Can Vanilla Hold up?

Luke_

Hello, Ive recently looked into Vanilla in substituting my Vbulletin members forum. I love Vanilla but I am afraid that because its still in beta will it hold up. I have 22000 members and 240 000 posts that I would have to move. Should i try this venture? will it take a lot of resources to run vanilla on such a user base. Any feedback is apreciated. As well as where can I get a hold ov V1? I imagine its more stable then 0.9.... Cheers Luke

ADM

Keep running your vbulletin and setup Vanilla on the side and have your members try it out.. see if they like it, if they do then switch over.

It would be able to handle that amount fine, the only problem I can see is that it could be very hard to keep track of all the messages since it's all on one page rather then seperated (unless of course you use the categories as the front page).

Either way though see how you go by trying it out with your userbase first.

Crypt

I agree with ADM. With that many members and such it will definately be less organized and your it would be a big adjustment from vBulletin

Minisweeper

Using the categories page as the index is really simple in v1 though so it wouldnt make much difference. 0.9.2.6 is the most recent stable release at the moment but is much different to 0.9.3. Version 1 itself isnt out yet, there is a prerelease going round which may be useful for you to run as a test bed but although it's almost faultless I'd advise against running it on a production forum of such size (purely because theres a lot more people to be annoyed if it goes wrong, it should scale absolutely fine).

You'd also need a way of translating that much data. If you can convert it to phpBB format you can use my migrator, which i believe after the latest modifications should work on that level of data, but if you had any issues i'd obviously be willing to try and help out. Unless you were planning to write your own migration tool in which case i'm sure there are plenty of people out there who'd be very greatful to you.

lech

Just rehasing and condensing what I and a few others here have said to others posing the same question. Give your users the option to decide whether they like it or not and explain you're just trying it out. For Vanilla, a board of that size would surely be a nice way to gather not only some (hopefully) constructive feedback, but as well as execution stats to truely see how well it stands up for you and your users. I remember another user here pulling a similar switch on nearly the same kind of numbers you're presenting (if not more, than perhaps just a little less) and the impact didn't fair too badly. Like mini suggests, plant a stable release on there which would be a latest 0.9.x build then make a copy of the DB you have and invite your existing users to toy around and see what happens. You might like it and your users may like it more, if not, feel free to toss it and try something different :)

Krak

Dont feel free to toss Vanilla!! Feel guilty! Guilty as hell!!

j/k, lol, good luck with the switch. I just had an idea, someone should make a "Vanilla Switch" video. Like all those Mac switch parody vids. That would be awesome.

lech

Ok, I'll get the camera and white backdrop, you find the barely legal and completely high teen girl willing to "voice" her thoughts on Vanilla... wait, no, that sounds terribly wrong.

Luke_

Thanks all for the feedback. I would definetly need to seperated into categories but I imagine this is how vanilla is split up anyway. I imagined the latest posts will be listed on the main page so all categories mixed into one forum display. Does vanilla divide posts by forums in mysql or do they all enter the same table with a certain ID devised by the forum. The hard part is that I can not allow my users just try the forum and have them switch back . As we archive the discussions on a constant basis and events are run within the forums it would be hard to keep track of this in the "testing" period. I will see soon what I should do. Thx all. Luke

Minisweeper

If we're looking for barely legal and completely high teen girls I have an excellent source...

And you could just setup a vanilla forum for them to play with, even if it contained no real discussion whatsoever. People might think its a bit pointless but if they dont want to put the effort in deciding if they like it it's not their place to bitch when you change over :P

lech

The only major difference you'll experience in difference between what you do now and what you can do with vanilla is, as I read, you archive your discussions. With that, Vanilla doesn't rely on any specified archival method because it's not really needed (is it?). I can see archives being important when a forum gets so big, but I don't think you'll miss it if it was a task in the past, and the code is fairly fast that it should be able to cut through just about any sized database providing your database/server is maintained.

Krak

"The only major difference you'll experience in difference between what you do now and what you can do with vanilla is, as I read, you archive your discussions."

huh?

lech

Krak, some forums allow admins to permanently archive a discussion. Basically it plucks those rows and tables from the DB, and stores it as a static html file in a backup folder which is still accessible. At least, I'm fairly certain that's how it works on a part of the whole. Feel free to stop and correct me at any time if this is wrong or inaccurate.

ithcy

that sounds like good extension material

Krak

Oh oh... now I know what your talking about. Yes, I've seen that, where I dunno, but I have..
And indeed it does sound like good extension material. cough*addon*cough, sorry.

Slim the db down, stockpile super old posts. But would you still be able to search them? Probably not? And would it really make anything any faster? It would slim down the db's byte size, but thats about all I can think of.

Luke_

Sorry for the delay. I was wondering which one would be worth installing for such a large community. Should I install v1? at the stages that its in and simply update it once its released? Also where would I be able to download v1 right now in its beta stage? Thanks

Minisweeper

it depends how much you value your community. heh. I'm sure if you were up for it mark might be interested to know how v1 held up to that sort of useage (I believe he's already done testing with it but he might be interested nontheless) but it *is* still a beta (no matter how perfect) and there *could* still be bugs which havent been discovered yet. Upgrading from either version (1 or 0.9.2.6) will be pretty painless though so it's really not much of an issue. There is a pre-release kicking around the forum if you search for it. Or it's on the swell blog. How are you planning on moving the data?

Krak

There will always be bugs, always. Its just how many come in, in a period of time. Thats the issues. Thats the only difference from Beta and Non-Beta, imo anyways.

I noticed it has been at revision 440 for some time now, no bugs to fix? Does this mean we are close to the "non-beta" release?

lech

If you're feeling unsure, go with 0.9.x, if you're feeling risque, hit up the SVN and let your users rip into it. Just keep in mind that there's still that really damn small chance that something could go terribly wrong, and that we warned you. So make back-ups of all your databases and any other files deemed worth-saving. But over-all, testing is good that way, right? And if you do encounter any bugs, serious or small, by all means, do report them. Your friendly neighborhood kill-joy, Lech