UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums General Suggestions and Feedback Auto prune topics

It was there in UBB 6.5.5 and I am missing it dearly in UBB.Threads v7.x.

I could use the prune topics from the control panel, but it has some distinct disadvantages.

I can't mark topics as "keeped". Some topics we want for life. And it's a lot of work since we keep one forum for X days and another for Y days.

Any news on if this feature is coming back, and if so, when.

If it's not scheduled for 7.2 I have to boil up a plan of my own because we will grow out of our assigned diskspace.

If you have it planned up, I would love to see it combined with some archiving function.

Since 7.2 is being worked on right now I believe the featureset is pretty much set in stone already.

I have brought this up in the past, if it does return it would need the topic options of keep this thread for topics so when you prune or auto delete it will ignore all posts that are flagged as kept

flagging doesn't seem too hard, just add a new cell in the threads table, "preserve" or something similar; then adapt the auto prune scripts to ignore any threads which are to be "preserved"

That's why I asked if it's on the stone or not

And if not, if there are any plans on whether or not to bring this feature back, and if so, is an archiving function considered. If not, I'll have to make it myselve.

I have to have an autoprune somewhere on the line with an archiving function, since our databae cannot grow, grow, grow without a limit.

I'm definatly rooting for archive options, lots of various ones (mmm, a private topic comes to mind)

For UBB 6.5.5 I made my own private topic archiving tool for members. Well, actually it was just one big page with each and every PM on it, with a link to the actual PM in case you wanted to remove it.

They could use the tool, and copy/paste everything into word or whatever, and have an easy local backup.

But let's focus a bit on how we would like an arching tool to behave?

The way of arching we used before was the following:

When a topic was pruned, an HTML file was generated with the complete topic content of that topic. It was put in \archive\boardcode\topicid#.html. We also added the topicname and forumid to a database and that was used to make the overview.

Searching through topicnames is done with a script, and pulling up the actual HTML is done from within a PHP script that just adds a link to the style sheet to the stored html file.

http://themepark.nl/scripts/forumarchief/
This link will work for a couple of days, it's normally members only

I was going to fix it so that you could remove html files, and the script would check for existance. If not, you could request as a user to put that archived topic back online. But before I could do that, ubb 7.x knocked on the door

Anyway, as far as topic archiving, I would like to have something that can be kept online and nearline. Have the bulk of it outside the database dumped into a HTML file.

I've started several topics on archiving options, heres a quick rundown...

1. MySQL5/Archive Table Type: This feature would obviously only be available to MySQL5 users.
2. MySQL/Alternate Tables: Use alternate tables to store archived threads/posts in; would be compatable with all versions of MySQL.
3. Export data into flat files.

If i'm correct, a Archive table type is just a table that you can only add data to. Not any good if you want an offline or nearline archive. For compatability reasons with MySql 4 I would not put any time in this one.


That's better. But it's a very big bulk of data to incorperate in a daily backup. Having our archive in the mysql database broke up our daily backup. That's why we moved the actual content of a post into a flat file.


I like this one for reaons I mentioned earlier. Very easy to put the archive online/nearline/offline. But you do need a little database around it to manage it.

The point of an archive is to not add data to old posts and to just have them housed; and if stored in the database an archive table type would be ideal due to how it is designed.

It's basically the above "archive" type with compatability for older systems, which doesn't really enefit from the Archive table type's features.

I like to think of it as a UBB.C feature ...

I'm hoping some form of all 3 will make it into the UBB to provide OPTIONS for users, those with MySQL5 could do the #2 sugguestion with a better suited table type, whereby #2 would allow users to have #1 but with compatability for older MySQL builds; #3 would allow users to create a flatfile backup, but would still need at least some sort of indexing table and I'm not sure how searches would work lol

I spend a little time researching on it, but I don't see any super duper features on archive table types that would benefit an archive. Especially the no indexes thingy and the fact that the only thing you can do is add to it are not my favorites. What if it's "full".


Our archive only allows searching on subject. Any meta data you want to enable searches on should be in a database.

An archive is both the data and a reference to where the data is kept. You should not attempt to combine the both. And where the data is kept should be movable afterwards. Because it doesn't matter how big your space is you can archive, it will hit a roof someday, sometime, just when you cannot use it.

My daily job is computertechie at a radio and television broadcast station here in the Netherlands, and I had my share of archiving troubles also in my daily job.

If you're unable to search the archived files via the search utility it won't get used; people want one way to search and have it work accordingly everywhere without any additional steps; to make this more involved and to retrieve less data than it currently does wouldn't be a valueable application

Having an archive online for several years now, I know people know that the archive is different from the actual content.

They know we keep posts online for 6 months and after that they go into the archive which has a different interface around it and has limited search capabilities.

Anyway, if you want an archive that has the same search stuff as the normal forum, you can forget about the mysql5 archive tables.

Anyway, I am sure that Rick will find a way, if he will implement archiving.

For now I am mainly curious about if auto prune is coming back. If it is, it would make life for me a lot easier.

It's easier to hack my own archiving method in an existing auto prune.

It just couldn't be indexed, you could still preform a select query on it; it'd just take longer, probably a lot longer at that lol

Just passing through and need to understand this topic. I've been wondering what the link in our cp under "Prune Topics" was for. From reading these posts, I think it means to delete all posts between certain dates. I guess I will not be using this for a long time since no one has really posted in my forums yet (I'm still writing the instruction manual in small segments for detailed forum training).

I'm for the archiving option to "keep" those "forever helpful" posts around.

If there's something important about this set of pruning fields I need to know about, please enlighten me. Otherwise, until my forums get pretty big, I'll leave it alone. Thanks.

An "Auto Prune" would automatically prune posts which reach a certain date barrier for certain forums; helpful for some sites that don't really rely on the quality of content and want to keep things clean. (auto prune isn't a feature yet)

For sites which rely on quality of data, manual pruning and selecting which to keep is a nessessity (which is what we have now)

Hmm, not really the case here. We talk about current affairs here at themepark.nl, and it it's X days old, it's not current affairs anymore

We do want to archive for oldtime sake, but gone is gone. And it has nothing to do with quality or not.

Well, by making that statements i was defining a fence, everyone is on either side or in the middle :x...

PITA to be in the middle of a barb-wire fence

'eh thats what you get for standing in the middle of my fense

UBB 6.5.x did have some quality control b.t.w. added to the autopruing stuff. It allowed you to mark a topic to keep.

The pruning feature is nice for certain forum categories like my classifieds category in which I delete posts more than 60 days old. Makes the job a lot faster.

I agree, same for my board