As many are no doubt well-aware, the Young Writers Society appears to be suffering from some database malfunctions as of late. In fact, it seems to be happening at least twice every day.
Fortunately, I do know what's causing the problems; it's just going to take a while to fix. In the short-term, what I'll need to do is completely re-design the front page. All those blocks (e.g., "Recent posts," "Recommended for you," "Leaderboards") require a lot of resources for the server to calculate owing to the huge size of the database (it's now more than six gigabytes in size). Getting rid of those blocks should keep things moving, which means the front page will become greatly simplified.
In the long-term, I'll need to do a total site overhaul, which is not going to be easy. I was already planning on starting it come 2012, but I guess I'll just move it up to December.
At any rate, please expect the problems to continue for at least another week. I'm going to a conference and doing a fair amount of traveling this week so I just don't have the time to deal with it.
