I've been using phpBB for almost four years now with no coding or upgrading problems so far other than those all of a sudden security updates that come out every now and then. Nevertheless, thats not what I want to discuss. The phenomenon that I've noticed is that member tend to post/register more at Vbulletin or IPB than they do at phpBB based forums. Is this true? have you noticed it as well? I have tried changing the templates, doing more (vb-like) mods for my forums yet I can't achieve what my competitors have achieved using VB. I am rather proactive at offering new services than my fellow competitors are & I have everything (better rankings/services e.t.c.) to outsmart them yet people are more interested in vb/ipb than they are in phpBB. Don't ask for the urls I won't be able to provide it. I just need to know if you have felt the same before. I would greatly appreciate if you could give me any advice. I have almost 10K members, with 228K+ posts & 2500 uniques per day at average.
Hi, my advice is for you to upgrade the forum from phpbb to VB at once. It's gonna cost you almost nothing to buy the script while the upgrade might cost a little bit more. Anyway, it's going to be worth it. 10k members with 228k+ posts on a default phpbb script? This is the first time I heard that.
phpbb has a lot of security issues and if you are running the default phpbb without any modifications...(its pretty much a useless script isn't it..I mean the default's got nothing at all). VB offers a lot more features that interest people... depending on what your forum is about of course...but VB is lot more user frienly...and easier to moderate (IMO). I'd definately recommend switching to VB...it's worth every cent
Setting up to move one of my forums from phpbb to vbulletin, I found something stupid with PHPBB. I have a ton of rss feeds to posts on my forums, so I wanted to prune them down before moving the database. Well the default phpbb prune will just choke on anything that is even the least bit marginal in size. So I did a lot of searching and finally found a solution. It required a single line being added to the prune.php file so it indexed properly and then large forums could be pruned in a matter of seconds. Realize that this solution I found was from 3 years ago on the phpbb forums and the problem still exists today in the current version of 2.0. I simply can't wrap my head around why the prune.php file would not have been updated to include that change in 3 years. it makes zero sense.
It's not the default phpbb installation that I am running. As I said, I've modified it to include vb like features. Thats very strange, aeiouy. Indeed the phpbb support staff takes longer than usual to detect & remove security threats/bugs. They are working on phpbb 3.0, perhaps thats the reason why they don't care about the version 2 anymore.
phpbb gets targeted a lot more by bots and spammers for autoregistration - so phpbb member numbers can be mostly bot, rather than actual human users. Not so easy with vbulletin - so even a smaller member total can reflect a very real number of actual human members, who are therefore more inclined to post than a spam bot.
I, Brian, perhaps you are right, but that doesn't imply towards my board since I've taken protective measures to ensure that no bot gets in .. i.e. image verification. Nevertheless, I'm planning to switch over vbulletin because this modded installation of phpbb is taking it's toll on me. With a 512M ram vps, page load time is whooping 34secs. Just one question, is VB less resource intensive or more?
Honestly no idea, but I would presume some of your phpbb mods are adding extra queries? My understanding is that vbulletin can provide the same functionality, but make the querying more efficient.
There are more than 300 phpbb mods installed (most of them come with a standard vb package). I haven't added any new mods for 8 months, just the routine upgrade, traffic has dropped down to 1600 uniques a day from 2800/day so extra queries or load are out of question. There were memory issues in the past & I had to upgrade it. I am sure that there is something wrong with the web host because everything worked fine earlier before this switch to a new vps node. I'll switch to a new host before making any software moves.
You are running on a VPS - have you ever tuned your MySQL config to run in this environment? It is very likely that your 34seconds/page is due to a badly configured MySQL config plus the fact you are running on a VPS. The best thing you could do is to chuck more RAM at the problem - for this sort of usage, from experience, I would suggest that you run on a dedicated machine with a minimum of 1Gig Ram.
Yes I tuned it earlier, it seems as if this host is overselling it's servers because CPU load is always in the red areas even with 1 person online (myself). I honestly can't afford a dedicated server at the moment but I will definitely upgrade the ram to 1gig with my new host.