Suggestions for Archiving this board...

[TapeOpHillary]

any thoughts?
i was thinking about archiving each forum quarterly or bi-annually or something (so that there's an archive that contains all the forums for that time period)

however

what do i do when threads have posts in them that extend into the next quarter?

how do other boards do this?
argh!

hillary

[zoetrope]

depends what you mean by archiving. If you mean "backing up" the board, I would do it often. If you mean making the posts available somewhere else in some other form, where and why. They are all here now and forever (unless you're deleting them.)

Not clear on what you're asking

[TapeOpHillary]

yeah, i've seen other boards make a separate section (like all posts from 2002, or whatever) to make it easier for searching for something by approximate date or whatever.
but maybe it's not necessary...
do we want to have a zillion pages eventually within each forum?
wouldn't that slow down the database?
- h

[zoetrope]

It would slow down searching somewhat, but searching can be time limited anyway, so if you only want to search last month's posts or whatever you can have a quick search. Those who want to search the whole damned thing can do so too. I'd keep it as it is, let the database get huge. Just keep backing it up. Things are running pretty zippy right now, until (if) they slow down I'd leave it alone.

I run a phpBB board that has grown quickly and haven't noticed any slow down at all.

My two cents.

[transmothra]

i would suggest letting it all pile up. archiving will still use the same amount of MySQL space, so searches will still go as fast or as slow as they would archived or unarchived, and searching is the main way to get specific information anyway. you could always hand-prune all the really dumb, corny, and utterly pointless threads monthly or something, if you really want to squeeze a little (VERY little) extra zip out of the database. or set the auto-prune to kill all the older, deader posts in the O/T forum at some interval.

[TapeOpHillary]

transmothra...you've made me so happy!!!!!!
it's jr bob dobbs...

thanks for yr opinions, guys, i think you're right about letting it pile up and i'll talk to AJ (the guy that handles the database) about backing up...

hillary

[cassembler]

Well, if you're talking really REALLY long term, you may want to give the users an option to limit views by date; something like "view threads from the last 30 days" or something in the options...