unagi1

Good job to Michael and all who helped out!!
Thanks

ZBeeb

I play with internet community software for a living, although we don't use InfoPop...

Bottom line here is that there is likely a scaleability issue on the message board, and it doesn't handle too large forums, such as United etc... hardware tweaks might get you a few inches here and there, but they won't get you over the finish line if the software doesn't scale.

So I don't wish to nor will I make this an ad for something we sell.. but there are highly scaleably message board solutions available and people who manage them. I know FT doesn't want to spend a fortune here either.

One of the most interesting non commercial solutions right now is a java based board called Jive.. it's open source, almost entirely free and very very scaleable. Sun are working on switching most of their boards to Jive based technology, as are several others.

There's always the more expensive commercial solutions, if you really want to spend $$ I can give you a list, but looking at this thread there's enough expertise out there to get things moving.

The second and more immeidately addressable area is how the community is structured. The issue of course is scaling... 2 general United boards isn't going to work, where would you look for information? What will work is breaking United and AA into smaller chunks that are topic specific... United Policies and Issues, United Flights and Aircraft, United MP Information and so on... I'm sure with a couple of hours of analysis every topic in United can be broken into a list of three or four general topics where people could clearly see where to post... suddenly you have a bunch of smaller forums that aren't overloading the limits of InfoPop, yet a structure the users can easily follow.

There are systems that can deal with this amount of traffic, eBay uses an external vendor with over 60,000 new posts a day (on their message boards, that's not the bidding system), CNN, HBO... I could go on, but there are plenty of sites handling bigger loads... at some point someone needs to "byte" the bullet (sorry couldn't resist) and decide to go forward with a scaleable replacement.

The choice of spending big $$ for a commercial grade solution and vendor or spending IT resources implementing something like Jive is one only Randy can dictate... but step one is to admit (at least internally if not to the users) that the current system is at the end of it's scaleability capability. The time to do that is now so you can put your resources into a solution that works, rather than spinning cycles trying to hold together something that's bursting at the seams.

Someone said buy InfoPops bigger setup for $80K... for the record $80K is over the top for a scaleable solution for the volume I suspect this board has (cheap for eBay, but WAY expensive for FT).

Anyway... the short term fix probably lies in topical sub forums for UAL and AA, longer term something that scales. So there's my 2 cents worth... at least here on FT it's 2 cents.

Let me know if you want any specific information, I've tried to stay general here and avoid advertising our products or anyone elses, because that's not what this board is about.

Michael at WebFlyer

Good morning everybody...well, almost noon now.

I thought I'd drop you all a quick line or three and let you know how much I have appreciated all of the help I've received from you. There have been a large number of very, very good suggtestions here...and I am looking into all of them.

I apologize that it has taken me so long to get back with you...this has been a very big week. In addition to the FlyerTalk bulletin boards I have a number of other fairly substantial responsibilities...not the least of which is assisting our in house editors with making portions or our magazine "InsideFlyer" available electronically.

I won't go into all of the details at this point in time, but as you can see we have the United forum up and running again...man, has this ever been a fiasco. Randy has been an extremely busy man and it's sometimes difficult to move forward on "controversial" solutions without his approval and this is compounded when you are unable to get ahold of him long enough to explain the situation and it's various remedies. I'll post more about these solutions as time goes by.

Suffice it to say that a couple of the gents from InfoPop had to remove and backup a sumstantial portion of the United forum in order to get it up and running again. It seems to be working fine at the moment which seems to bear out our observations that the hardware and software are not up to the task of handling such a large load. We will probably be doing the same for the other 3 or 4 largest forums on our boards. Randy is adament about having that data available to our community and although I agree it's been very, very trying accomadating such a demand within the limits imposed by the conditions.

I apologize if I have offended anyone by not giving out the hardware specs but I haven't had the chance to clear it with my systems admin...I don't see a problem with releasing such info nor do I believe that he will, but since I'm not all that systems savvy I thought it best to wait until I can discuss it with him. You all of made some pretty close gestimations and I think that, that is something that you should all applaud eachother for...pretty amazing really.

As for alternative BB systems...I have been looking into them for sometime now. I've even setup and tested many on our local server. The list includes "WWWThreads", "vBulletin", "WebCrossing", and a number of other less reputable boards. "Jive" came to my attention through a personal email from an individual who I found very warm and knowledgeable. I've taken a cursory look at the software and have liked what I have seen so far but it'll need to be scoped out a little better. I will be doing a thourough investigation of it's relative strengths and weaknesses here very, very shortly.

I think that about covers it for the time being. Any questions? Comments?

Thank you all again for your time and patience.

------------------
Michael at WebFlyer
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
2428 Hall Ave.
Grand Junction, Co. 81501
970.263.4201

ZBeeb

Sounds like a plan. WebCrossing will scale better, but with over 50 WebX installations in place and working we're likely to move away from them, also a flat file system and subject to some strange things happening from time to time, but definately a nice step up.

Jive certainly seems to be the flavour of the moment because it is Open Source and thus very customizeable. The side issue is that it takes a little more engineering resources to implement it... or you can pay the folks who wrote Jive a few bucks and they'll make it work, they're good guys and relatively inepxensive to hire.

Whatever the alternative be aware that moving the data cna be a challenge in some systems, look further ahead and consider both moving the data into a new system, and later out of it... some systems don't do exports gracefully if at all. Jive is nice, it uses Oracle for it's DB... neither flat file nor a problem moving data in or out.

Dorian

Jive is certainly a very good recommendation.

I have seen single threads in excess of 75 pages that have no speed issues at all.

Dorian

Michael at WebFlyer

Thank you. I hope people keep the feedback coming in this particular thread/forum...I find it helpful and reassuring.

You guys hit one of our major problems right on the head...the legacy data. We have consistantly found problems getting the old data into either a database or into another flat file data format.

WWWThreads did a very nice job but we found that it appeared to be a bit too slow...as slow, or slower than UBB...at least that's what I was told by our testers. Looking back on it I'm not sure that it was really any slower than UBB has been for the last many weeks.

WWWThreads also had a lot of very nice additional functionality. Although I'd settle for a stable, fast and scalable solution at the moment...we could worry about additional goodies later.

Thanks again.

------------------
Michael at WebFlyer
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
2428 Hall Ave.
Grand Junction, Co. 81501
970.263.4201

Dorian

I was chatting about Jive with a few our hacker/technician types...they said that it is the only BB software out there for &lt;$50k that is highly scalable without onerous hardward requirements.

Dorian

dgolds

Michael: In the spirit of the open source movement, if you are thinking of going with something like Jive, why not see if there are people here who might be willing to help out for the good of the community? I bet a few among us would go for it...

"Will code for miles or points"

Dorian

There is an interesting thread on massively large deployments over at Jive.

They state that serving &gt;1,000,000 pages a day is no big deal.

Dorian

EPS

Have any of you looked at phpBB?

Michael at WebFlyer

EPS, hello. No, I've never heard of that one either. I'll look into it.

Thank you for suggesting it.

------------------
Michael at WebFlyer
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>
2428 Hall Ave.
Grand Junction, Co. 81501
970.263.4201