Considering creating a forum from scratch

[aeroswat]

Would this be a good idea or would it be a better idea for me to just use something like PhpBB? I need to create a forum that's able to handle massive traffic and I am not sure exactly how everything would be stored. What would be the best way to keep track of posts and pm's? Should pm's be limited to a certain amount and have column names for each pm? Alternatively should posts be generic and contain information like poster, date/time, forum, post?

[Wolphie]

Honestly, there are so many bulletin board softwares out there, it's pointless writing one yourself unless it has a unique feature which none other has. Which is unlikely since most bulletin boards support plug-ins etc...

 

I'd stick with one that's maintained, open-source and supported.

[aeroswat]

Honestly, there are so many bulletin board softwares out there, it's pointless writing one yourself unless it has a unique feature which none other has. Which is unlikely since most bulletin boards support plug-ins etc...

 

I'd stick with one that's maintained, open-source and supported.

 

If this is the general consensus could you recommend a php forum software that is highly customizable, able to freely be used in business application, and very efficient

[Psycho]

Based upon the questions you have I would highly advise not trying to build a forum yourself. Most of your questions are related to database design. With a forum, a good, normalized database design will be key if it gets a lot of traffic. It sounds as if that is not an area where you are strong at. If you were just building a forum for learning purposes I might say go ahead, but not if it is something that a site with a lot of traffic will depend on. Even if you were very skilled I would still suggest against it. Anything you produce is going to have bugs - many of the available, ready to go forums, have been out long enough that many/most of the issues have been found and resolved.

 

Although there is one thing to say about having a custom forum. With the ready-made forums when a security hole is found any sites that use that forum may be at risk until the hole is patched. Because of their widespread use, there are more people looking for and using vulnerabilities against those forums.

 

If this is the general consensus could you recommend a php forum software that is highly customizable, able to freely be used in business application, and very efficient

 

You should try some out to see which ones have the features you need.

[aeroswat]

Based upon the questions you have I would highly advise not trying to build a forum yourself. Most of your questions are related to database design. With a forum, a good, normalized database design will be key if it gets a lot of traffic. It sounds as if that is not an area where you are strong at. If you were just building a forum for learning purposes I might say go ahead, but not if it is something that a site with a lot of traffic will depend on. Even if you were very skilled I would still suggest against it. Anything you produce is going to have bugs - many of the available, ready to go forums, have been out long enough that many/most of the issues have been found and resolved.

 

Although there is one thing to say about having a custom forum. With the ready-made forums when a security hole is found any sites that use that forum may be at risk until the hole is patched. Because of their widespread use, there are more people looking for and using vulnerabilities against those forums.

 

If this is the general consensus could you recommend a php forum software that is highly customizable, able to freely be used in business application, and very efficient

 

You should try some out to see which ones have the features you need.

 

Thank you for this comment. This is a great way to look at it in my opinion. Because of the extremely heavy modifications that will be required for the forum I am considering doing it on my own. I thought that a decent timeline for the preliminary release of the forum if i were to work on it by myself, (I will actually have someone else working on the aesthetics of the site while I work in the inner workings), would be around 6 months. This would be the release of the basic features and then over time I will add the advanced features. I'm not very experienced in this field of work but this seems like a reasonable deadline. I won't be doing any of the graphics for the site either. That will be done by 2 graphics artists working on the side. I have used PhpBB before and that's why I mentioned it in my first post. It is a very nice "good to go" forum from what I've seen. It's very clean and easy to use for a basic user (kinda like windows ) However when I dove into the code and attempted to make changes I found that this was very difficult. The code seemed somewhat messy to me and hard to follow. I was able to make changes but not as many as I would have liked to. It seems like it took me much more time to make those small changes than what it would have taken me to just re-create the entire thing myself.

[aeroswat]

It might look as if i totally ignored your recommendation mj but I don't want it to seem like that. I am considering both. I agree that it would be a bad idea to just go about it. Maybe I should try to create a small one first and then standardize it until i get it the way it needs to be. I do not know the limitations of MySQL and PHP in these regards though and this is definitely what I am concerned about the most. If I do stumble across a good pre-built package i will not hesitate to use it. By certain standards this may not be considered massive traffic but I feel that for a forum it would be rather large. I am creating this forum for an audience of 10,000 - 50,000 regular users.

[ignace]

Here's a list of a few good forums around http://webtecker.com/2008/05/02/8-popular-open-source-forums/

 

I highly recommend Vanilla or SMF (which PHPFreaks uses)

[BluMess]

I'd just like to throw this out there

I was in the same position, and while a lot of the pre-made forums out there are very effective etc, I found it impossible to customise them in any way, to make my own mark on them. I searched and looked into it for a long time, but gave up and went my own way to make a forum.

 

If your site design is generic and would fit with the forums' general simple, light-coloured style, then it would be best to go with one. For me, I had lots of dark colours and as said before I couldn't make anything out of where my header and footer could go. I still made my own forum being a newbie and I have to say there have been SO many bugs to sort out, it's unbelievable! But they're going, and I'm starting to see the advantages of making your own forum.

You can integrate it perfectly with your own site - bring in user details with ease, add and edit any area of it freely, and choose the features you want to make for it. You can even add to your BBCode script to make custom code tags, like bringing in youtube videos (very easy, just copy+paste their embed code but use a specified video id instead of the one they give you).

 

It's really up to you - it is very satisfying to make one, and provides you with HUGE flexibility over things as I've said; everything can be tweaked, which makes it stand out from other pre-packaged forums. But it has taken a long time to get rid of the bugs, including many headaches over string shortening. It's also not as reliable as i'd have liked, with glitches popping up (the id int auto_increment in the database wasn't big enough to hold any more posts, which was a confusion for a while) and if your site has lots of traffic you don't want users poking holes into your work, so I'd advise it best for low-traffic sites while you get it stable

 

Good luck with whatever you choose!

 

 

[aeroswat]

I'd just like to throw this out there

I was in the same position, and while a lot of the pre-made forums out there are very effective etc, I found it impossible to customise them in any way, to make my own mark on them. I searched and looked into it for a long time, but gave up and went my own way to make a forum.

 

If your site design is generic and would fit with the forums' general simple, light-coloured style, then it would be best to go with one. For me, I had lots of dark colours and as said before I couldn't make anything out of where my header and footer could go. I still made my own forum being a newbie and I have to say there have been SO many bugs to sort out, it's unbelievable! But they're going, and I'm starting to see the advantages of making your own forum.

You can integrate it perfectly with your own site - bring in user details with ease, add and edit any area of it freely, and choose the features you want to make for it. You can even add to your BBCode script to make custom code tags, like bringing in youtube videos (very easy, just copy+paste their embed code but use a specified video id instead of the one they give you).

 

It's really up to you - it is very satisfying to make one, and provides you with HUGE flexibility over things as I've said; everything can be tweaked, which makes it stand out from other pre-packaged forums. But it has taken a long time to get rid of the bugs, including many headaches over string shortening. It's also not as reliable as i'd have liked, with glitches popping up (the id int auto_increment in the database wasn't big enough to hold any more posts, which was a confusion for a while) and if your site has lots of traffic you don't want users poking holes into your work, so I'd advise it best for low-traffic sites while you get it stable

 

Good luck with whatever you choose!

 

Thanks for the advice guys. The auto_increment numbers are something to worry about. Does anyone have advice on how to handle that? Would you reset them after a set time? Like a year or something? Would you make separate tables for each forum to cut down the number? Very interesting things to think about. Keep the recommendations coming guys! This is very informative and I appreciate every bit of advice.

[Psycho]

The auto_increment numbers are something to worry about. Does anyone have advice on how to handle that? Would you reset them after a set time? Like a year or something? Would you make separate tables for each forum to cut down the number? Very interesting things to think about. Keep the recommendations coming guys! This is very informative and I appreciate every bit of advice.

 

You just need to define the length of the id fields to an appropriate length. The previous poster simply underestimated how big to make his fields. However, you may want some function to clean up the forum of old posts - that's for you to decide. Making separate tables is a bad idea in my opinion. Only increases the chance of errors.

 

My recommendation, if you are to proceed with this, is to do A LOT of reading about database design and normalization.

[aeroswat]

The auto_increment numbers are something to worry about. Does anyone have advice on how to handle that? Would you reset them after a set time? Like a year or something? Would you make separate tables for each forum to cut down the number? Very interesting things to think about. Keep the recommendations coming guys! This is very informative and I appreciate every bit of advice.

 

You just need to define the length of the id fields to an appropriate length. The previous poster simply underestimated how big to make his fields. However, you may want some function to clean up the forum of old posts - that's for you to decide. Making separate tables is a bad idea in my opinion. Only increases the chance of errors.

 

My recommendation, if you are to proceed with this, is to do A LOT of reading about database design and normalization.

 

Thankyou for the suggestion. I will do some looking into these topics. I'm not going to jump right in. Still in the planning phases. I thought he was talking about the auto_increment number and how it only holds up to a certain number like MAXINT