Hey all, so I've been using ubb for about 2 years now and we are thinking of moving to threads. We have had some stability problems which I think is caused by the high usage of our board, usually 150 to 200 in a 30 minute span during the work day.

Anyways I've been looking at the various ubb.thread boards out there and one thing I've noticed is that there is no builtin daily topics. Is this true and if so what hacks are available? Also for people who are old classic users, what features are missing and what ones are there that are in threads that make it worth the switch beyond the speed of using MySQL.

Any other things people could think want to bring up about switching or pointing me in direction of good threads on this board would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Jon

I have never used .classic so I can't offer any opinions as far as comparisons and pros/cons between the two. There are some .classic -> .threads members here so hopefully they'll chime in when they see your post.

I've upgraded a few classic sites to threads Make sure you've downloaded the latest version of the importer script, and that you import into threads 6.1 - you'll have the best results then Ask if you have more questions regarding that.

For the 'latest threads', check your /addons folder, several scripts are included in there you might like

daily topics

The UBB.threads equivalent is:

View recent messages
Past 24 hours

This is at the bottom of the Main Index page.

Unlike UBB.classic, this displays the posts made within the last 24 hours, not the posts made since midnight in the server's timezone.

Thanks guys.

One thing I guess I'm wondering is from those who have switched are they glad they did it? I guess we are just trying to figure out if we should make the move. The .classic dev community is great and it looks like there is a great one here. There is no immediate need for us to switch but we do have a high traffic board and something faster and a little stable would be great.

So is there any script that is equivalent to the daily topics as far as providing the latest reply summary?

heheh..
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For the 'latest threads', check your /addons folder, several scripts are included in there you might like
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I switched and it was one of the best decisions that I've ever made for my web site! Here is what I did:

• I started with an shtml based web site and UBB Classic, a site that was using about 15 GBs of bandwidth a month.
• I migrated the board from Classic to Threads and bandwidth utilazation fell to 13 GBs a month.
• I moved all of my articles and all but two pages over to Threads posts (in read only forums). Bandwidth fell to around 10 GB a month.
• Last but not least I enabled zlib compression in Threads (my web server supports it) and bandwidth use fell to below 3 GB a month!

It took me about 6 weeks to convert my site over (I have a lot of articles) and the number of users I had didn't change significantly over that period, but the amount of bandwidth I'm using sure did!

Zlib compression has also made my site faster to access since all the data from the server to the client is compressed.

Thanks for everyones reponses!!!!

Allen I actually have not downloaded ubb.threads yet that's why I kept asking. I was just wondering for those that have not only used both but admined both which they like better. Hey Allen don't you admin both? Maybe I better install the thing on my TiBook and try it out.

I'm not actually not worried about bandwidth, I'm more worried about server load, but holy crap from 15 gigs to 3 gigs. Did the number of pages you served increased over time?

Dalantech, what was the response by your users to the change?

Thanks again!!

Helpful Hint:

When converting from classic to threads, make sure you do at least one test run to check and see that all the date is converted over. Check for dup signatures, missing users, moderators lost or missing permissions and anything else you can think of. There have been some issues with these and more since there are so many hacks out there which can change the info in the posts, etc.

If you run into anything wacky, let infopop know by posting on their boards. You can usually get it fixed by someone who has experienced it within a day or so Tis best to make sure all your existing data will be saved and converted properly before you put the new board up for users.

I converted from classic to threads a few months back with one minor bug that I just decided to live with. Had I read and researched a bit more, I would of found the posted fix for the duplicate signature issue! No biggie

The number of pages served changes from month to month (of course) but the fluctuations were too minor to be the cause of my bandwidth utilization going down.

Just about everyone on my forum who was familiar with the Classic board has said that Threads is several times faster. I allow unregistered users to search my forum (lots of PC and networking info) and the searches were slowing down Classic really bad. Searches don't seem to impact Threads as much (must be the MySQL back end).

Some of them complained that Threads didn't have the same features as Classic, but it’s easier to hack features into Threads than it is to hack Classic (IMHO). I've made a lot of changes on my own, and I don't consider myself to be a PHP “scripter”. I think if you've had some exposure to CGI, Perl, etc and you know HTML then Threads is easy to modify (very efficient use of templates).