UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? Strange problem with the topic summary...

Today something strange happened at my forum (http://forum.kaagent.be). In the forum "Algemeen" all the topic titles were gone, there were just blank titles. No topic starters were mentionned (column was just blank) and in the "Last Post" column were no dates, but just "blank 1920 00:00" every time. There were no new users registered in the period of the problem (and you must be registered to post something).

But the topics weren't gone, every topic where users posted a reply, re-appeared in the forum summary. So the forum is beginning to function normally again, but I can't figure out what caused this weird problem...

You can always check this out at http://forum.kaagent.be and then click on the forum "Algemeen" (all the other forums did not have this problem).

Rebuild forum stat files for that forum.

Thank you for the great tip! I did what you said and all the topics are back in the summary! What exactly does the "Rebuild forum stat files" function do? Do I have to do this frequently to avoid having the same problem again? And are there other maintenance functions that have to be done frequently?

Sorry for all these questions, but I'm new to UBB and there are so many features that I don't understand every little detail yet

The UBB uses plain text files to store all its data.

To avoid having to open and reach each of those files to generate the topic listing page, we use a number of metadata files that store thread information. These are the forum_thread_data_*.cgi and forum_*.cgi files inside the noncgi/Forum* directories.

The rebuild stat files function regenerates the metadata files, which usually gets rid of odd little quirks like the one you had.

Generally, you don't need to do any maintenance to keep things running smoothly, except perhaps to rebuild the search indexes from time to time.

[ 01-08-2002 06:15 PM: Message edited by: Charles Capps ]