (even on really large forums), it has some cool features (like term boosting, which basically lets you say which words in your search query are most important), and uses a search interface that's a lot like the standard vBulletin interface. It keeps about 95% of the search features of the current vBulletin search too -- most users won't even notice the difference from the standard search except that it'll be faster for them. However, some people that do a lot of complex searching will miss a couple features of the old vBulletin search. We're working on a release that takes care of some of these advanced users' concerns, and we'll roll it out here as soon we're comfortable that these new features (actually, just re-implementations of current features) are working okay and aren't breaking anything that currently works fine.

This post got a little long-winded, I guess, but I hope it gives you some insight into what we have going on here.

I got this big popup that said "DVDtalk is moving". Damn ads!

Thanks for the info Nate!

If you do anything to the search to improve it, you will be loved by many. The current search is really pathetic. You can't make it any worse, so don't hesitate to give it a try. Perhaps a 'beta search' link or something.

Anyway, it's good to see the new ownership represent.

Sure, trust a "new member" Next thing you know he'll try to get to buy a bootleg dvd from a google ad.


Glad to see the popups, etc. were a mistake. Old timers like me fear change.

Thanks Nate.

i haven't seen this... not once...

Thanks for the update ibtravel. I have not seen a pop-up over the past 24 hrs, so that's awesome.

Is anyone else having weirdness with the icons? They're all showing up as rex Xs for me.

Same with me Kittydreamer

Ditto to the missing icons...

Ditto to the ditto.

Same here. That's why I came to this forum for the first time in my DVDTalk life

I see what's happening with the icons. It should be fixed in a few minutes.

I keep hearing a door closing...

This may be something similar or it might just be me. I recall seeing some banner ads - normally on dvdtalk's homepage over the last few weeks for Pinecone Research etc . Now I never clicked on them or anything and I don't recall seeing anything specific here, but on a few other sites I've gone to after this - or really just one site (www.twitchfilm.net) - which I've never actually seen listing the "banner ads" for this company - when I try to follow direct links in that site, I get hijacked by an apparent empty space listed as pinecone research and have to basically go back and then refresh to make it disappear.

I'd say I get that phantom pop-up about 33% of the time when I click a link to a new page on their site - but I've never seen the banner there. Someone else at the forums there suggested that it might have been a hijacker program (or maybe a trojan horse) from another site - but this is the only one I can recall seeing those ads at. Has anyone else had any issues with similar links? Has anyone else been seeing those banners here as well?

thanks.