Big-board Admins - do you think this section should be private?

[Razasharp]

Would big-board admins prefer this section to be private and only be seen by big-board admins and vborg and vbcom staff?

By big boards I mean those listed on big-boards.com (or those that qualify to).

I won't start a poll because non-big-board owners will vote (:p).

Personally I think big-board admins would be willing to share more if they new this section was private.

Please post your thoughts along with your url if you are not a well known Big-Board admin.

[Paul M]

Yes.

and yes to the coders forum as well.

:)

[KW802]

1) The description for this forum is about "running large vBulletin forums", nothing about being a Jelsoft sponsored support forum for Big-Boards.com or those associated with it.

2) There is already a private support forum for Big Board sites at TAZ.

[Razasharp]

With all due respect that wasn't the question - the question was would big-board owners prefer this section to be private or not.

[KW802]

With all due respect that wasn't the question - the question was would big-board owners prefer this section to be private or not.Considering that this forum isn't a big-boards support forum, then who cares what they prefer. With all due respect of course.

[Razasharp]

Big board admins care - because it's them who the section is aimed at, it's them who are invited to post in here, and frankly, without them there would be no such section.

[alexi]

I don't believe this should be made private. If enough big board owners feel like they would like a private board, someone should start one and PM invitations. After all it should not be hard for someone to find a bit of extra room and that prevents a lot of problems for Jelsoft

[GTAce]

Can you give us your reasoning behind making this section private? How does your everyday Joe reading this section harm it? What would be said in here if it were private that would not be said otherwise?

Personally, if I were a big-board admin (which I am not), I'd rather have it open to the public than closed off...I'm sure there are many server admins out there who are FAR more knowledgeable on technical aspects than the vast majority of big-board admins.

[RJ2]

As a big-board admin, I see no point in making this area private. Sites with less than a million posts may still be experiencing the same resource issues as a big-board admin and can still benefit from the information in this forum.

And as mentioned, we already have a private area on TAZ.

[Paul M]

And as mentioned, we already have a private area on TAZ.Not everyone uses TAZ.

[Razasharp]

And as mentioned, we already have a private area on TAZ.

It's not exactly private either - the threads and posts can be seen by premium members or those who have submitted articles.

[Cromulent]

I'm not a big board admin by any stretch of the imagination, but some of the information regarding optimisation etc is useful. I really don't understand all this secrecy that people seem to feel is approprate.

I mean if you don't want people to find out what you are posting, then you have to ask yourself if you should be posting the information on the internet at all with all the associated security risks that it entails. A secret is only a secret if you don't tell anyone :).

/useless comment over :D.

[Razasharp]

It's about a whole number of things - site security issues (that can be used against you), site ideas that may be used by competitors are just two to begin with. Anyway the reasons are not the point of this thread - the thread is basically asking big-boards admins what they would prefer.

I know non-big-boards would probably prefer the section not to be private and I appreciate that, but like I said, I'd like to know what other big-board admins think.

[Talisman]

Anyway the reasons are not the point of this thread - the thread is basically asking big-boards admins what they would prefer.

While you may post a question requesting a reply only from the specific members that you want to hear from (big-board admins)... you are still going to get responses from anyone else here who wishes to make a comment of their own, like it or not.

If you're not willing to disregard the feedback you don't want, maybe you should make arrangements for a moderator to restrict or censor this thread.

[sensimilla]

lets limit media hacks to media boards, journal hacks and tips only for blog related sites, dark skins only for death metal sites and so on.. great idea..
how small board admin could help a big fish.. ? ;)

[Symen_4ab]

As a big-board admin, I see no point in making this area private. Sites with less than a million posts may still be experiencing the same resource issues as a big-board admin and can still benefit from the information in this forum.

And as mentioned, we already have a private area on TAZ.

That's exactly what I was going to say.
My forum has ~200'000 posts, but tweaking tips are always welcome..

[COBRAws]

Maybe just restricted to vbulletin license holders, that would be cool.


I mean, if you have a big board, you need to have a license, and if you dont have one license, why do you want to know how to run and/or discuss subjects about running/administrating big boards?


By big boards I mean those listed on big-boards.com (or those that qualify to).
Well, you said big boards are only those who qualify into the 500.000 posts, I dont see why we should only call big boards those who some ranking site say they should be big! Doesnt make any sense. Besides, Big-Boards.com has nothing to do with Jelsoft

[lazytown]

I don't see a reason to keep it hidden and I have a few very large forums (I don't really like the term big boards any more!). People are always trying to create private clubs to keep people out -- IE lets not give away our "secrets". The whole idea of vb.org is to share. Now if it was a security discussion section, I could see limiting it to vb owners only.

-vissa

[Brandon Sheley]

I don't see how it can hurt if the little guys can see,, but not post ;)

[woodysfj40]

If the focus of this section is to cover feature enhancements, server tweaks, and other things specifically related to the vBulletin software performance, then keep it open...

if the focus of the section will branch out into financial/member goals, then it should be private.

[Karri]

Big board admins care - because it's them who the section is aimed at, it's them who are invited to post in here, and frankly, without them there would be no such section.


I thought this section was aimed at big boards not big-boards if you get my meaning. It is for big (IE large) board admins and not specifically aimed at those listed with big-boards. The description for this section is "Use this forum to discuss issues related to running large vBulletin forums" it doesn't mention anything about big-boards. If I am misinformed, forgive me.

[Reeve of shinra]

I visit a couple of sites (TAZ and http://www.bigboardadmin.com among them) and I think that a lot of larger forum owners simply prefer to discuss some matters in private -- especially since the information being shared is of a semi-sensitive nature.

[pcoskat]

I'm a BBA, and don't care if this board is 'open'.

To be honest, I don't see the point in making them private. (I've read the points that have been made...but I don't think they justify making the boards private.)

[BamaStangGuy]

I have a site with 280,000+ posts and I do not think this should be made private at the big-boards.com standard. There are a lot of good tips big board admins can give out that would apply to a site my size as well. Also why should big-board.com define what a big-board is here anyway and knock out those that could still benefit from this discussion?

[EricaJoy]

As a non big-board owner, I disagree with making this forum private. Why? Because I administer a board for a friend of mine that is growing exponentially. Probably by summer it will be at "big board" status and I would like to incorporate optimization tips found here before it does reach "big board" status.

Also, I don't understand what purpose a private forum would serve.

Bad idea overall.

[Erwin]

I thought this forum was for board admins who are big.

;)

[joeychgo]

I don't see a reason to keep it hidden and I have a few very large forums (I don't really like the term big boards any more!). People are always trying to create private clubs to keep people out -- IE lets not give away our "secrets". The whole idea of vb.org is to share. Now if it was a security discussion section, I could see limiting it to vb owners only.

-vissa


Well said. I agree.

[Ohiosweetheart]

I don't see a reason to keep it hidden and I have a few very large forums (I don't really like the term big boards any more!). People are always trying to create private clubs to keep people out -- IE lets not give away our "secrets". The whole idea of vb.org is to share. Now if it was a security discussion section, I could see limiting it to vb owners only.

-vissa

I SO agree...

[Domenico]

I thought this forum was for board admins who are big.

;)

Admins who have a big ego you mean?

:alien:

[Guest210212002]

/me points out to Domenico that Erwin's post is 8 months old.

[joeychgo]

* Chris-777;1113722 points out to Domenico that Erwin's post is 8 months old.



Smack :)

I will add one thing... I own a number of forums, all medium sized. (4-10k members each - close to a million posts combined) So I dont have a single board that qualifies, but I have enough between the forums that many of the same issues apply to me as well.

[SCRIPT3R]

umm, no.

[vprp]

I don't have a big-boards.com site with over 500,000 posts but my forum does have over 250,000 posts. I think perhaps it would be useful to have it so that only big board members can post here. I used to come to this forum for information and discussion but there were too many other posts clouding the discussion.

For example, a how many registrations do you get per day thread might have "i'm lucky to get 1 or 2 members a day" from a forum that has 250 members. I really don't think posts like those are the point of this forum.

[DaveAK]

I posted a question over at vBulletin. I wanted to know what constitutes a big board anyway. Number of posts alone seems misleading to me. Here's what I asked.

Here's my situation. I run a board that has a little under 200 active members, (300 total), maybe 30 concurrent when it's busy, but in the 9 months it's been running it's already up over 400,000 posts. We run without safety nets, (no 30 seconds between posts, no minimum post length, etc.), and have a few add-ons like an arcade, FlashChat etc. Hitting 'New Posts' every 5 seconds is a particular favourite.

We're running on a dedicated server, that has a 2.6MHz Celeron processor and 512MB ram. Powerful stuff, huh? I'm planning on switching to an AMD Athlon 3200 with 1GB when the contract is up, to help with the performance, (which isn't bad as it stands - only ocassionally do we get a server load of above 0.8).

I'm trying to figure out where we rank in all this madness so that I can make my ill-informed decisions slightly more rationally! I checked out the Server Configuration forum and everyone seems to be talking about 1 million plus posts, thousands of users, 200 concurrent, and dual core/dual processor servers. I'm seeing a tenth of the membership of these boards, but half the posts already, in only 9 months - all this on a poxy Celeron!

So how do I figure out where we fit in, so that I can make sense of the threads on here? Small board? Big board? Busy board?

Please note that I am NOT asking for server optimiztion advice. I AM asking for a guide to where my board fits in in the scale of things so that I can make better sense of threads that I read, and can ask more informed questions if and when I need to.

Now as to this thread, if you made this a private forum, how would someone like me break into it? Who would determine if I was ready to make the grade?

[orban]

I think the difference between big boards and other boards is that you run into problems that smaller boards or with less visitors never will have.

Examples:
-Search
-Caching (both code and content)
-Server Hardware
-Apache/Lighttpd
-Table Locking

As a board with 30 users online you will never have these problems even with 1000 million posts. Our problems basically started with ~ more than one million posts and more than 1000-1500 online (everything else makes our server run at <2 load). And you can do a hell of a lot of optimizations if you put the time in it.

Problems like "I have 50 queries on my forum home and it runs very slow on my shared host with 512mb ram" or obviously misconfigurations of apache/mysql/etc should be in a general optimization forum like the one on vbulletin.com to be honest. But I don't really care, if I see something I can help out I'll post my cents.

[Ntfu2]

Yep it should.

And lets make the graphics section private to only the graphics people, we dont want them to feel left out since there is a ton of information already hidden in a coders forum only coders can see.

Making this section private, and the graphics section should pretty much complete the splitting of the site into little "factions" and it'll be a better overall place knowing that the small boards cant get information on how to become big, and what to do once they are there. And we sure dont want any graphic secrets leaked out either.

[Paul M]

Who dragged this old thread up ?

There are no plans to make "Big Board Discussions" private.

[Razasharp]

Yep it should.

And lets make the graphics section private to only the graphics people, we dont want them to feel left out since there is a ton of information already hidden in a coders forum only coders can see.

Making this section private, and the graphics section should pretty much complete the splitting of the site into little "factions" and it'll be a better overall place knowing that the small boards cant get information on how to become big, and what to do once they are there. And we sure dont want any graphic secrets leaked out either.

Do you think if people want to keep things from you, making the board 'public' will stop them from doing so?! NO - they just won't post!!

At the end of the day, the big board owners will ultimately decide whether they use the section or not, and I feel more of them would be happier to do so if it was private. In other words it would end up being more useful for big board owners (you know, the people/boards it's meant to be aimed at!).

This can be tested/settled once and for all, by creating an additional BB section that is private - then seeing which one gets used more.

[Criticize]

*edit - didnt realize that the thread is 40 years old.

[Ntfu2]

Do you think if people want to keep things from you, making the board 'public' will stop them from doing so?! NO - they just won't post!!

At the end of the day, the big board owners will ultimately decide whether they use the section or not, and I feel more of them would be happier to do so if it was private. In other words it would end up being more useful for big board owners (you know, the people/boards it's meant to be aimed at!).

This can be tested/settled once and for all, by creating an additional BB section that is private - then seeing which one gets used more.


Thus completely going against any community feeling, this place is to freely share information, thoughts and ideas with everyone. Not to pick and choose who should and shouldn't you share your information with if you choose to share it here.

[Razasharp]

Well sorry but I can completely understand why BBA's would prefer NOT to disclose any problem they were having on an open forum that any old tom ++++ or harry could view.

[Fusion2]

With all due respect that wasn't the question - the question was would big-board owners prefer this section to be private or not.

NO :alien:

[Razasharp]

And your big-board is....?

[kmike]

IMHO it's pretty self-evident that this forum is a failure in its current, public form.

[Lee]

IMHO it's pretty self-evident that this forum is a failure in its current, public form.
I agree with that statement. It isn't really serving a purpose is it?

[TheHeartSmasher]

Just make sure that people like me who paid for vb gets to see everything to do with vb.

[COBRAws]

I agree with that statement. It isn't really serving a purpose is it?
True true. Another wrong decision (im my opinion) by the staff to encourage more vBulletin related admin/coding forums to grow and split the community instead of giving vB owners what they want in HERE.

[Kihon Kata]

What's up with the admins at big-boards.com? I submitted my site right when we hit 500k and still no add(not with 750k posts). WTF. I have contacted them also a few times to no avail.

Anyone know? (sorry to hijack)

[phpdevrus]

What's up with the admins at big-boards.com? I submitted my site right when we hit 500k and still no add(not with 750k posts). WTF. I have contacted them also a few times to no avail.

Anyone know? (sorry to hijack)

Ya i think the guy that runs it is currently away.

he is taking a leave of absence and also planning to update big-boards.

hopefully soon.

;-)

[orban]

IMHO it's pretty self-evident that this forum is a failure in its current, public form.

Well, depends what you want from it.

I personally haven't found anything remotely useful in this forum for my forum, but I shared two things (the template cache and the sphinx implementation). I will try to keep sharing things I write for my board, but it's a bit disappointing to get nothing back in exchange (tho I'm always glad to give support if I can).

I don't think you'll ever find detailed information of how to do "tune" your server in here or a complete guide from "create forum" to "100k visitors/day" in here. You just can't put those things in a "guide". I probably read hundreds of sites about server optimization, subscribe to a few blogs, check a few forums, read about other ppls issues...learning by doing. You can't come here with your newly created forum with basically no clue about anything at all and expect to find a guide how to make your forum work in 2 days.

If you run a forum (semi-)professionally you're basically a sysadmin...and some people do that for a job. You can't learn a job by reading a handful of guides.

[Kihon Kata]

tho I'm always glad to give support if I canAnd you do this, VERY GOOD, I must say.

[ngaiox]

I'll protest if you make it private. >:)

[COBRAws]

To enter this section you should, at least, need an active license.

[concepts]

To enter this section you should, at least, need an active license.

That I will agree with.

[ThorstenA]

I would like to let this section to be private.

[BamaStangGuy]

I would like it private but as I stated in my first post in this thread, how do you cut off someone? Do you use big-boards.com standard or define your own? I don't like posting stuff in public that I wouldn't mind if it was a private forum with people who have the same issues/goals/problems/whatever as me.

Sorry to keep this up but there seems to be a lot of support for it.

For Example: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=134951 That thread is from someone who obviously doesn't own a big board. In my opinion the whole point of this forum is for admins who run decent sized forums to share ideas on a same level basis? We don't want to see questions about how to submit a site to a search engine, which is usually something that a big board admin has figured out since... well... they have a big forum. We want to share ideas, have a place to ask about dealing with problems that arise as you get bigger.

[Caerydd]

Yes, I would be curious about what standards would make this private. My forum probably isn't 'big' in its number of current totaly users (we normally have between 30 and 60 users logged in at once), but we have over 1.3 million posts and a database of about 33k accounts and many users who drop in occasionally, so I have the occasional 'big board' issue when it comes to the database. I wouldn't like to be excluded because the current user base is, while very dedicated, relatively small.

[BamaStangGuy]

Yes, I would be curious about what standards would make this private. My forum probably isn't 'big' in its number of current totaly users (we normally have between 30 and 60 users logged in at once), but we have over 1.3 million posts and a database of about 33k accounts and many users who drop in occasionally, so I have the occasional 'big board' issue when it comes to the database. I wouldn't like to be excluded because the current user base is, while very dedicated, relatively small.
You would for sure be considered a big board and you people like you are what this forum is intended for :)

[parktonia]

How many BB forums do we need.. no offence but I have yet to get any amazing info off of any of them.. IMHO you get more out of the regular areas.

[Nerudo]

excuse me... what is TAZ?

[AWS]

excuse me... what is TAZ?
TAZ big board is nothing more than a brag podium.
Is there really anything that big board owners need to discus in private that small forum owners shouldn't see?
What you have to all remember is that all our big boards started out small and we learned from people who had large communities. Just think what it would be like if the pioneers didn't share their knowledge.

[COBRAws]

T
Is there really anything that big board owners need to discus in private that small forum owners shouldn't see?

I have no problems with that, but I do have problems with guest being able to read our posts in this section. IMHO this section and the rest, should olny be accessible to licensed users.

[Caerydd]

Cheers Bama.

Personally, I don't mind either way, as long as the people who need to access the discussions can --> so if it did go private, a clear way to get access.

[Hornstar]

well my forums is just over a year old now, and it now has about 50 000 members (pruned a whole heap recently) and we have over 300 000 posts. we get about 1000-2000 posts a day so in about 100-200 days i should be officially a big board, however im already running into lots of problems because having a database of about 2 gigs, and having over 2000 members visit your site everyday and heaps of guests does make running the site a big job.

I think as long as licensed members can only view this it should be fine. of course being accepted into a private area does make you feel special, it wouldn't be fair to the other members.

[Viper007Bond]

Seems a bit silly to make this private. Licensed only by all means, but private? I see no reason.

And for the record:

Threads: 15,866, Posts: 384,823, Members: 14,087

[Zowners]

excuse me... what is TAZ?

TAZ = www.TheAdminZone.com it is a forum for community administrators to discuss administration and anything else to do with foruming in general. It is by far the biggest and best resource on the net for community administrators.

[Xorlev]

I'll throw in my two cents, as I frequent this forum. No, it should not be limited to those with "big boards" of 500,000+ posts. My forum has about 100,000 posts and I already use this forum as a resource. I do agree however that it should only be shown to license owners.