Active Users List

Active Users List Users of Access versions of the forum DO NOT enable this feature as Access can not cope with the updates required and may lead to the database becoming corrupted and unrecoverable losing all your posts and data!

Well ... I qualify as a user of Access ... so how can I have this feature work?

(In an earlier post I mentioned that I risked it and failed - the board crashed.)

Yeah, that is the problem with using MS Access.  MS Access is a great way to get started without shelling out money for a SQL Database, but if your site grows in popularity, SQL is really the only way to go.

If your site doesn't become popular, then you saved money by not paying for SQL.  And if your site becomes popular, expect to upgrade to SQL to handle the demand caused by being popular.

-boRg- wrote: You can't unless you upgrade to SQL server. To keep track of active users there details are stored in a database table this needs to be constently updated as people move around the forum. The problem then comes with Access, as a flat file database system it can only cope with so many people connecting to it at once, it two people try updating the database at the same time problems occur. You also have the other problem that access doesn't completly remove entries from the database after they are deleted until a compact and repair is done, this then leads to your database file getting larger than it should and slowing down performance.

I noticed that someone commented in the mods forum that they are using Access and an Active Users mod (See Michelle's comment). Now, if the standard feature won't work, does that mean that this mod won't work either?

-boRg- wrote: If it uses an access database to store the data it will suffer from the same problem. The only work around is to store the data somewhere else like an array at application level or the dictionary object.

If I upgrade to MySQL, will the database start anew? Or will everything as is and pick up where it left off?