Prune threads to flat files...
 

In an effort to keep a large database from growing far too large - I'd like to have a system in place that moves old discussions that haven't been replied to in XXX amount of days - into a flat HTML file.

I never prune messages. At my forums, people cringe at the thought of deleting our "history". Is there any possibility of this becoming a reality?

Yes, I've been looking for something like that - especially if it can run as a CRON job...

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this is a good idea.. Hopefully others will chime in, positively, as well..

Anybody else out there?

I'm sure there are issues like rights to see messages (it doesn't matter to me), each thread in a file or threads appended to a single file or single file per forum etc. The main thing for me is to make my database smaller since all the static "historical" threads are gone but not ir-retrieavable.

The "Show Printable Version" is almost perfect if it could be done based on a query and handle multiple threads...

It might be simpler and better to have 'old' threads moved to a different database. I think it would add queries but it would at least keep the primary db smaller and faster and keep the archive dynamic and searchable. Since not many people search old threads anyway, the cost of the extra queries may not be too bad considering.

That might not be a bad idea, Reeve of Shinra..

And regarding the 'rights' issue, maybe the flat html files could be located within the forum they were archived from - somehow. I'm not too sure how PHP and MySQL work so I don't know the limitations. But if they could be stored in the same area as the forum with the permissions they have to see them - it would be okay...

That's fine if you want to have them searchable through "normal" searches... But personally, I'd like it completely exported to external files. That way, I could ZIP them up and allow them for download (maybe the download link in the forum home page for each formum). If a user wants to search, let 'em download the zip and use text searches.

I know this topic comes up now and again, and nobody wants to do it :), but my database can't grow forever! Right now, I'm selectively pruning and that's a pain - not to mention NO archived threads is FAR worse than download/text-searching.

Logician already wrote a hack to download threads as plain text.

Ok it doesn't look good if it's plain text, but the important things are there...

People have been begging for this hack for years because it will allow people with smaller budgets to store archived threads on a free web host. I'm surprised Jelsoft hasn't built it in yet given that so many of their customers are small-budget hobbyists.

Amy