I've been with you since 2005 and have had a few issues with how big our forum is. Is there a maximum size, beyond which it all gets hopeless? I don't want to move to something different, I'm really happy with YaBB but we've just had yet another wobble on the server and I'm terrified of losing all the information we've accrued. As you can tell, I'm not v technical but the IT guys know nothing about forums. Is it all maybe a server issue? Nothing to do with the software?

Our users have made 119429 Posts within 14645 Topics and we have  8179 registered members. The site is affiliated to a magazine, so I don't want to go through and clear a lot of old posts etc, it's all useful reference material. We are currently running V2.4

Any suggestions gratefully received!

Thanks for replying. It's much quieter here than it used to be 

I think that if I can go to IT and tell them what the forum needs to be stable and expandable, they will do it. I've been reading around and from what I can gather it's YaBB's flat files that can be an issue for servers. What does a server need to do/be to solve this?

In the admin center the Backup facility can be set to remind you to back things up. Also IT should be able to set up an automatic backup for you since what you need is the yabb2 directory and its sub-directories (actually, you can probably get away with just the Members and Messages sub-directories on a daily basis.)

As to where the resource bottle-necks are, Corey or one of the other guys will have a better handle on that than I do.

media116 wrote on Dec 13^th, 2011 at 9:11pm:

As for backing up your YaBB forum, as with any other data that you should back up regularly, my suggestion is for you to use the Cobian backup software, which is free. YaBB's backup function seems to be problematic, and evidently takes a lot of your server's resources to run it.

Alternately, as I recently learned from Corey, an even better backup program might be the Fbackup program, which is also free.

Just so you know about the edit function here, it's not available for me either; at least not presently. We have to remember that this forum is using a beta version, so because of that we have to live with a lot of bugs. I don't get it, but that's the way it is here.

Edited:


In any case, especially if the powers to be want to make YaBB look impressive, and attract some needed talent to take things to the next level, my suggestion is to only run a stable version of YaBB until the newest version is ready for primetime. Otherwise, things here might seem a little amateurish.

Please don't take my suggestion lightly. I'm trying to help here.  

Should add, I outgrew YaBB2.5, so had to turn to the dark side (SMF).