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[Peter van Es]

quote:Originally posted by waqas



No need. There are already conversion scripts for moving a forum from Snitz to phpBB. However, it is no easy task, and many man-hours would still be needed. Thus, a specific benefit needs to be identified and justified before deciding to undertake something like that.

I had a look at one of these once -- but not in a great amount of detail, but the biggest issues were:

• the full members section is a set of ASP pages and therefore need to be hosted on Windows. Rewriting these, as I wrote, is a pain. If the forum moves to open source we need two different hosting plans and get a different name for the forums
• you lose the link between members, nr of posts and so on if the conversion script is not careful
• attachments need very careful handling
• Google can't find anything anymore

As a result, I decided to focus on the Technical Manual on the Wiki rather than a time-consuming forum replacement. However, if you are willing to help, I'm sure it actually requires us to write software and modify the script and test it carefully. So we could start looking into it.

quote:
I don't know enough about Snitz (besides this site), but one of the major improvements phpBB has to offer over Snitz is the ability to arbitrarily decide what file-types to upload (PDF, XL, DOC, etc). Perhaps this option already exists in Snitz, and we've just chosen not to use it.

Actually, Snits offers these abilities. We were very constrained in storage space under our initial hosting plan (we ran out a couple of times, the site stopped working altogether and I had to use my personal credit card to buy the next level of ISP service), and therefore we limited the picture size and only allowed people to upload pictures. Now that constraint is less severe, but I'm not very happy with the ISP. I've noticed that Windows hosting is typically a lot more expensive than Open Source hosting and the level of technical knowledge is low.

Everytime I call the US based hoster (Web.com if you want to know) end up talking to a very nice but not very knowledgeable Philippino on their helpdesk in Manila. So perhaps looking for a better ISP o even paying a bit more to get more processor capacity is a good solution.

By the way, we currently have over 55000 messages posted!

Peter

1970 280SL. Also known as 'admin@sl113.org' and organiser of the Technical Manual.

[Richard Madison]

A suggestion to reduce the number of time-outs due to long searches:

When looking for information or for a specific message, if it's likely to have been discussed or posted in the past few months, try using "Search By Date" in the Search Dialog Box. Limit the search to whatever number of months you think is good for your search and select one Forum to search.

If you don't use the "Search By Date" option, the search will made of all messages in the forum chosen from the first day we opened for business. This is likely to result in more timeouts.

I can usually find what I need if I limit my search to one forum and to "Last 12 Months". I get very few timeouts.

Richard M

[Peter van Es]

Dear all,

on the front page of our site (at http://www.sl113.org) I have changed the search function to use Google. Previously we used a site search facility that manually required reindexing the site, and therefore was not very up-to-date.

If you want to find everything there is to know about a topic, use the site search function. It finds content, regardless of whether it is in the forums, in one of our tables, or in the Technical Manual.

Furthermore, it does not time out and generates no load on our server!

Peter


1970 280SL. Also known as 'admin@sl113.org' and organiser of the Technical Manual.