I have a site, BellaOnline, which is an article directory. So for example we have a Wine editor who writes articles on Wine. Associated with BellaOnline are our BellaOnline forums, which are UBB forums. So we have a forum area called "wine" where the wine lovers post.

Each time the Wine editor writes a new article, he creates a matching post in the forum. That way people interested in that article can talk about it. He can link from his article to that thread he created.

What I'd like to do is have the thread text show up UNDER THE ARTICLE, similar to how when you go to CNN or other news sites you see a running tally of comments beneath the article. That way they are right there.

Any ideas on how to make this happen? We have hundreds of thousands of threads. So the idea of exporting flat files of those threads and filling our disks with them boggles my mind. But on the other hand that still might be better than having database calls being made continually to the database, to extract the matching thread details for a given thread.

Is anybody doing this?

I am no expert as seen in another thread..however would RSS feeds do something similar? Not sure as I myself don't use them. (though I am thinking about it).

Dunny

I am not 100% on what you are looking for but rss feeds as stated may work for you or using a post island and placing it external use may work. The issue with that method is you currently only have the ability to create 10 post islands.

Macworld used to do this when they ran UBB, and they do so now with IPB.

Displaying the posts isn't very hard. If you wanted to allow people to comment in the article it would be harder, maybe something to iterate on. The key to doing this is tying the article to the thread somehow.

Actually, embedding the post form wouldn't be hard at all to allow comments from the page, so long as you disabled the referrer checking in the control panel.

I'm just getting back to this project again, now that I have all my forums auto-watching properly. That was the first stage in this process.

OK, so adding comment boxes plus existing posts for a given thread to an external site. Here's what I'm looking to do.

BellaOnline has 400 sites. Each site has a forum area in the matching forums.bellaonline.com forum. So for example:

low carb site -
http://lowcarb.bellaonline.com/Site.asp

Low carb forum -
http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=postlist&Board=221&page=1

So far so good. Now the low carb forum has lots of threads in it. I try to make a new thread to go with each new article. So article on eggs and salmonella -

http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art178214.asp

forum thread on eggs and salmonella -

http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads...lmonella#UNREAD

Nobody is posting in that thread because it's too cumbersome to go from the article over to the forum to post about it.

So I want the thread content from that "eggs and salmonella" article to show up UNDERNEATH the article content on the main BellaOnline site. And then I want a post box so that someone could add their own thoughts to the thread without manually going over to the forum.

If they're not logged in, it would prompt them to log in, but at least logged in members could instantly post.

Here's part of my challenge. My site gets around 15 million pageviews a month. So that's a lot of hammering. I don't necessarily want, every time an article is requested, for it to have to do a lot of queries to the UBB database to drag out the thread content. Especially if most threads aren't changing often. On the other hand, I have hundreds of thousands of threads. I cringe at the idea of having a script write all of these to a file somewhere in a massive directory. Still, clearly the data has to be *somewhere* to be retrieved when the user needs to see it. So I think having static files on a hard drive would be quicker than constant database queries.

Of course I say that and the BellaOnline article database is all done with live queries, so every time someone requests and article it's going into a SQL database for that content. So that is already working that way and the site loads fairly quickly. So maybe my database concerns aren't overly important.

ASP doesn't play well with RSS so I don't want to be writing things out into RSS and then having ASP have to re-translate it again to put onto the page. It makes more sense to write it out in HTML so ASP can simply include that HTML file and plunk it up without any further work.

So I suppose what I really need, and I cringe again at thinking this, is something that, every time a post is changed, it re-writes that thread out to a flat file. Directories choke if they get too big so it'd have to be organized somehow so a given directory didn't grow too huge. And then I'd need for my article database to know what thread ID to grab for a given article, so that when article 12345 was drawing, it knew to go find thread 98765 to show the matching content for.

You can see why I keep putting this off. But I think it's critical to build up discussion momentum again. People just don't seem to go into standalone forums as much as they used to. They now expect to comment and interact right where they're reading the article.

If your pages where using PHP I'd suggest using the User Authentication Class over @ UBBDev, it'd allow you to see if a user is logged in or not and then you could do a little form manipulation to allow posting from an outside page... Unfortunately though, you're using ASP which I know absolutely zilch about...

Yes, I know, you guys aren't too fond of ASP . I'll take it piece by piece and see what I can do. The first step is to show the existing parts of the thread so they know what they're responding to. So I have to figure out how to write a thread in a nice HTML fashion when it's updated. I need to have it write into directories in an organized way. Probably a directory per forum, but also I need to organize within that directory. Some forums get huge traffic and if I just dumped one file per thread into a directory it might exceed the directory's ability to work properly. So then maybe subdivide by increments of 10,000?

:snicker: maybe a slightly smaller number really...

You must utilize the crap out of Sitemaps...

Gizmo -

Do you mean less than 10,000 files in a given directory? I've had mail queue directories that get over 300,000 files in them and they only seem to crawl when they get up over 100,000 files in them. The directory structures seem fine with 80,000 files. Have you seen issues with directories that have only 10,000 files in them? To me that's a fairly small number of files ...?