This probably won't affect most of us because most of us are logged in while reading other people's diaries - but if you're not logged in, you will no longer see the entry navigation bar ( the icons which allow you to choose the diarists first, last, previous, next and a random entry ) which can be found at the bottom of an entry.
Those of you who were here when this feature was introduced may remember it slowed the site down considerably when first introduced and I had to find a way to improve the database query to make it even remotely bearable. And the change I made was bearable on average, until fairly recently.
Recently though, Google and a few other search engines appear to have taken an interest in DearDiary.Net again - this is in itself excellent news because we rely on being found on search engines and recent Google changes (I say recent, pretty much the late part of 2023 was when much of Google's changes were implemented) meant that we really didn't feature at all.
By taking an interest I mean their web spider or crawler has started crawling our public diaries quite voraciously. Again, a good thing. Except that query which runs a little on the slow side runs REALLY slowly when being spidered hard. And the more pages that are trying to be loaded concurrently, the harder the database has to work to service them. And the slower it goes.
This leads to a cascading failure which the server and the server software have handled relatively gracefully but the load on the server has become significant - slowing it down for everyone.
Thus, the navigation bars are removed for users who are NOT logged in. None of the spiders will ever be logged in, so their traffic will never see the navigation bars and the database query will never be run for them.
Reduced load from spiders means more horsepower available for logged in users. Happy days.
This may reduce the surface area that the spiders can use to find new posts but I suspect they'll find other ways to find your public entries 😀
Any issues, please let me know as always!
Steve.