Forum Backend update
Hey guys!
After some performance issues we've been having on the forums during peak hours, I made some changes to the backend of the forums for, hopefully, smoother performance and more reliable behavior. Now the forums is using some features of Cloudflare. Specifically, the forums are now better cached, better load balanced, search engine bots are more carefully managed, and there is additional protection against performance drops due to malicious users. According to Cloudflare's benchmarks, the forums should be somewhere around 20% faster on most pages and around 50% faster on pages that rarely change (like the activity log, contact page, etc).
There was also some changes and optimizations made behind the scenes on the server itself, but those changes were pretty minor and mainly relating to security and search engine bot optimization.
Hopefully all of these changes will make the forums faster, easier to use, and overall better for everyone. If you have any issues or anything, please let us know! Thanks! :smile:
