Archiving posts and threads ... now that is a killer feature

[Rigel Kentaurus]

Most of the functionality of forums is so standard these days, it is difficult to differentiate. Sometimes somebody comes with something relevant, and I was reading this morning about the archive system of IPB (http://community.invisionpower.com/blog/1174/entry-7053-ipboard-33-dev-update-archive-system/)

I truly think that is a killer feature

Having a couple big boards myself, I quickly found that my choices were
1) Gettings faster, better hardware
2) Pruning the database out of old posts and threads

Although InnoDB is a little better about locking, I can truly say that MySQL starts choking whenever I reach the 1M posts goal. It just does not like it. Then you start dealing with server optimization, replication, and improving the hardware. All of that costs money.

A good solution for me was moving all the threads and post to a "secondary" table. By doing this, I operate with light tables, while keeping all the content in secondary low-hit tables. This saved me a bunch of grief on the MySQL side. I was today really excited when I read that, something I have been doing for years out of necessity is now a core feature in some forum platform. Finally.

 

[mrGTB]

Sounds great new for big board owners that like yourself. Just been reading the topic on IPB and see it's a new thing to IPB 3.3

 

[Carlos]

Ya know, mass moving seems to be non-existent in xenforo.

When I imported the vb4 CODForums database into the new xenforo instance, I had to manually move all the threads [that I don't feel fit in the public forums] into the archive forums. Same with my official CarlosX360 forums. I can't say I like it much.

I plan on buying bigger xenforo sites and merging them into an per-existing sites. The problem is organization from where I sit.

 

[Walter]

The amount of rows in a database table isn't influencing performance as bad as most people think. Any decent database can find a certain row in fractions of a second if the right index is used. There are even clever solutions for fast text searches nowadays.

I'm not voting against such a feature, I have two fairly big boards myself, but such a feature isn't as necessary as many would think and imho the priorities should be somewhere else.

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

The amount of rows in a database table isn't influencing performance as bad as most people think. Any decent database can find a certain row in fractions of a second if the right index is used. There are even clever solutions for fast text searches nowadays.

I'm not voting against such a feature, I have two fairly big boards myself, but such a feature isn't as necessary as many would think and imho the priorities should be somewhere else.

I kind of agree with you, in concept, but my experience has taught me otherwise. I have tried to keep my forum running with every single post since the beginning, but MySQL would just have slow queries for almost anything that had to deal with the "post" table.

Even though locating a post with the right index is fast, aggregating the result might be not if the table is so big that the pointers fall into non-adjacent places of the hard drive, that translate into several hardware sweeps to fetch a single resultset. Locking is no longer an issue thankfully, and searching can be delegated to other table, but the joins are still somehow tricky, and anything that queries by dateline becomes a lot slower. Even searching "all posts by a user" would return a higher set of results, than if the posts were in other tables and they are not included in the resultset at all.

My point is, it still matters enough to the point of having an archiving feature

 

[Carlos]

What is your site, if I may ask?

Erm. What software is the site powered by? IPB, vB, xenForo?

 

[Rigel Kentaurus]

What is your site, if I may ask?

Erm. What software is the site powered by? IPB, vB, xenForo?

http://cemzoo.com
http://fanficslandia.com

It used to be powered by vB (3.8, of course), it is now powered by xF

 

[Carlos]

Yeap, xenforo. I love that orange theme you've got going in there!

I was going to ask if the skin was available.... but a lot of people don't want to share.

 

[Reeve of Shinra]

The value of this - in my opinion - is if it supports post table in different DB's. This way I can one db for 2009 posts, one for 2010 one for 2011 etc. makes back up management a little simpler.

 

[lakef]

would it help things if searches only looked back 30 days by default? maybe having a captcha required for total searching

 

[Digital Doctor]

How is this IPB version better than vB archiving ?

Under the IPB version, I think it should be relatively easy to request an unarchive of a post. And maybe key members and moderators can VERY easily unarchive a post from the front end.