I was at a board recently that specializes in home theater subjects. They use vBulletin 2.2.5. One of the threads had over 4100 replies and over 79,000 views. Here, when a popular thread gets too poular, it gets locked and spun off into another thread.
My question is, what is the upper limit THIS board can handle (both replies and views) if the Mods didn’t lock and split?
The original Very Vaguely Creepy thread got up to 11 or 12 pages, but only the first ten pages were easily accessible - after that the forums didn’t recognize the updates when people replied and you couldn’t get to the eleventh or twelfth pages without manually typing the number in the address bar, IIRC.
… of course, she added, slapping her forehead, that was several versions of vBulletin ago. Current mileage may vary.
According to my vBulletin ER diagram (which I always keep printed out and handy), the only thing that looks like it would limit it is the “replycount” variable in the THREAD table. This is an unsigned int, so if it is 32-bit, then you are looking at a maximum of 2[sup]32[/sup] posts maximum. Or about 4 billion.
Of course, from a practical standpoint, the server may have serious personal problems dealing with 2[sup]32[/sup] replies - it might take ages to load any portion of the thread. But the database could handle it, in theory.
I notice now that “views” is an unsigned integer as well, so maybe that limit would be hit first. However, I don’t know if rolling over “views” would keep the thread from working or not. Looking at the code, it appears that the result might be just a rollover to “0”. So you would have a thread with say 1,000,000,000 posts and “0” views.
You don’t happen to know where those of us who don’t own a copy of vB could get this, do you?
Well, the ER diagram is available only in the “Paying Customers Only” portion of the vBulletin site, so I think they only want people who pay for it to have it.
Sorry to give you a negative response, but you deserved to know I wasn’t ignoring you or anything.
Hey, no prob. I figured they didn’t want that released to the general public. Thanks for the response, though.
When the SDMB was using software from a different vendor (UBB from Infopop) threads seemed to have difficulties when they got too long so we would close them. We have not noticed this problem with vBulletin, and I would guess that the current version of UBB handles long threads better.
We may still choose to close a long thread if we think the discussion has run its course.