Friends list/Search Function

[Belisarius09]

I've been away fro some time but have now returned.  This look different, I could use some help navigating the site. 

 

What happened to my friends list? I can't seem to find it. Was it removed?

 

Also where is the search function?  Was that removed?

[CaulShivers]

Indeed, I would like to have these questions answered too.

[Sparks]

Ran posted in the announcements thread about this, but the short form is that anything powered by the underlying search tables (search itself, obviously, but also a number of other features) puts a far heavier load on the forum than just reading/posting does.  To use an analogy, it's the difference between going for a jog in running shorts and a tank-top, versus going for a jog in full plate armor while dragging a cart behind you as if you were a horse.  Those functions are the armor and cart.

The forum software has performance modes you can enable—disabling a lot of features—if the forum is seeing high traffic.  Since the HBO seasons are airing and we're seeing traffic levels among the highest Westeros has ever seen, Ran turned those on for now, which disabled pretty much any feature you're abruptly missing.  The features will be re-enabled post-season when performance mode gets kicked off.

We are going to move the forum to a dedicated machine, per my post in the announcements forum, and we'll examine whether that gives us enough leeway to turn the features back on.  But we're seeing traffic among the highest levels Westeros.org has ever seen right now, so it may prove to make more sense to keep the forum in performance mode, even on a separate machine.

[Rhaenys_Targaryen]

On 4-5-2016 at 0:31 PM, Belisarius09 said:

What happened to my friends list? I can't seem to find it. Was it removed?

That is indeed gone. Instead, there's now an option to subscribe to users instead (which has a somewhat different function).