If I still use new replies in the meantime, does that have a huge effect on the forum breaking?
No one raindrop believes it caused the flood.
The fact that you (and others) are trying is very good. Notify simply uses less database resources than Show New Replies, and it resolves and even provides a feature long sought after by many - the ability to un-follow after posting. On one hand, yours is a small part... ultimately, it's in your hands to decide how much you desire to contribute. I still use Show New Replies myself on occasion, partially out of habit, partially because we really need a top-level link to Notify... but I too am adapting and trying to reduce unnecessary server load. It's a process, and it's a good change to make no matter how well or poorly running the forums are at any one point in time.
I won't deny that there's far heavier hanging things that could do far greater benefit to the forum's database performance, but most of those things require us calling on the moderators to do now, making their jobs harder short term, as opposed to doing ourselves. We can't lock our own threads anymore to make it easier to transition to new ones (and I remember why, too, because it was a change that flummoxed my ability to update the Guide on my own and eventually stopped trying). We can't split long threads into shorter ones. We can't purge dead accounts that are racking up huge database entries of a never-ending slew of new "unread posts", or trim the "unread post" database size on long-long idle accounts. We can't consolidate down the board count, either. (And there is
some consolidation that might be worth doing if we actually think long and hard about it, such as ask and share as there's a lot of overlap. I also found it odd that it seemed like the journals were originally
intended for case studies and progress given its descriptor, which was one of the reasons why it wasn't
publicly visible without an account given it dealt with more sensitive financial data points, but then the journals morphed into what it did and a
new board for case studies was added later on and left publicly readable. ¯\(°_o)/¯ )
It was never my intent for people to bail out of the journals and just give up. I'd seen so many journals "rebooted", what's the difference if it's done at 1500, 2000, or 5000 posts? The dialogue continues. The shorter lengths simply hammer the database less to pull up. My intent with my initial post was to get
everyone's attention for the sake of realizing we were
all contributing to the problem (even me). My biggest regret now was not also rapping the board against "infinite horse-beatings over long-dead topics" in the litany of over-the-top, attention-grabbing phrases to perhaps take a bit of the sting out of the Journal check. For that, I do apologize. But I also want to remind that I never
once name-checked any specific person, nor did I have any specific people in mind. Please remember that.
That's still something we can collectively choose to at least try to do on our own, though. We don't have to keep posting in the same thread, whether it's locked or not. We can start new ones and ask to move discussion to them, and we can ask the mods to lock the old ones at their leisure. I did it myself with the guide discussion thread, trying to live the example. Baby steps though, and transitioning the most active users from Show New Replies (with or without PTF) to Notify is an excellent start.
That said...
(And yes, I am starting to text and email more and more forum friends since you've told us that we could be ruining it by talking too much)
Try not to frame it from a "ruining it by talking too much" angle so much as just
being more conscientious of what we're all posting and actually contributing. Slow the roll just a bit, that's all, and maybe consider that a subforum that isn't publicly searchable but still publicly accessible with an account may not be as private as it sometimes gets treated. However, it actually brings joy to my heart to read that part I bolded. Texting and emailing your friends and taking the relationship more out of the forums and into real life is a great thing! I am
genuinely happy for you and others.
Right tool for the job and whatnot. :)