Would a "archives" forum help?

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1

I’ve seen this at a few other forums I visit. They have some type of “archives” forum inwhich the old threads are placed. I was wondering if it would help the speed of this board in anyway.

Think of all those threads beyond the first 10 pages or so that never get viewed or replied to. However, they are still being shifted around everytime the front few pages get new material. I guess it wouldn’t matter if no one was looking at those pages at the time. Still, out of the teeming millions surely there would be more then a handfull that decide to go through old threads. Is this causing a unnecessary strain on the server?

Perhaps we could close all threads that are more then, oh say, a year old. I assume resurrecting very old threads slow down the hamsters and that is why it is frowned upon. This way we could stop newbies from posting to threads from 2001.

We then move the old stuff to a archives forum where they would still be available for viewing. We could make this a yearly thing, kinda like a “spring cleaning”. Not necessary in spring of course :), just whenever it’s most convenient

Someone please correct me if I’m mistaken. I don’t know much about how the hamster cage is setup behind the curtains. Would a seperate forum for old threads be a good idea? Would it even have a effect? Would it be too time consuming or cost prohibitive?

PS One quick question since I’m already in here. I was reading a thread in the pit and someone says the ignore feature is not to be discussed. Now, I didn’t even KNOW we had a ignore feature! Could someone please elaborate? I don’t want to accidently shoot myself in the foot.

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Just regarding the “ignore” function – it seems to have been disabled. There used to be a button under each post which, when clicked, added that poster to your “ignore list” under your profile options. It isn’t there any longer.

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Yeah, but you can manually enter it from your Control Panel. And don’t worry, you can’t ignore yourself(I’m pretty sure, at least) if that is what you meant, Cletus.

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Okay, thanks for that info, Aslan. The taboo thing here, Cletus is that, while you may use the ignore function, you MUSTN’T disclose who is on your ignore list.

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To tell the truth, I can’t answer why exactly bumping old threads is frowned on, but I can verify that it’s not really a performance issue. The Board doesn’t really care that much if a thread you post to is 1 day or 1 year old, except in the minor case where you have a server with enough RAM and MySQL settings high enough to cache large portions of your database in memory.

Personally, I feel that bumping of old threads is good, because it cuts down on repetition of posts, and you get to see some of the past wisdom and answers that others had. However, that’s purely IMO and has nothing to do with the rules, policies, desires, or directions of the SDMB and/or its Staff.

A separate forum would speed things up if what it really was was a separate database on a separate server with its own bandwidth allocation. In which case, there might be a significant speed increase. However, a big problem is exporting the threads and posts to move from the “current” to the “archive” forum (which can be labour intensive), and the problem of broken links when referring to one thread or another. Plus, the expense of running a parallel server, with parallel software license fees, etc.

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Thanks for clearing that up Ice Wolf. I was under the impression that it was a bannable offense. That’s why I asked for someone to explain.

Una Persson, I’ve noticed at other forums its been discouraged to resurrect old threads too. Since I’ve never seen a reason why, I logically assumed it slows things down.

As for the idea of a separate forum, I thought maybe it would prevent the constant shuffling of all those old threads. Of course, I know almost nothing about the mechanics of message board software. I thought it would be best to ask here.

The amount of initial labor and cost had occurred to me. It might be too much to justify moving everything. I mean, there are literally thousands of threads that would have to be closed!

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From the FAQs:

The bit about bumping a thread older than three months is a guideline, cletus. I’m not so sure it impacts on board performance hamster-wise, but seeing a thread, readin’ through all the responses, only to find that it came from last year rather than yesterday, is blo- … er, extremely annoying.

Night of the Living Thread, as it were.

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No offense, but why?

Take a GQ thread: “Should I use premium gasoline?” The basic facts, and even the detailed ones, have not changed in many years to answer this question. The correct answer is the same every time, and yet how many threads have been started on this? And how many times do wrong answers get re-repeated, as well as the right ones?

Searching for “gasoline” in the title yields 68 hits, of which out of the first 50, maybe 15 seem to be the same thread. I didn’t open all of them to save the hamsters, I tried to guess from the titles the obvious ones.

What slows the performance of the Board down is sandbagging the database with post after post after post of the same data. It’s for the most part redundant information, and it ony causes the database to grow and grow. Which slows down searches, access time, etc.

Other threads that come up repeatedly are the “what oil should I use for my car” ones, “what hardware/software does this board run on” ones, and sadly the “why is this board too slow” ones. As well as numerous ones already covered by Cecil, one of the SD Staff, or Snopes.

IMHO, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the SDMB rules, policies, directions, and desires and so should not be followed contrary to their directives, I feel that bumping old threads in GQ, GD, ATMB, CCC, and CSR is a good and beneficial practice, provided that the bump adds new content, new information, or points out an earlier error - for errors should not be allowed to stand, regardless of age.

That having been said, I can fully see the benefit of not bumping IMHO, MPSIMS, and CS threads, since so many of those deal with current events and are much more time-driven.

And I don’t think there’s much benefit to bumping Pit threads.

But the Rules and desires of avoiding bumping threads have been clearly stated by the Staff, those Rules should and must be followed, and I’m not arguing against them at all. I’m only saying that there is a positive side to bumping threads - a very positive one IMO - under some circumstances.

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A good rule of thumb, were bumping encouraged rather than discouraged, would be for the bumper to state in that first new post something along the lines of “I’m sorry to bump this after two years, but …” The annoyance factor only comes into play when you’re halfway through a 75-post thread only to find out that posts 1-70 were from 1999.

Now, in GQ this won’t make much difference, because as Una points out, an answer that was right in 1999 is likely still right, with some exceptions (i.e., new evidence and facts have come to light). But the bumper of the GQ thread should be bringing something new to the table - that is, new information that refutes the conclusion reached earlier in the thread OR a new reason for discussing the implications of said conclusion. Sometimes bumping that thread is helpful to those who wouldn’t have thought to do so on their own, either because they have no direct experience with the subject or because the subject simply didn’t occur to them. But, of course, we see threads all the time that don’t affect us directly but that we still find very interesting.

GD is a whole 'nother animal. My impression is that there is a relatively small number of debates that are rehashed all the time. Which is better - twenty threads spaced out over a period of two years, each with approximately 200 posts, or one thread over two years with approximately 4000 posts? The answer might be the former, if only owing to the psychological impact; that is, some people are more likely to open and post to a thread (for the first time) with a smaller number of posts than one with a lot of them. I know I am.

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Those are very good points I admit I had not considered. What you say here makes a lot of sense.

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Absolutely no offense taken on my side, Una. As you say, the non-bump benefit is more likely for threads in the IMHO, MPSIMS, and CS forums than the “Q&A” ones.

That said – I don’t think the myriad threads started up about a topic in the likes of GQ is down to the no-bumping guideline. If it was, there’d be some evidence of links in a good proportion of the repeats. But there isn’t. It is simply the same questions coming up, again and again.

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Back at the original question, we did look into the idea of archiving old threads, perhaps in a special forum, but we were told that the effect on performance would be negligibobble.

The “please don’t bump old threads” guideline was primarily to stop the annoyance factor. Especially when someone bumps an old thread to add, “Wow, how interesting!” or something equally innocuous. It’s not a rule, it’s a preference, so that people don’t have to wade through old stuff.

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Ah, but Dex, you forget that your slightest casual whim becomes the unalterable will of God as far as I’m concerned. :slight_smile:

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Cletus, to address some of your suggestions in the OP, I am speaking from the standpoint of one who knows a good deal about the inner workings of modern database management schemes, and some about vB, which is merely a database composed of posts. Not too different from a telephone directory with cross-references, really.

It may seem like we have totally separate forums, new and old threads and posts, but to the computer, they are all the same and equal. Moving a thread from one forum to another just changes a few numbers (pointers); the data rarely physically moves. If a forum became dormant and was never accessed, it would still occupy the same space.

And the space occupied does not strain anything, either, it just reduces the space available for other stuff. To get from point A to point B, a disk head doesn’t care if it is skipping over valuable data or empty tracks.

Pruning posts or threads, that is, chopping off some data to shrink the total space occupied might help the traffic & storage load some, especially if the opened space is recovered (like your “defrag” function) but that operation itself is human-time consuming and subjective. Probably not worth it unless huge amounts of data were deleted, and then you lose much of the value of our forums in the first place.

And bumping threads doesn’t make any diff to the computer, either; the objection is more an organizational, philosphical, and psychological one.

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And don’t forget the oft stated rule that as soon as we free up more bandwidth and increase speed, the membership swells to clog the system back to a baseline speed.

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Thanks Dex and Musicat. I’m sure eventually someone will come up with a solution that works. Until then, anybody care to donate a few spare servers to the SDMB? :slight_smile:

As for my statement about old threads, thanks everyone for clearing that up for me. I didn’t originally intend to start a discussion about it but its been a interesting read nonetheless.

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What would be really neato-mosquito would be if they took a lot of the older threads (2000 and 1999?) and were able to store them online somewhere, say on a website with a ton of free webspace. Wouldn’t that be cool? The problem is that to do so the database data would need to be converted to HTML data, or something along those lines. In other words, I don’t imagine you can just take some threads out of the “regular” database and plop them on a website.

Additionally, there’s the interior linkage issue; what if a later thread links to one that’s now been removed? That won’t work.

And so we suffer… :slight_smile: