UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.classic UBB.classic 6 Support Very unhappy with UBB Classic

Hello

We are www.tombraiderforums.com

We paid £199 for UBB Classic, which we run on a dedicated server. We have 15,000 members and half a million posts and are a very busy community with more than 200 folk online at any one time.

We have noticed that our forum grinds to a halt during peak times. We have followed the advice of InfoPOP by enabling acceleration (which didn't help) disabling Recent Visitors (which marginally helped) but our forum still becomes almost non-responsive (5 minutes to process a reply!) during peak times.

The only resolution InfoPOP have come up with is to delete old members and delete old threads. Why should we have to remove our content and disable member accounts in order for InfoPOP's software to function adequately?

In my experience, UBB Classic, while excellent software for smaller community-based web sites, is NOT a durable solution for a large scale community. I am extremely disappointed with by InfoPOP experience, having used their products for almost 5 years. Growth, it seems, does not favour InfoPOP.

A most disappointed customer.

Hi McJ,

You are correct that UBB.classic does better with smaller communities. For that reason, we have created UBB.threads and Eve. Both of those products are more efficient for larger communities, as they use a MySQL database to store the data rather than flat files. For optimal performance, I wouldn't keep more than 3,000 topics in one forum at once with UBB.classic, and you have several forums that exceed that by far. Have you considered switching to UBB.threads or Eve? We have import utilities for either one, so you could do it without losing any of your forum, post or member data. If you have any questions about that, feel free to post back here or to put in a support ticket. We want you to be happy with our software, so please let us know if there's anything we can do. Thanks!

Hi Laurie

Eve or Threads was not suggested as a viable alternative to Classic. Does upgrading to Threads cost any more than the license we've already paid for our Classic software?

Thanks.

Hi McJ,

There is a $100 license conversion fee, but that also includes a year of free access to upgrades and support, so it's just like renewing your Member Area access. If you'd like to do that, you can order the conversion here . Please let us know if you have any other questions. Thanks!

Laurie.

My only concern with upgrading to Threads would be backing up my forum. At present, I can completely back up my entire forum (software and data) daily. During our five year tenure, we've moved our forum a couple of times, and it's been a breeze. I also download our backups and install on a local server every few weeks to run extensive tests on our routines, data files... etc to make sure no little gremlins are present that could render our community inoperable in the future.

Is your Threads software as easy to backup, in-install if necessary, move.. etc?

Thank you for helping us resolve our problem.

Hi McJ,

I don't know exactly how you do things, but most likely it would still be easy to make backups. You might have to back up the database separately from the files, but it shouldn't be difficult to do that. Again, not being familiar with your server environment, I don't know what database management tools you have. On our servers, it's very easy - we can back up the entire site at once (files and database included) with Direct Admin. UBB.threads is also easy to move. Simply copy the files to the new server and restore the database from a backup, then adjust the paths/URLs in the config file and that should do it. There are definitely differences between the two products, so you may want to download the trial version to test it out for a bit before you decide. <img src="https://www.ubbcentral.com/boards/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

McJ, additionally, the recent versions of UBB.threads include database tools that will let you back-up your MySQL database tables from your UBB.threads control panel. Of course, you'll still have to download the backup file, and backup the instance of the software running on your machine as well, but it's pretty easy.