Addressing forum issues permanently. A few ideas and solutions. - Printable Version

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Addressing forum issues permanently. A few ideas and solutions. - Raion - 06-10-2024

It's no secret that we had some performance issues as of late. I think I have solved them temporarily. The issues were as follows:

Stale guest sessions (uid 0) filled up the sessions database and caused all sorts of havoc. I purged those sessions. Nobody should have to relogin or anything. 

Caching system in use (apcu) had stopped working. I cleaned that up. 

There is a lot more to be done and I'm going to start working towards that. But I have a few issues and questions for how to handle issues going forward. 

For those unfamiliar with the ancient history at this point of the forum, the 2017-2018 era had us using PHPbb. We migrated in late 2018 iirc to MyBB. 

Unfortunately this resulted in a lot of broken shit lingering around and I was also never experienced enough to run a forum of the size and mistakes were made. There is also other issues involved that I need to address. 

So my thoughts on ways we can fix this:

1. Export Pre-2020 posts into an archive of sorts. This will essentially purge the forum of all early MyBB issues and PHPbb cruft. Obviously these will still be searchable, and private messages and other data will be unaffected. 

2. Migrate to Postgres. Here's the only trouble with that: 

The way the forum was set up, the migration system officially MyBB sanctioned will change forum IDs, user IDs etc and completely change certain historical things about the forum. 

This will potentially hamper SEO for a little bit, as I cannot automatically redirect things, and it would also potentially cause confusion within internal links. 

The alternative is for someone to step forward and be willing to try and move the forum manually. It's gonna be a painful process and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. 

Postgres is better overall though. The performance is comparable but you can actually have multi master systems that don't suck. 

3. Clean the forum's codebase up. I'm actually interested in doing this later this year when I finish my garage and will thus finally possess a quiet space to work on things again. I am not an expert at PHP but I am better at it than most languages. I can probably handle this. 

These all tackle separate issues. If someone else has a better idea, feel free to share. But it's pretty unlikely I will take you up on any offers if you try to push towards proprietary software. This is not me trying to bitch but rather I like to be able to modify code bases and everything with xenforo and alternatives is ioncube encoded. There is no easy way for me to be able to recode and fix things. Plus I've seen what happens when you piss off the developers enough that they take away your license... (Looking at a certain green forum named for a small brown bird)

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