[thelist] Best Forum Software?

[John Handelaar]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Jeff Hinds
> Sent: 21 June 2002 12:21
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: [thelist] Best Forum Software?
>
> What is the best message forum software?
> I need something that can  handle 4000+
> users, and that won't be a strain on the server?

The forums at abctales.com have been up for about
9 months and generated roughly 53,000 postings in
that time.

http://phorum.abctales.com

Right now it's running on PHP4.21/Apache1.24/Win32 (!)
with a MySQL database.  There have been several version
upgrades to Phorum (http://phorum.org) since I strung
it together, but I'm more than happy with its performance.

There are two downsides:  first, it ain't pretty when
it comes 'out of the box'; and secondly, sooner or later
with NT-based servers you're going to run into the
humoungous problem of defragging the disk on a production
server - or at least you will if there are thousands of
users and tens or hundreds of thousands of postings,
and the DB is MySQL, 'cos I can testify to it.

<tip type="NT Hosting">

Do you know what's going to happen with your NT-based
server when you have databases and server logfiles getting
past the 500Mb level?

Your hard disk is going to get fragmented into Swiss
cheese.  Which will stop your database applications stone
dead by increasing query times purely as a result of
fragmentation.  And *then* you'll have to figure out
how on earth you're going to justify a 5-hour defrag
process on a live server.  *And* it might not work anyway.

Be prepared.   Running Win32 servers isn't necessarily
insecure, and isn't necessarily a mistake, so long as
you know what you're doing.  Me?  I wouldn't run a *single*
server under NT/2K, because you always have to take one
of them out from time to time.

</tip>

PHPBB 2.1 is pretty kewl as well, and looks much nicer
from the off, although installs of it do all seem to look
exactly the same.  Probably that's why :-)

------------------------------------------
John Handelaar

T +44 20 8933 1494       M +44 7930 681789
F +44 870 169 7657   E john at userfrenzy.com
------------------------------------------