Spring cleaning that has been delayed by a decade.

[Fuzzy]

The archive idea sounds very reasonable to me.

[SugarD]

We can still keep this forum for legacy memories(open for public on a sub-domain or something! 

Psst...

If so, my second idea would be having Argo host the entire original forum in read-only mode on an archive subdomain, (like http://archive.argonathrpg.com/index.php?action=forum for example), and then users could still retrieve and access their old data from there, (as well as make references to it via links), and the new forum would reside where this one is now. That would also allow people to copy over their old posts that they want to keep.

Got a spare license, so got that covered. IPB is insanely good.

I still wouldn't recommend it for our main community's forum. Argo has been using SMF for many years on nearly all of its forums, so you would be creating a mess of a learning curve for thousands of people that don't know how to use it. Also, getting newer versions for the sake of security and other updates would cost us further. If we were in the financial and user activity place we were say...5 years ago or so..., then I would also be less hesitant. You're talking about also creating new themes and essentially starting from scratch on designing the entire forum, (and not just creating it), as there would be many changes between the softwares to account for. Argo isn't exactly in a good position for something like this right now.

Don't get me wrong, IPB is a great software. I just don't use it personally because I don't prefer it, (and I like my stuff free hahaha).

Now say if you were talking about reopening Azellus and having a customer support forum in IPB, that may definitely be worth looking at... *cough*

One thing I'm not too sure on is how to possibly migrate active topics if that's the plan, I guess it can be done though with some clever DB trickery. I'm sure groups with open topics etc, member pics and such would be cool to keep on a new forum!

Well there are a few options, but the easiest for most standard users would just be having the original poster recreate the first post, and link to the original topic on the archive so further replies could quote/discuss from that, unless they decided to continue on from the original post. (This may actually get rid of some of the off-topic discussions too, ironically).

[Mr. Goobii]

Psst...

Didn't read your post, sorry! Glad we have same idea! 

[SugarD]

Didn't read your post, sorry! Glad we have same idea! 

No problem!

Edit: Not to brag, but...uhh:


Assassin Theme


Assassin Theme (Changes automatically on Christmas Eve's day and Christmas Day itself)


CC Theme


Oldtimes Theme (The original SMF 1.x theme for Argo, remade from scratch)


I'm more than willing to put in the remaining work if it means the community will thrive. I just need the blessing of our White Wizard and his godly, watchful friend!

[Sauron]

As usual people have no idea what they are talking about.
Just like a 500 slot server runs at great ping on a 2Gb RAM VPS when there is 1 user online and get hopelessly stuck when there are 30, forum software in influenced by a lot of things.
The database size itself is not really an issue, only with large searches it can cause some delay. While nobody searches the 200k posts, there is not really a problem.
However people who attack the servers also attack the forum. Mostly this is mitigated, just it will be noticeable in the speed.  And then there is the VPS on which the forum is running.
The provider is regularly updating their offers, meaning we regularly changed the VPS without anyone noticing. The current one has had a lot of issues, especially last year in the beginning. We made the provider move the VPS to a less overbooked root server, and that solved most but not all of the issues.

So what can we do to improve the speed?
1. Get a dedicated VPS for the Argonath websites. Currently they are shared with a number of my customers, meaning others pay for our website. By doing the same trick as with the game servers, which as worked great for them, we could separate the Argonath site and dedicate all needed resources exclusive to there. Would come at a cost though, as I can not raise prices for my customers instantly.
Positive would be that we could also fix an IP and run the website through HTTPS, a wish of Teddy and other security freaks.

2. Move the whole thing to another provider
We could take a VPS of about same price and size with another provider, problem would be it is a gamble as there is no guarantee it will work better

Anyway we will spend some time optimizing all things shortly, and a new design is in the works.
We will remain with the forum software we know and has served well for the last 12 years, it has millions of users and a good development team. Though future developments may change the way we operate the site.

[SugarD]

Sauron, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the host is bad, but this forum does have a lot of bugs in it from the years of changes and abuse by a large number of people. (Many of which were just installing mods and had no idea what they were doing). All I'm suggesting is a fresh start using what we already know and love. I'm sure the VPS can handle that just fine. The forum remake I created works just fine on a very cheesy VPS in comparison. I don't see why this current one couldn't handle the load of Argo Forums as it does now. (The host issues were resolved years ago anyway). These bugs themselves are still an issue though, which is where most of the complaints come from.

I'm not asking for a new host. I'm just asking for the forum software issues to be resolved. At the point these problems have reached, it wouldn't make sense to try and fix them one-by-one when we don't even know what causes half of them now. Why not redo things fresh the same way they are now? The new design you mentioned could easily be implemented into that too, making it even more efficient, as it would avoid these bugs that would no longer exist.

[Sauron]

Sauron, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying the host is bad, but this forum does have a lot of bugs in it from the years of changes and abuse by a large number of people. (Many of which were just installing mods and had no idea what they were doing). All I'm suggesting is a fresh start using what we already know and love. I'm sure the VPS can handle that just fine. The forum remake I created works just fine on a very cheesy VPS in comparison. I don't see why this current one couldn't handle the load of Argo Forums as it does now. (The host issues were resolved years ago anyway). These bugs themselves are still an issue though, which is where most of the complaints come from.

I'm not asking for a new host. I'm just asking for the forum software issues to be resolved. At the point these problems have reached, it wouldn't make sense to try and fix them one-by-one when we don't even know what causes half of them now. Why not redo things fresh the same way they are now? The new design you mentioned could easily be implemented into that too, making it even more efficient, as it would avoid these bugs that would no longer exist.

The bugs are lone gone, because what you expect to be has been moved out of the way long time ago.
Every time we change VPS we build up the forum from a fresh install and add the packages in an order that is best for performance. If a piece of code cause specific errors it is changed and cleaned.
The one thing we could do is remove all unused tables and fields from the database, that might optimize it, as well as do a hard forced conversion to a better coding format. That would however first have to be tested as well as cause a rather long downtime.
So yeah, yo do no know what you are going on about.

[Julio.]

Oh snap, Sauron has spoken 

[Hidduh]

Replace it with IPB while we're at it! The archive solution seems good Sugar:)

Oh yes please!! IPB or XenForo

[[NP]Monte Montague]

http://paruni.net/index.php?PHPSESSID=nrn7t8168kseqqha40ihobpt57&action=forum
Paruni has a better fucking forum than we do.

Just make sure you don't push the BUTTON when you are there...

Spoiler for button:

 

[Brian]

MrMe and I are looking in to a possible solution of freshing up the forum. Someting that should've been long done but I've been stopped from doing, MrMe offered to help me doing that so that'll be worked on shortly, and we'll look at multiple possible solutions.

This is from the software side, as wel as clean up old plugins and all that, this will be done on a copy of the current website so your day to day items will not be altered, until we transfer everything to the live environment.