This Forum's technology

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Most forums, guestbooks, etc. require a database, which stores data and makes it extremely easy to access, since it's pre-sorted and the database does most of the work, rather than the bulletin board script routine. The downside is if the database goes haywire, all posts, logins, etc. are gone! :eek:

Flatfiles mean each post, user data, etc. is stored in individual text files in various directories. This can slow things down, since the board script must sift through the appropriate directory. If all goes wrong, maybe one or two posts are lost, whatever was being accessed at the time of write, will be lost, but not the whole kit-and-kaboodle.

In the past, flatfile boards consumed a lot more CPU than a database, but since version 1.3 of YaBB, the server CPU and RAM usage is pretty much the same as a database system.

I'm personally biased against databases, because I have used three, and all have lost data :mad:

I have yet to lose a flatfile-based system :)
 
What I gleen from all this...

It strikes me that the most important attribute of a BB is that people will use it. Also, once code and environment have settled down, reliability can be reasonably well engineered. Good backup, raid, etc. Data bases are less reliable than flat files true, but your bank runs on data bases (most likely) - have you ever lost money? So if data bases favor response time for every user, every day I'd say that's worth it IF you can engineer in enough reliabiity to suit the application.

Second, code is rarely tested well enough. Broad usage is the best test. PhPbb seems to be very broadly used, and has thus been better tested than most BB's.

Third, it seems to me that scalability is quite important because if your community succeeds, the last thing you want to do is run out of gas, change technology, and force every user to learn a new interface. Data bases support scale.

I would expect low volume for the community I want to build - 100 posts a day max. Does that seem like it will press the bleeding edge?

How do search engines regard Phpbb - are the posts generally indexable? Seems like it since so many posts here show up on google. Was attention paid to this aspect or did you just get lucky. :). Ted.
 
Re: What I gleen from all this...

TheoM said:
How do search engines regard Phpbb - are the posts generally indexable? Seems like it since so many posts here show up on google. Was attention paid to this aspect or did you just get lucky. :). Ted.
We run a very heavily modified vBulletin system. I had to specifically alter the code to get our pages indexed by google etc.
 
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