Fun With Forums
Entry posted by Guest
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Well, since we went ahead and purchased this blog module for the forum, I should probably write at least one entry! This has been a pretty hectic week for me, because of work, moving AtariAge to a new server, and of course, moving the forum to completely new software. It's this last bit that took the most amount of effort, and is why it didn't happen nearly as quickly as I kept promising over the past year.Why change the forum over to new software? Well, there are several reasons, most of which I've already discussed at one point or another on the forum. When we first started running phpBB back in the summer of 2001, it was a very nice forum package and offered considerable benefits over the older UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) software we were running at the time. This included the fact that phpBB used a real database instead of flat files, was written in PHP instead of Perl, and was far friendlier to the server in terms of resources used. Additionally, it was a big step up in terms of functionality and flexibility. Some people weren't crazy about the change at first, but I think most people saw it as a good step forward. Fast forward nearly three years, and we have migrated the forums once again to new software. This move was initially planned over a year ago, and in fact, the license for this software was purchased back in July of 2004. That means we ended up paying for a license that we only will use about 25% of before it needs to be renewed again in July. Over a year ago it became evident that phpBB was running into serious issues as our forum grew in size (number of total messages) as well as the number of active users at any given time. Some of phpBB's features were becoming increasingly slow, such as editing and deletion of messages. Some searches were failing, particularly those that returned a large number of results. And it also became evident that the pace of phpBB development was somewhat glacial. The phpBB software was also becoming increasingly targeted by hackers, and a fair number of exploits have been discovered and taken advantage of in the past year. In fact, our own forums were briefly hacked not too long ago--thankfully I was awake at the time (it was after 1am) and was able to quickly fix the problem.After reading up on Invision Power Board, we decided to migrate the forum from phpBB to IPB. We were impressed with the features built into IPB, many of which we had to "hack" into phpBB. Since we extensively modified the stock phpBB installation (such as adding support for attachments), this made it difficult to upgrade to newer versions of the software, a bad thing when new exploits were being released on a routine basis. We were also impressed with the overall speed of the forum, especially for those forums with a large number of posts and/or active users. Speed of development also appeared much faster than with phpBB, and over three years after phpBB 2.0 was released, they still have not released a major update to their software (they are working on phpBB 3.0, which was originally going to be 2.2). Unfortunately, moving away from phpBB was not as easily said as done. Because we had heavily modified the forum, the conversion software to import all the posts from the old forum into the new needed some serious work. In particular, the attachment support in phpBB was something we added, and with over 30,000 attachments, we didn't want to lose them when migrating. This and other problems with the conversion software (nearly all of which I was able to fix) contributed greatly to the delay in moving the forum. In addition, there are always many other projects I'm working on at any given time, some related to AtariAge, others not. Moving the forum to new software is always something fraught with peril, and not something I wanted to do lightly.I've certainly been rightly mocked for saying the forum migration was just around the corner, as it took about nine months from the time we purchased the IPB license to the time we finally pulled the switch. What finally lit a fire under my ass was when the phpBB forum was hacked. It took less than 24 hours after a critical phpBB exploit was revealed for someone to walk the list of phpBB boards over at Big-Boards.com and hack as many boards as he could. I only know they came in this way through our web server referral logs--that night I saw quite a few phpBB boards that had been hacked. It was then that I thought, "Okay, it's really time to get off phpBB before we're hacked again."Now, that's not to say that IPB is impervious to being hacked, and I've already seen examples of IPB boards that have been. But usually this is due to weak admin passwords or the installation of third-party mods (like Arcade) that have their own security vulnerabilities that can open up your board to attack. But the phpBB forums getting hacked was the last straw, and moved us into action. Another aspect of getting the forums moved over was skinning. While it's relatively easy to change the header at the top of the page, change some colors, and maybe replace some buttons, it's a hell of a lot of work if you want to skin the entire board as we have done. Many thanks go out to BinaryGoddess, who did a fantastic job of creating a skin for the new forums. It takes time to put together a nice, consistent skin, and IPB is a fairly complex piece of software and using their skin editor takes some patience to get things just right. While the migration was not without problems, it did go relatively smoothly given the 830,000 messages, 80,000 private messages, and over 30,000 attachments that had to be imported. The biggest issue we had was moving the AtariAge.com domain from one server to another--it took some time for the new IP to resolve for some people, which made it difficult to log into the new forums. Next time I'll be smart and reduce the TTL time to an hour or so, well in advance of the move. We're still tweaking the forum and making improvements, such as the addition of this Blogs section. The new forum opens up many doors for features we can add to the site, and we'll be taking advantage of this throughout the course of the year.So, what's next? Well, I'm not going to say right now, but there are some cool things in the works. 
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