This website forum sucks

[NigelJK]

Having just setup a BBS for my Narrowboat syndicate, I decided to go with phpBBS, not least of which because it had a vBulletin import plugin (the old forum being vB).

Still generated the post even with the 500, but edits don't post if you get the 500.

[NigelJK]

It still generated the post even with the 500, but edits don't post and also generate the 500

[NigelJK]

Oddly, the tooltips work for the broken threads:

[vetran]

Light relief works,my productivity has soared, have to be careful or they will promote me!

[agentzero]

I blame the chimp. . .

The rather depressing thought is that a replacement will be worse: that's been the case for yonks.

We all hated the previous iteration until we met this one.

The previous iteration was a good collection of html links. The new version is a rubbish implementation of javascript and is borked. It's better to have a simple forum that works reliably than something over complex rubbish that doesn't even allow mod functions to work correctly and reliably.

[woody1]

Is it possible to revert to an earlier version, or was the "upgrade" irrevocable?

[jamesbrown]

Is it possible to revert to an earlier version, or is the "upgrade" irrevocable?

Probably EOL, so not an option unless you're willing to accept zero fixes/patches and a mounting security nightmare.

[NickFitz]

The previous iteration was a good collection of html links. The new version is a rubbish implementation of javascript and is borked. It's better to have a simple forum that works reliably than something over complex rubbish that doesn't even allow mod functions to work correctly and reliably.

That's an additional problem - as well as their OOP/ORM fetish, they also jumped on the Javascript-driven web app bandwagon, even though the entire SPA concept is a terrible fit for something like a forum. And they weren't very good at it either

[NickFitz]

Is it possible to revert to an earlier version, or is the "upgrade" irrevocable?

No going back - they don't really support the older version any more, and it would involve reverting all the changes made to the DB to shovel everything into the new schema

Switching to Xenforo, there's a conversion script, but it would need some additional work to account for things that are done by plugins (nice URLs, Thanks/Likes, various things I did to make it behave more like the old forum). Not a huge task TBH, and the processes involved are either well-documented or relate to bits that I understand because I wrote them

Not going to happen tomorrow though, unfortunately - there's a bit more to it than just installing the new software and running an import script

[woody1]

And the database's Nodes table has millions of rows in it: a row for every subforum, and a row every thread, and one for every post, and every PM, and loads of other things, all in one table.

Presumably that table was already enormous from day 1 of the new version going live? And I'm guessing it must have taken a fair few hours for the upgrade to create it.

The table's not missing any indexes is it?

I suppose deleting very old stuff might be one way to improve matters.