keeping look and feel for upgrade?

Really taxing things!! I wish all the forums we hosted were this size, we could pack 1,000's onto a server.

This forum is fairly small compared to many that we host ourselves which get around 60 to 300 active users 90% of the time.

With only 15,000 posts your SQL Server database should only be around 50MB in size at the most. You should check the the recovery model is set to simple and you should shrink the database.

Upgrading to version 9 should be fairly simple, but the biggest difference with version 9 is the look and feel so keeping your existing look and feel may take a bit of tweaking.

Maybe the simplest way is to upload a temporary version 9 forum and just have it running on Access while you tweak it. Once you are happy with it switch it to use you existing SQL Server database. Although you will need to use the database upgrade tool to upgrade your database to version 9.


Edited by -boRg- - 06 December 2007 at 7:12pm

Sorry billd3, but as Borg said, your forum isn't that big really.

As a note, your bandwidth usage seems pretty high aswell - do you host a lot of large images for your users?

I'll tell you how I converted my forums to v9, keeping the original colour scheme etc, but tweaking it to actually look better - v9, in my opinion, is a lot slicker looking and put together, so the upgrade actually makes your forum look better too.

• I made a copy of my v8 SQL database and just renamed it to 'test' (for example)
  
• I uploaded v9, and configured it to point at the 'test' database
  
• I then went about creating a skin, basing it on the dark skin which comes with the forum
  
• When I was happy, I upgraded my v8 database (taking a backup beforehand), and then pointed my v9 upload to it
  
• My users were still using v8, but I was using v9 - this allowed me to see any changes which needed to be made, as I was using it on a day to day basis
  
• When I was happy, I then deleted my v8 files, and just moved the v9 files into their place
  

Easy peasy!

http://www.ckyalliance.co.uk/forum/

If your host is saying you're taking too much bandwidth / space / resource, then I would look at moving.  Either take a look at Web Wiz Hosting, or drop me a PM.


Edited by MortiOli - 06 December 2007 at 7:48pm

Hmmm. OK, well, it's taxing our setup. I know borg has educated me in the past on this.....
You can't tell how many users we have at any given time because server memory (sessions) are constantly reset or purged, several times an hour. So it may state there are 20 active users and there are really 50 or 60. We've seen it as high as over 40, then boom, it drops to 1 or 2 so we know the number at the bottom is false.
We don't host the images posted to the forum to keep bandwidth down, HOWEVER, we REALLY REALLY REALLY want folks to be able to upload images of their cars and there's historical info we want to host ourselves, or allow a couple of folks to upload.
Anyway, back to the look/feel thing. With 9, would it be easy to add the navigation to the bottom of the page?
For example, you have this (see below) at the top of the forum pages - can it also show at the bottom, along with the "active topics button" too?
Forum Home - Product Support Forums - Web Wiz Forums Version 9.x Support - Web Wiz Forums 9.x Modifications

We are getting donations collected to do an upgrade of hosting, so we'll probably be wanting a quote on hosting soon. We started earlier when the host kept crashing things - it's been very stable the last couple of months, even though the pool is constantly refreshed and sessions lost. We simply didn't have the money to make any changes then, I think we do now.

Thanks for the tips on the SQL database. I've not really done anything with SQL but will look into it - they use the PLESK control panel, and some SQL manager thing on the web so I have access to poke around.