Datastore question

[Krawall]

Hi,

I'm new here and I hope this is the correct place to ask. I have asked over at vbulletin.com and they told me to ask here, so I do.

Sorry, I'm seeing it's a lengthy post. ===>

The datastore - I see that in my config file the datastore setting was left out from the beginning, so I assume stuff is being cached in the db.

Then I thought that's not a good idea because we will have many many [repeat that: many] forums / subforums and the forumcache field will go crazy big. So i changed that to file-caching. But guess what, it seemd to change to file on my development machine but not the life server.

Anyhow, no big deal I thought, but lets hack some code so the subforums under a certain forum will not show up in the admincp (because it will be 1000's later. Explain: We have lotsa system generated sub-forums under a parent forum and I would edit them through a custom link to prevent loading a huge list of forums and make the admincp unusable) and, alas, they didn't show up. Success! (actually, I hacked the creation of iforumcache, I thought that's an own one for the admincp)

But the cool thing is I couldn't get them back anymore, nowhere. I mean, like I have custom links to access these forums, and these links work great, it's just the forums don't appear in the forumcache, so you get a page "you don't have permission to view bla bla"

No big deal I thought, I hacked it wrong, try again but first lets delete the forumcache it'll "sureley rebuild itself"

But then all was gone. Though I had a backup.

Still then, when all the forums didn't show up, they were in the database. Some forums are still missing now, but they are in the database because my forumcache backup is oldish.

So I wonder:

What the bing is the forumcache about. It's not a cache it seems, it's looking to be even prioritized over the database in each and every respect. I have many forums in my (test-)database but they won't appear anymore.

I tried rebuilding the cache with the tools.php file and even it tells me "success. proceed", it ain't change nothing.

There must be a clear way to update the caches, I think.

And I would appreciate if there was some fundamental information on how stuff works. I'm pooling around with code and I'll finally get where I want to be, hopefully, but it's a bit tiring without the proper information.

My goal is to have a given parent forum hidden from all users, yet still accessible for all by knowing the link (that somewhat works) and making them invisible from the admincp unless you know the link (working on that)

And I could run into a problem where my sub-forum number exceeds a few hundred, as this will drive the current forumcache field crazy. Or the database. Because forums will always be created on the fly, the forumcache variable will quite often be rewritten, leading to a lockup for a few seconds once I get really MANY forums.

I am sorry for the length of this post, and I'm sorry if I posted it onto the wrong spot. Feel free to move this post wherever it should be.

Oh, and hi everyone.

Tom

PS: Within a few days I got some experience of vbulletin, so if somebody has a similar problem we may be able to help each other out.