Fighting Forum Bloat

JasonP

So I feel pretty strongly about this, but it warrants some discussion:

I want to set the maximum age of any post to 1 year without activity. After that I am going to write a plugin that memorializes any older posts into static html pages with indexes (by month) and they are removed from the forum itself. A link to the 'archives' will be places on the sidebar here.

The goal here is to fight forum bloat, and keep the database from becoming a huge horrible monster that is unwieldy and slow as all hell. The idea for this policy is to prevent speed issues as I've seen at other forums as they grow, with no end in site. We aren't google, and we don't have infinite computational power or storage. The archives will of course be searchable by google, and I'll put a custom google search on those pages.

Thoughts?

kennyk

You mean........not like my million e-mails.

JasonP

Kenny so you are one of those people, lol

jr@mac

I am all for it. In addition to demanding huge amounts of physical resources, zombie threads really disrupt the organic ebb and flow of a forum. Who really likes it when someone on another forum will post on a thread from 2007 "did you ever build this? what were your thoughts on that woofer? are they still for sale?"

Odds are if anything had happened relevant to the thread, it would not be buried. That being said, some people love to have their threads float to the top via the scurrilous "bump" post. At least post a dad joke or something, sheez.

PWRRYD

Who would do that JR?

kennyk

I CONFESS! I posted requested material on an old post. Sniff......sniff.

jr@mac

The old stuff will be viewable, of course - and the original poster will probably be around to answer direct questions.

kennyk

If the search engine is hardy enough, there would be no need to repeat old questions or reposts.