friolator
Fri 8th Sep '00, 12:30pm
i've got a site with about 30,000 users, currently running on a heavily modified WebBBS script. WebBBS is hitting its limits in terms of scalability, and i want to move the site over to PHP anyway, so i've been looking at vBulletin.
My main concern is that i'd like to be able to modify a few fundamental things - namely, i dislike flat-thread message boards. users of my site have been using WebBBS for some time, and they're resistant to change [i did a survey]. I think that moving to a completely different style of bulletin board would be a bad idea. plus, i find flat threads to be sort of irritating to navigate. [it's nice to see the thread right there in front of you, and be able to click directly to the response you want].
that said, here are my questions:
1) is it possible to display only one response at a time? right now, there are a bunch of responses per page, with the option of moving to the next page. could i specify the number of messages per page? i only want one message per page to minimize loading and page rendering time.
2) is it possible to display the thread within a message as a nested html list, showing branches of the thread? If so, is this acheived by hacking the scripts, or can i do it in a template?
3) on the list of threads, every customization i've seen is essentially the same, with each thread in a table row as a flat list. is this html output by the template or by the script itself? how hard would it be to modify this?
4) in reading through the documentation, at http://www.vbulletin.com/manual/control.html#4 i see that i can control the Default View Age. the largest number says "1000 (i.e. all)" -- does this mean that the maximum number of messages in the database for a forum is 1000, or does 1000 mean infinity, and there can be an arbitrary number of messages?
5) related to number 4, is there any provision for archiving old messages, or will i need to do this myself, manually? i'd love to have old threads get archived automatically [probably with a cron job] to text files that can be displayed or downloaded through my web site. my archives currently hold more than 150,000 messages [most are not visible because it's alaborious process of moving them around and setting up WebBBS scripts for each 500 messages.
take a look at my site if you'd like, to see what i'm trying to achieve. ideally, i'd duplicate the look and feel of my message boards with vBulletin, but i'm not clear on whether this is even possible.
thanks,
-perry
http//www.postforum.com
My main concern is that i'd like to be able to modify a few fundamental things - namely, i dislike flat-thread message boards. users of my site have been using WebBBS for some time, and they're resistant to change [i did a survey]. I think that moving to a completely different style of bulletin board would be a bad idea. plus, i find flat threads to be sort of irritating to navigate. [it's nice to see the thread right there in front of you, and be able to click directly to the response you want].
that said, here are my questions:
1) is it possible to display only one response at a time? right now, there are a bunch of responses per page, with the option of moving to the next page. could i specify the number of messages per page? i only want one message per page to minimize loading and page rendering time.
2) is it possible to display the thread within a message as a nested html list, showing branches of the thread? If so, is this acheived by hacking the scripts, or can i do it in a template?
3) on the list of threads, every customization i've seen is essentially the same, with each thread in a table row as a flat list. is this html output by the template or by the script itself? how hard would it be to modify this?
4) in reading through the documentation, at http://www.vbulletin.com/manual/control.html#4 i see that i can control the Default View Age. the largest number says "1000 (i.e. all)" -- does this mean that the maximum number of messages in the database for a forum is 1000, or does 1000 mean infinity, and there can be an arbitrary number of messages?
5) related to number 4, is there any provision for archiving old messages, or will i need to do this myself, manually? i'd love to have old threads get archived automatically [probably with a cron job] to text files that can be displayed or downloaded through my web site. my archives currently hold more than 150,000 messages [most are not visible because it's alaborious process of moving them around and setting up WebBBS scripts for each 500 messages.
take a look at my site if you'd like, to see what i'm trying to achieve. ideally, i'd duplicate the look and feel of my message boards with vBulletin, but i'm not clear on whether this is even possible.
thanks,
-perry
http//www.postforum.com