vBulletin.org Forum changes

[Marco van Herwaarden]

We have decided to make the following changes to our forums.

New: Forum and Server Management

This new forum is intended to host all technical discussions regarding Forum and Server management. The intention is to have a single place where the technical aspects can be discussed, some of the topics that would fit in this forum:

- Optimising your database (for basic server optimisation, please use Server Configuration)
- Using alternative search methods
- Tuning your forum for scalability
- Tuning your forum for best performance
- Securing your server and board.
- Multiserver configurations

At the same time we will be discontinuing 2 of the forums that are not bring the topics they where intended for or are a duplicate of topics also discussed elsewhere.

Discontinued: Big Board Discussions

The intention of this forum was to provide the owners of very large boards a place where they could discuss the specific issues related to running such a large board with other operators of large boards. In reality only a few topics created in this forum really met that criterium. For this reason we will not continue with this forum as most discussion would also fit in other forums. For the technical aspects reagarding running such a large board, the new Forum and Server Management can be used.

Discontinued: General Hosting/Server Discussions

This forum hosts discussions that are also hosted at vBulletin.com forums: vBulletin Hosting Options & Server Configuration

As it does not make much sense to have 2 sites/forums discussing the same topics we have decided to discontinue the forum on vBulletin.org. Some consideration that have let to this decission:

- Hosting questions mostly resulted in a vague (ie. not enough information to base a good advise on) threads where people would just post a link to their favourite host without providing any information as on why this host/server would be best in this specific situation.
- Most (not all) decissions on hosting are made in a Pre-Sales/Setup situation. vBulletin.com is better suited for questions asked at such a time.
- For basic server (PHP/MySQL/webserver) setup and configuration assistence the Server Configuration forum at vBulletin.com is better suited as Professional advise is given.

Grace period of discontinued forums.

The 2 discontinued forums will be open for new replies only for a period of 2 weeks to allow current discussions to be finished. No new threads can be created in these forums. After this grace period we will move threads that are still of interest to the appropriate forum and archive the 2 discontinued forums.