FYI -- you might notice some missing PMs.

I've had people freak out about this before, which is why I decided to announce it this time.

Remember: it's only a few missing PMs for you, so for those who think their little world is much bigger than it is (don't worry -- you're not alone. Such a tendency is very human and understandable), you might picture something like me logging in to your account to delete them individually.

But that's not how I do it. There are thousands of PMs (all less than 6 months old!), and I delete the oldest of them with one simple command:

DELETE FROM `mb_pmsystem` WHERE pm_id < 81000

If your PM was older than record #81000, it got cut this time around. The oldest record is now from December 20, 2013. There are now just 800+ PMs in the database, all less than 17 days old!

I do this to keep things humming along smoothly on CI, as far as database performance. As I've said before, I can't afford to be your Gmail. Google has much more money and resources than I do. They can afford to let you archive your digital life on their server. I can't.

If you receive something awesome in the PM system, you should save it off to a text file, word docuмent, or print it out.


I also cleared out some log files, Likes/Dislikes, etc. but I never touch topics or posts. Those are what I *do* want to keep. Thus you find CI posts going back to 2006.

So you should notice that your # of "likers" and "critics" have gone down as well.

.

So does this mean that if we keep track of old posts that we really like a lot, then every time you 'trim' the database again and again and again, we can go back to those old posts and "like" them all over again, and again, and again.................?

.

Actually, you're right.

You can always go back and "like" posts from 2011 or any time in the past if you really like someone.

You have to really dig though. There are still 15,000 likes in the database right now. That takes things back several months -- so you'd have to find posts older than that.

The thing is, the system will cut you off if you end up being more than 15% of someone's likes, or 18% of someone's dislikes.

That prevents "cheerleaders" and "mortal enemies" from exerting too much influence.