Turning some forums into Archives, IMPORTANT!

Spark

Spark

HPIC - Hatas gonna Hate
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Oct 2, 1998
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Please read the following very VERY carefully... I don't want anyone making rash statements because they didn't fully comprehend what's going on...
biggrin.gif


In the next few days, I'll be turning the Blade Discussion Forum, Spyderco Forum, Himilayan Imports forum, and Shop Talk Forum read only. At the same time, I'll be turning on new forums in their place that you will be able to post to.

Because of the popularity of these forums, their size has increased to the point where it's dragging down the server as a whole. Part of the price of success - the more popular you are, the bigger the forum gets.

Here's the quick and dirty run down about why bigger isn't better in this case -
When you make a post, there are quite a few files in the back end that get updated. When a forum is this large, the files wind up being extremely large, and the larger the file is, the more time it takes for the server to process them. When you have a lot of changes being made to these large files, there is a bigger chance of file corruption and the server is tied up doing tasks that take a lot longer to complete.

So, as a result, certain functions stop working, like moving threads, etc; all the functions that need a lot of CPU usage. So, to make a long store short, we wind up being crippled unless we either delete some of the posts, or turn off the forum and start a new one in it's place.

So, in a few days we're going to make this forum so that you can read the posts (and search it), but can't post to it. At that time, we'll open up the new forum in it's place.

Just to make this 100% clear -
  • No Posts are being deleted. We're just turning the forum to read only
  • We aren't closing this forum down permanently, just turning on a new one, and making this one read only.
  • You'll still be able to read all of the old posts, but you will not be able to post replies to them. Post replies by starting a new thread in the new forum.

    We've done this before (see the Blade Discussion Forum - Year 1) and it works just dandy.... so don't panic. Just don't be suprised when you can't post to the old forum, and there's suddenly a new forum...
    biggrin.gif


    Spark

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    Kevin Jon Schlossberg
    SysOp and Administrator for BladeForums.com

    Insert witty quip here
 
The less "dandy" part is that our search function only covers one forum at a time. Newbies will be less likely to find old threads that answer their questions and there will be more repitition of old topics.

Is there any way to link the old and new forums together as far as the search function is concerned?
 
I know that there used to be a "search all forums" function, that got deleted for some reason, so the capability to search multiple forums exists. The question is can it be set up to search only a couple of forums, and will the powers that be do it.
 
Is there a cut-off (pretty slick attempt at knife content, don't ya think?) date in mind as to when these things fall into the "archive" category?

I'm not a computer programmer (just ask Scott about the comm.drv story) and I don't play one on TV so the nature of this question may prove that, but could posts older than, say, 6 months be made NOT to update or could they fall into the archive category without needing another seperate forum to hold or maintain them? I'm not even sure if I'm explaining this correctly, but I hope you get the gist of it.

------------------
Ron

Is that thing shar...OW!


 
The search feature is a ALL or ONE feature. We do not have the ability to select which forums it will search.

We have been asking for a mass archive feature now for nearly a year. To date, it is not available. Not sure why as we can prune by date so why not mass archive, right?

Oh well we have have our knives and cut with them too
smile.gif


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Best Regards,
Mike Turber
BladeForums Site Owner and Administrator
Do it! Do it right! Do it right NOW!
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Visit www.onestopknifeshop.com
All sales from 1 Stop Knife Shop help support this site!
 
And we're still gonna blame you, no matter what.
wink.gif


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Dave
------------------------
If a tree falls in the forest, and there is nobody there to hear it, don't blame me.
 
Ron - thanks for pointing out the cut off date... I should have included that, my bad.

I'll be opening up the new forums tomorrow... how about we cut off the old forums at COB on Thursday? Does that sound fair to everyone?

Spark

------------------
Kevin Jon Schlossberg
SysOp and Administrator for BladeForums.com

Insert witty quip here
 
Can't you wait until Spyderco hits the big 2-0? It's oh so very close!

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ET
 
You know what's funny? In spite of the ample warning that the forums will undergo an archiving, there will still be people panicking, and we'll find a slew of posts on one of the other forums on Friday morning wondering, "What's wrong with the forums?" "The Forums are broken!" "Spark and Mike don't love us anymore!"
smile.gif


I'm curious about my brother, Ron's, idea, Spark. Is there something in the software what will allow a thread to automatically become archived after a set amount of time? This would be similar to setting a limit on, say, Internet cache file size, or something of that nature. With a four or six month "term limit", the thread would automatically archive, and the "up front" forum would never consume CPU resources beyond a certain point. Intriguing, I'd say.

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Don LeHue

Rome did not create a great empire by having meetings...they did it by killing all those who opposed them.
 
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