Can you create UNLIMITED Child Forums with MyBB Forums?

Discussion in 'Forum Management' started by Woodcs82, Mar 29, 2011.

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  1. #1
    Can you create UNLIMITED Child Forums with MyBB Forums?

    This is my deciding factor between MyBB and VBulletin.

    Thanks,

    -C
     
    Woodcs82, Mar 29, 2011 IP
  2. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #2
    While it's not TECHNICALLY unlimited, for all practical purposes it is. The limiting factor is how how many unique IDs MySQL can handle in a single table that defines forum. Normally it's 2^32, which is 4,294,967,296 total forums (same as vBulletin). But if you have 4.3 billion forums on a single site, I doubt your server would have enough memory to even load the list of forums to display, so... kinda irrelevant.

    But yes... to answer your question, there's no PRACTICAL limit to how many sub-forums you can have with vBulletin OR MyBB.
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  3. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #3
    Thanks Shawn,

    Can you or anyone think of a reason why VBulletin would be a better option? What does Vbulletin have that MyBB doesnt have?

    -C :cool:
     
    Woodcs82, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  4. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #4
    I prefer vBulletin (obviously). If MyBB has everything you need, use it... It's free, so... {shrug}
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  5. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #5
    True...apart of me wants to go with Vbulletin cuz it might be the better option....but at this point FREE Is the best option.

    Thanks Shawn,

    -C
     
    Woodcs82, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  6. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #6
    Well if you end up considering commercial software, check out XenForo too. It's not yet as feature complete as vBulletin, but the underlying platform/structure is pretty awesome from a developer standpoint.
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  7. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #7
    If XenForo came out with somethiing better than Vbulletin would you ever consider switching over? Or are you Vbulletin 4 Life? XenForo ...looks like really nice software...

    -C



     
    Woodcs82, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  8. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #8
    I'm definitely not blindly loyal to vB. I've built a ton of custom stuff for this site that is based on the vB framework though... So the fact that a platform change also means rewriting everything is certainly a factor. I'll definitely look at our options when vB5 come out. A major vB version also means a lot of rewriting anyway, so that's always a good point to consider other options since so much needs to be rewritten anyway.

    Same thing for vB4... Was a lot of rewriting, and we looked at other options, and for us vB4 was the best option.
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  9. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #9
    From what your sayin.... Xenforo....could be something to possibly grow into. Xenforo seems really Clean...i haven't looked or used it enough tho. I'll def. be checkin it out more. It also seems like Xenforo has only been in biz for a while....so it can only get better from here.

    I respect you as a business man...but i think a huge part of why your with Vbulletin is cuz you've been with them from the get go ....u know what im sayin...









     
    Woodcs82, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  10. EvanP

    EvanP Banned

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    #10
    XenForo is definitely worth a try, from a users' point of view it is an amazing software which is going to be a massive rival to vBulletin in a year or so. But yes, MyBB has everything vBulletin has, so you might aswell save yourself some cash and use MyBB for your forum.
     
    EvanP, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  11. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #11
    How hard would it be to convert the MyBB to Xenforo ,or any other option in 6 months to a year regardless of forum size?

    Thanks,

    -C

     
    Woodcs82, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  12. EvanP

    EvanP Banned

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    #12
    Converting XenForo to MyBB would be the easier option, but MyBB to XenForo also works and requires intermediate knowledge of cPanel and phpMyAdmin.
     
    EvanP, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  13. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #13
    I'm a terrible business man... Luckily I make up for it by being a decent coder. :)

    But nah... I'm definitely not loyal to vB or stay with it because we've always used it. Even starting a new forum, I'd probably still go with it. Once XF gets some things that I consider a necessity (like infractions), I think it would be a viable option.

    I mostly look at it from a developer/scalability standpoint... Nothing (including vB) does exacty what I want... But how extendible is it to develop new stuff for? IPB's plugin system is pretty terrible in my experience. MyBB isn't bad, but it's not really designed to scale to multiple server environments. Today, XenForo has the most promise of being really good once they polish it a bit more and add a few missing things (in my opinion anyway). But definitely not loyal to vB... I'm loyal to whatever works best for US. :)
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 30, 2011 IP
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  14. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #14
    Ur very Humble Shawn!

    It least you have ur Options open..... Im gonna either go with MyBB for short term and convert or from your rec. (after i check it out myself) look into Xenforo..

    Thanks,

    -C :cool:


     
    Woodcs82, Mar 30, 2011 IP
  15. RectangleMan

    RectangleMan Notable Member

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    #15
    Actually it is. At least with the DB. They support master/slave replication. And anything you do with load balancing should be supported by MyBB or just about any forum because that's done at server level.

    To the OP and original question. MyBB can do unlimited forums (within Shawns mentioned restrictions) but why would you need such a setup? I could see 3-4 forums deep but beyond that you're getting lost. Even DMOZ I think has about a 5-6 max deep category setup.
     
    RectangleMan, Mar 31, 2011 IP
  16. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #16
    I haven't looked at it recently, but I sort of recall it doing annoying things like forcing you to give write access to certain directories/files to the web server "user". It's a security issue to begin with, and doesn't play nice when you have multiple web servers acting as a cluster and only 1 web server has new settings and such.
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 31, 2011 IP
  17. RectangleMan

    RectangleMan Notable Member

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    #17
    Most of the required write access is for theme edits in admincp, setting updates, and avatar uploads. Would not be incredibly difficult to work out a multi server setup to deal with those factors. I would assume VB would make it easier to deal with larger forums and scale but VB is also a resource hog. IMHO it's easier to add then remove.

    Ultimately in big forums like yours and mine we need plenty of custom code. No forum solution is going to be a box fit. As hard as I try to minimize core edits there are times when I have no choice. With MyBB I can say that it's been minimal and their plugin/hook system has served me better than VB or PHPBB did.

    IMHO Xenforo isn't developed enough to consider using in a big-board environment. Heck their Internet Brands lawsuit leaves the question if they'll even be a company in a year or two.
     
    RectangleMan, Mar 31, 2011 IP
  18. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #18
    Yeah... no doubt that no forum system is going to be perfect for a "big board". Even with vB I've done a lot of custom work. For example our templates are not read from the DB and spun through eval(). I wrote a custom daemon on the "master" web server that listens for template rebuild commands. It in turns does the rebuild for the template it was requested to do... writes the template to a static PHP file and then distributes it to the other web servers.

    Doing it that way solves a bunch of issues... you can write templates to the file system without the web server "user" having write access (it's a separate daemon process that's doing it). It also handles the distribution of that file write/template change so it's disseminated to all servers in the cluster. And more importantly, it doesn't need to eval() templates on the fly. PHP needs to compile on the fly any code within eval()... so there ends up being a LOT of resource overhead when you have to compile that much for every page view. Saving them to static files allow XCache (or whatever opcode cacher you want to use) to store the templates as pre-compiled PHP... so pages load quite a bit faster and web servers need about 80% LESS resources to render a page.

    But yeah... stuff like that is custom built for our setup obviously, so...
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 31, 2011 IP
  19. Woodcs82

    Woodcs82 Well-Known Member

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    #19
    Thanks guys...i enjoyed reading your replies......At this point i think Xenforo is way too early...

    From what ive seen from Vbulletin...they just can't seem to get their sh*t together. At least with MyBB its a FREE option and Rectangle man , you seem to be doing well with it.

    Shawn, maybe you should hop on over to MyBB?

    With that said..... Xenforo could be good down the road...its still a baby. This is the first ive heard of a lawsuit with internet brands.


    -C

    :cool:
     
    Woodcs82, Mar 31, 2011 IP
  20. digitalpoint

    digitalpoint Overlord of no one Staff

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    #20
    Why? I haven't seen anything it does better than vB yet. If I'm going to change platforms, it needs to be an upgrade, not a sidegrade. No point in changing just for sake of changing.
     
    digitalpoint, Mar 31, 2011 IP
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