UBB.Developers Forums UBB.threads 7 Development How Do I? retreiving post and members count for UBBs

hello, I am the owner of http://www.big-boards.com/ , a site listing the largest message boards on the web, amongst which a couple are UBBs (see http://www.big-boards.com/index.php?type=Infopop ).
In order to update the boards statistics i need to fetch the user and post counts from the site dynamically. Unfortunately, most UBBs don't display this information upfront (often user count is there but not post count). Since i do not know the software indeep, I was wondering if there was a way to find this information somewhere, like a stats url, a "last post url" with an accessible post id in it, or any other technique that I could use to get the numbers dynamically (if possible consistent across UBB versions).

Thanks for your input.

UBB.classic does not have unique post IDs - you'll need to add things up manually. (Topic numbers are unique to the forum, and post numbers are unique to topic. The joys of using flat files... one of the major reasons that you won't find too many UBB.classic boards on your site is due to the basic limitations of our architecture. We always advise keeping less than 3,000 topics in one forum for best performance.)

Doing a complete sum of the posts actually somewhat easy if you have Firefox/Mozilla and UltraEdit - you can use Ctrl + click to select the columns in the forum summary table, then copy to the clipboard. Paste in UltraEdit, do a replace of each tab with a newline, then switch into column mode, select all, and do a column sum.

Now, this isn't true for UBB.threads, which does have unique post numbers. Look at the Number= value in the query string when visiting the latest topic. Do note that this number is the total number of posts ever, as opposed to the total current number of posts. For example, TrekBBS 's last post number is approaching three million (currently 2,996,000 - we'll hit 3 million within the next 24 hours at the normal rate of 4,000 new posts a day), but I have to keep the database pruned to around 400,000 posts due to us not having enough money to afford the server setup we need...

UBB.x/Eve uses random OIDs for each topic and post, so you'll need to use the same column add trick with it as well.