Dan - have you guys given any thought to upgrading to UBB Threads? It has many of the features users here have asked for:

New user control panel
Using a central control panel, users can now add favorite threads and forums to watch, remind themselves to reply to a certain post, and view users who are currently online from their address book.

A partial list of features from their website:

Member list
Users can browse a list of all registered users with various sorting options.

Time offset
Users can choose a time offset from the server so all displayed times reflect their local time.

Change language on the fly
The end user can choose which language to use. Choices include: Chinese (Big5 and GB encoding), Danish, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Spanish. Default language is set by the Admin in the config file. Admin section is English only, to keep the language file size small.

Flat or threaded mode
Users can decide to view the message board in flat or threaded mode. This preference can be changed at any time.

Total style sheet control (skins)
Style sheets control all color, fonts, etc. Users can choose from various style sheets or skins that you create. This allows you to easily change color schemes for holidays or other occasions.

Preview post
The user can edit his/her profile to turn the preview post screens on or off.

No duplicates
Enabling this feature means that the system will not accept duplicate posts. This can be helpful for slow-responding systems, where often users will hit the submit button several times if they get no response.


And it's a SQL database with some very good admin/geek features. And all for only slightly more than what you have now. Based on their pricing structure, I would expect you could buy the software, a year's technical support, and access to the member's area on their website for less than $900. I bet I could raise that amount from members here in less than a day. That presumes you have the basic system requirements - namely an SQL server, FTP access, and non-beta PHP-4.

For the rest of you, here's the link detailing the features/etc..

http://www.infopop.com/products/ubbthreads/

Is there a reason why this couldn't be a viable option? Do you have SQL guys on your staff?

I personally think the FT community would eagerly participate in upgrade costs if it provides features we would all like to have...

Several months ago we considered switching the board to WWWThreads (the name of UBBThreads before UBB bought it). It seemed promising because of the additional features and the fact that it used MySQL -- a product that we like a lot.

We purchased a license for the board, ported the data from from UBB, and started experimenting. It was horrible. Tim (our main programmer) and I were fixing errors in the code before we could even install the database -- keep in mind that this was a professional product that was not cheap, and we were having to fix bugs in the code just to get it installed!?

Finally the software was installed, and the threads from flyertalk were moved in to the MySQL database.

The performance of the board was slow -- very slow. Imagine the slowest day that you've ever seen FlyerTalk and double it. That was WWWThreads.

I think that we'll stay away from them -- we're still open to changing the backend of the board, but it won't be to Threads.

how about vBulletin. that software is pretty affordable and offers a ton more features.

Yes, we've talked about vBulletin, and we may look at it again in the future.

All of these optionsalways look good to some boards you may have visited or played with in tests. The big difference is always in traffic and size of the thread base. FlyerTalk has near 800,000 posts and growing as fast as ever. Actually if you look closely at any big board our size (there's not a lot of them) that use UBB you'll notice that alot of them have not even upgraded to version 6.0 because while that version is great for smaller boards, it melts for the big boys. Again, we constantly are looking at solutions and they all look great as eye candy, but once filled up with FT, they just can't seem to handle the load. Remember, we're pushing some 200 gigs of data a month on this thing. Please keep letting us know of things you are seeing out there. Thanks.

If you could make UBB spit out cleaner and more efficient HTML code, you could probably reduce the size of pages by 25-50%

FewMiles..

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That's a great idea FewMiles -- while we were doing that we'd probably want to optimize the perl code.

Maybe rewrite it in C so it would be faster while we're making things work better!

Boy, I certainly hope I didn't offend anyone w/ my original post! On re-reading it, I somehow edited out several statements I originally had there - one of which began with "I'm sure you guys are all over this.. ".. please don't think I believed I was bringing earth shattering information to you...I was just curious as to your position on the product, given that it appeared to offer enhancements our community seeks. I hadn't seen this "Threads" product until recently, and just wondered if you had played w/ it. Apparently you have. I thought perhaps some of the load-distribution characteristics of SQL would help the speed issue.. curious that it doesn't. Of course, that would suggest multiple available servers to share the load amongst.. We used SQL in our last venture, and were very pleased w/ the load management - but we did have at least pieces of 3 or 4 servers to spread the sessions out over.

I guess you guys are also on top of UBBDev.Com ? Looks like there are some hacks in the works for the timezone issue - but looks also like they're being coded for 6.x - not the 5.x version. One of the hacks I really did like was the "Who's online" feature... but I totally understand your resistance to hacks.

Anyway - thanks for your response and I hope you don't resent a butinski

[This message has been edited by svpii (edited 12-30-2001).]

No offense taken at all -- I just wanted you to understand why we were staying away from a product that looks like it has a good feature set. It definitely helps to spread the load over several servers and SQL based solutions are more effective than flat files -- the experience just taught us that Threads didn't deliver on that promise. It may not be a problem with the SQL backend -- just a problem with the coding of the board.