Newbie admin.

[jemiller226]

Hi,

My wife has been a long-time moderator on a mid-sized vBulletin forum for several years now, and the original owners decided that they didn't have the time or money to continue running it, so my wife inherited it. Because I work in IT, guess who is now the technical contact.

However, I've been essentially dropped in at the deep end--this forum hasn't been maintained properly in quite a long time, and so it's running up against the host's maximum size for a MySQL database. I saw that the "post" table was immense, suggesting that it was time to prune threads. However, whenever I try to follow the instructions in the vBulletin docs, it gets partway through and times out. Fine, I try a limiting my search more...finally, I can get maybe 80 threads pruned at once, but I planned to do many many more than that.

So, is there any better way to do this? Furthermore, what needs to be done once I do the prune? I assume I need to optimize the post table, but what counters do I need to update (since it just says to "update your counters"...but, which ones?!)?

This is all information that seems to just be understood by vBulletin admins, but I can't find it anywhere, no matter how well I use my Google-fu. :(

[borbole]

How big is your database? Also how are you storing the attachments, in the db or as files?

[jemiller226]

Thanks for the quick reply.

The max database size is 700 MB. We were right up against it. The post table by itself was well over 500. I'm storing attachments, avatars, profile pics, signature pics--basically anything I can--in the filesystem, not in the DB. That's the very first thing I changed, but all in all there were so few attachments that it hardly mattered.

The method I more or less stumbled across is this:
1. Prune x amount of threads.
2. Rebuild Thread Information.
3. Rebuild Forum Information.
4. Optimize "post" and "postedithistory".
5. repeat for a while
6. Update Post Counts (because we don't really use that for anything).

Once I did that a few times for ~40-80 threads at a time, things seemed to free up. I'm able to do several hundred threads in one fell swoop now. I hate to think how long it's been since someone bothered to look at any of this.

[borbole]

Have you considered to purchase a bigger hosting plan instead? Because you can''t keep pruning things every so often.

[jemiller226]

And why is that? They've pruned old posts throughout the history of the forum. I see vBulletin add-ons on this very site that auto-prune for you if you want (I don't).

Money doesn't grow on trees, you know.

[borbole]

And why is that? They've pruned old posts throughout the history of the forum. I see vBulletin add-ons on this very site that auto-prune for you if you want (I don't).

Money doesn't grow on trees, you know.

Take it easy pal, it was only a suggestion.

[jemiller226]

And my question was serious. Why shouldn't I prune now and then?

[slammz]

And my question was serious. Why shouldn't I prune now and then?

It may be okay to prune "now and then", but it would be nice to keep the content on your forum for future reference etc.

[jemiller226]

Okay. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't going cause structural problems with the database. A lot of the stuff on the forum frankly isn't designed to be kept. It's all pretty transient stuff. If something's really and truly important, we make it a sticky, and I won't prune those.

[Mr_Running]

mmm...that could be a lot of stickies. :)

Keep in mind that if it's prune/deleted it would leave a lot of dead links for search engines and possibilities of people finding the forum due to lack of content in search.

[jemiller226]

On most forums, I'd agree with you 100%. This one, though, is for folks with mental disorders, and as often as not the members would rather things not stay there indefinitely to decrease the chances that people they know find out about some of this stuff, because with the way things are today, just about anything outside the utterly normal could threaten your job.

Not to mention, there's a subforum dedicated to silly games like word associations and "musical artists a-z" sort of things, and there's absolutely no need to keep any of that long term (or even mid-term...).

[Mr_Running]

Fair enough. If those threads/post are public maybe hide which usergroups can view.
Old content may help others and old content is your history that one day may be looked at fondly. :)

Maybe close old threads with some sort of warning

Warning: Thank you for your support...Things have changed for us. :)