Bulletin Boards

recommendations

[Suki]

I'm looking to add a bulletin board feature to a site that currently has 25,000 registered users(and is expected to grow).

I've looked at UBB but it looks like it is only good up to 20,000 users and Open Topic can get pretty pricey.

Is it worth buying something or is it easy enough to build?

Any suggestions?

[Brett_Tabke]

Welcome to the board Suki.

If you have 25k reg'd users, ummm - I'd think money wouldn't be an issue. With that many users, it has to be something professional. You need someone you can call and scream at when it breaks.

[EliteWeb]

No doubt I agree, yelling @ people can be fun. Atlease its not on your shoulders. I use phpBB and host it myself - hehe i dont getta yell @ myself (;

[Suki]

Good point, although money is always an issue with this project :(

Maybe what I should be asking is does anyone have any recommendations?

Has anyone used UBB or OpenTopic? How would you rate it?

[Brett_Tabke]

VBB is excellent and solid. Yes, it is expensive, but if you have that many people around - whew, you are going to need something that is street proven. That is some serious system load you are prepping for. If you can pull that many people into a forum system, you are going to need a top end box to handle just the forum alone.

[Olaf]

Well, YaBB [yabb.xnull.com] is an open source (freeware) message board that IMO has all of the features the retails ones have. It has a huge support fan board and you can get proority support from the makers for a fee. But the support forum is no-charge.

Running 3 yabb boards myself and haven't had a single problem with it yet.

Best is since it is open source you are free to mess around with the code to implement features from your own site or add extra security.

Oli

[txbakers]

I like the O'Reilly Web Board. If I wasn't using a free one I'd use that.

[EliteWeb]

I use O'Rielly's board for many years without modifing the HTML (tables) was rather large had many nice features such as private messages, admin could broadcast messages to people online ( a nice notification would popup on the userside ) can ban, can turn on chat and have chat built right in. Then I changed ISPs and I couldnt use that one anymore (;

[rcjordan]

What Brett was pointing out is problems of scale and/or traffic volume eliminate many of the usual alternatives. Anyone have experience with a script capable of running 5,000 active members, 20k lurkers (they're cranking up the cgi, too), and thread counts numbering into 5-digits in several forums?

[esconsult1]

Hmmm...

One thing is that, unless you're running mod_perl, stay away from Perl/CGI solutions for that amount of traffic.

Check out the PHP or Java section of Hotscripts.com for a wide variety of boards.

I think the main problem with open source boards however, is the lack of good templating systems that can allow you to merge it all into your current site.

Also, like the forums here, what will make your board grow, is the ability of its members to subscribe to, and receive e-mail when a topic is updated.
Also, although MySQL is a decent database, when faced with lots of inserts, it tends to slow down pretty rapidly because of it's "record" locking schemes. Look for forums that can use more than one kind of database backend.