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topic archiving


Guest eFestivals

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The forums software used here introduced a new archiving feature recently. This means that it's possible to move topics out of the main posts table into an archive table, which keeps those topics readable but means that they can't be replied to.

This new feature is very useful here, because at the busiest times the size of that posts table ends up limiting the number of users that these forums will support at one time - and so by archiving some of the topics these forums will remain usable with many more users here. Previously I had to delete older topics to keep the posts table at a reasonable size.

And so I implemented the archiving feature, and over the last few months the older topics have been moved to the archive.

Unfortunately, there were some bugs in the archiving function, meaning that not all of the topics which should have been being archived were archived. Because I was trying to reduce the filesize of the posts table to a particular point, this led me to keep reducing the time limit before topics would be archived.

Eventually I realised that things weren't working as they should have been, so contacted the forum makers for support. After much faffing around, they've fixed the bug and everything is now archived properly.

However, all of what happened has caused me to archive newer topics than I'd have wanted to archive - so if a older topic that you wanted to post in is not available to be posted in, I apologise.

As things stand, all topics that haven't been posted in for 400 days are now archived. I'm now going to raise the archiving threshold to 550 days, so that topics that have been dormant for 18 months can still be posted into if wanted - but it's going to take 150 days from now for that 550 days threshold to come into affect.

Hopefully people will see 18 months is a reasonable archiving threshold, but if you think it should be a longer time I'm happy to consider other ideas with their reasons.

If there's an older topic that you desperately need to revive for some reason please get in contact and I'll see what I can do to help.

Anyway, with the archiving as it has been done combined with significant upgrades to the three servers that are used by these forums, should get to mean that these forums run far better on Sunday for the Glastonbury ticket sale than has been the case in the past.:)

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So we should keep our important post counts now? :P

I'm not entirely sure if I'm honest. I don't know if posts within the archive table would be included if I was to run the app to recount each user's posts.

What I do know is that the archiving process has impacted on the reputations it's possible for a user to have, because the reputation points have got deducted for archived posts. Whether that might change in future versions of the forums I don't know.

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