Various forum issues: Signatures, Board Index, ...

[jacob]

Bluehost suspended the site without warning at midnight because some of the databases had grown too big.

The database related to the search function was the biggest problem and when I switched that off, active topics went away as well. I'm trying to figure how to recover the active topics, etc. functionality w/o blowing up the database again.

Also, it's no longer possible to comment on the blog (the 20000 spam comments that arrive weekly was the second biggest problem). No big loss there though. That had been coming for a long time.

[Tyler9000]

Seems to work now. Thanks, Jacob!

[jacob]

Might be temporary.

[jacob]

I find google to more useful for searches ... the built in version returns too much.

Including site:forum.earlyretirementextreme.com as a search term limits google returns to the forums only.

[Spartan_Warrior]

As a user of Bluehost, I'm dismayed by this situation. Not that I have to worry about exceeding any limits any time soon, but still. Bad business. Are these database size limits even publicly available?

Blog comments I won't miss and search I can do without, but Active Topics, I'd rather not lose. Is it possible to reduce the database size, e.g. by deleting all posts with no new replies in X years, etc? PhpBB may even be equipped to cull old posts automatically. I don't know SQL databases well enough to know if that would even solve the problem, and obviously it would entail the loss of some information (and SEO), but given the choice, personally, I'd rather lose old posts than lose functionality on the forum. There's always the wiki to store the nuggets of wisdom from the forum that deserve to live into posterity. Just a thought.

[GandK]

...but given the choice, personally, I'd rather lose old posts than lose functionality on the forum. There's always the wiki to store the nuggets of wisdom from the forum that deserve to live into posterity. Just a thought.

Agreed. Maybe we can automatically delete posts older than X. Or maybe those in all the forums except money/finance, journals and reference... the places where we'd expect long term information to be.

The star icon is gone now, I see (the one that tells you which threads you've posted in before).

Edit: thanks for all your work, @bigato!

[Spartan_Warrior]

Yeah, thanks for working on this, Bigato. Definitely seems like blog comments and forum search would be the most vulnerable to spambots, DDOS attacks, etc. I assume only forum members can use the search function? I'd just jack the minimum search interval up to 60 seconds or so and let everyone know the Google search hack. It might also be possible to disable search completely, and use a different forum skin to achieve the functionality of "view active topics". Just spit-balling here; I know even less about reducing load on a server than I do about reducing a database.

Still seems low of Bluehost to respond the way they did, especially if this was related to something like a one-time spambot or DDOS attack. Hell, even if the overall average server load is just too high, seems like closing the website without warning is a stupid way of letting a customer know.

[jennypenny]

You can't see who's online anymore. Just FYI.

I used to moderate a forum that used IPB and I don't remember many issues or complaints.

[henrik]

Active topics seems to work now, but the icon beside the post title that used to take me to the first unread post in the thread now takes me to the first post in the thread. Seems like the personal history of what's been read is gone? It's not a big problem at the moment, just so you know.

[slsdly]

I remember SMF to be decent forum software back in the day with conversion tools from phpBB and seems to still put out releases. Mind you, it was 10 years ago I used it mind you .

[theanimal]

MMM also has a TON more visitors, participants etc. his site/forums. A few of his sub-forums have more topics/posts (on their own) then this whole forum here. If it works most of the time there, then I'd have to guess it'd do pretty well here.

[GandK]

Wow... what forum has one million posts per day?!

[fiby41]

If the problem is the site being on a shared server, and since Jacob is considering upgrading the blue host plan anyway; I'd suggest looking into affordable dedicated servers like Liquid Web.

This way there will still be room left for new visitors to grow.

[Chad]

Anyone else having issues with the site tracking posts you have already read? If I read something on my work computer, it will show I read the post at work. But, on my home computer it will show as having not read it...and vice versa.

[jennypenny]

It looks like it's only updating the "last active" time once a day now. That might have something to do with it.

[henrik]

Anyone else having issues with the site tracking posts you have already read? If I read something on my work computer, it will show I read the post at work. But, on my home computer it will show as having not read it...and vice versa.

It seems that the read/unread tracking has been moved from account based to computer/cookie based. I just cleared everything from my browser and now everything on the forum is unread. This would also explain why you'd see your read threads as unread on a different machine. I'm guessing that may be a phpBB settings change to save server resources?

[Chad]

@henrik
That sounds like a reasonable explanation.

[fiby41]

I don't know what I'd do without the search functionality on the ERE forums.

site:http://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/ search term

[fiby41]

^^ Google that.

[Noided]

Is it just me, or even if I read a topic until the end, the forum does not count that one has read?

It is hard to keep track of what we read or not