Archiving
Archiving is a beneficial process that reduces the number of posts stored in the database, which increases the overall performance for your community. When you archive a topic, UBB.x moves the topic out of the Messages database and stores the topic as an XML file. Note that archived files are not only still searchable but they appear in forum lists just like any “live” topic.

Once a topic is archived, it cannot accept any more edits or replies. It is essentially closed. (Note: you can un-archive a topic, too.) Archiving is recommended for every site, but especially for medium to large UBB.x sites. You can use the Automation Tab (discussed below) to regularly archive older topics without lifting a finger. Because most Eve plans limit the number of posts you can store (including live and archived topics), archiving is a very powerful means of keeping older topics around longer than you would be able to otherwise and for maximizing your performance levels.

Automation Tab
With the Automation Tab, you can perform regular maintenance for your UBB.x without ever lifting a finger. A recommended setting is to archive all content that is older than 60 days (this suggestion should be reviewed on a case by case basis…depending on the nature of the information on the board smaller or larger cycle times could be more efficient). An effective maintenance cycle such as the one mentioned ensures that you always have all content from the past year, with a good chunk of older content archived to improve overall performance.

Eve 1.2
The transition to Eve 1.2, brings us the opportunity to give your site a remarkable performance boost. The best way to optimize this "boost" is to archive. I realize that many of you have had troubles with the time intensive nature of archiving in the past, but I am going to provide you with a way to "start clean" and get it all done in one fell swoop.

The transition will archive the data that you specify all at one time in a very powerful and efficient process. While the archiving feature will work after the transition, please take advantage of this time saving and performance enhancing opportunity while its available. To take advantage of this opportunity, the automated archiving feature must be turned on prior to your upgrade to 1.2, this means that you should have it turned on by 2/7/05 at the latest.

To Enable Automatic Archiving:
1. From the Eve control panel click "UBB.x" for version 1.1.2 or "Forums" for version 1.2.
2. Click "Content Management"
3. Click the "Automation" tab
4. Check the box titled "Enable Automatic Archiving" ( a new series of options will appear)
5. Pick the "Archive frequency" you prefer (weekly or monthly)
6. For the "Archive Topics With Last Post Older Than" option, select the time interval you prefer (please note that its better to error on the cautious side and archive more than you wanted to, you can always "unarchive")
7. For the "Include" option, select the types of posts you would like included in the archiving process
9. Click the "Save settings" button to save your changes.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Deni Fitz,

Denise:

This is an excellent heads up notice and I thank you for the email.

I have a suggestion back however.

Your email ID simply says “denise” in the display. Given that I (and many other admins) receive over 1,000 emails/day of which 980 are spam and junk mail, my filters are set high. The messages that do get through are then further hand picked and deleted by me based on sender and subject line without opening them.

Your message appears to be spam because it lacks a last name or any reference to Infopop in the sender display, and your first name is not capitalized and the subject line starts with an odd number "da109".

May I suggest that notices such as this be sent from an ID “Infopop Update” or similar obvious email address? This is the first one of these that I have ever seen and I’ve been running an Infopop board and having you host my site for over a year. If others were previously sent, I deleted them thinking they were spam.

Given the excellent and informative message that this one is, I’m wondering how many others have been deleted by me thinking that they were spam. I am looking only for something that says Infopop in the sender line (just like your monthly bills/statements) for email that I want. All others get the trash can!

Thanks. Hope you can make this adjustment for future notices.

"Kook"
www.oldgmctrucks.infopop.cc/eve

Hmm... So when posts are in the database they are fully editable, but get "slower" as things get big, whereas when they're in the archive, they are fully searchable but don't slow down as there get more of them?

I'm sure databases aren't _supposed_ to get much slower as you add more items! I thought proper indexes would fix this sort of thing, unless you're putting in a complex search query.

I also remember ages ago in an Infopop forum there were some "word game" threads that got >1000 posts long. These became very slow for some reason or the other, though maybe that bug has been fixed now, or maybe it's a similar one?

I suppose in short I'm wondering what the Eve software is doing to every post in the database every time that makes it get gradually slower?

Basically, the larger the database (number of posts) the larger the file that has to be searched for each query. Yes, indexes help, and with only a few queries occuring at a time, even huge databases will run fast.

The main problem is when you have say 100 users online at the same time, all visiting different parts of your site simultaniously. Each of these users when they click a link are generating many queries to the database, which can have data scattered throughout the db across hundreds of MB on the hard drive. Remember, a hard drive can only access data so fast, and when it is being instructed to pick up information that spans across a large area, eventually a bottleneck can form.

The caching does a good job at keeping this to a minimum, there are still physical limitations when you have a large DB and large number of users online.

Hi Stephen -- you're right in most ways but when you are scaling hundreds of tables to the use by millions of users, every degree of optimization makes a difference. Community software is remarkably complex and will become moreso as more features are added.

In the case of version 1.2 the indexing and locking of multiple tables is faster where the tables are smaller. We have in-house benchmarks that demonstrate this and one beta customer of ours with 7M messages is running faster than ever as a result.

Echo OldCarKook re the From name in official emails.

My sincerest apologies regarding the subject line,and the "from" address. I will make sure that future e-mails reference Infopop in a more noticable manner so as not to be confused with spam.

Best Regards,
Denise

Deni,

Why does automatic archiving improve our site performance more than manual archiving?

The major problem with automatic archiving (or pruning) as it currently stands is that we can't do it on a forum-by-forum basis; it's either all or nothing. So if we have boards set up where we want to delete all threads in a certain forum older than 30 days, not touch a forum that gets lesser activity, and then archive all topics in a third forum that are older than 60 days, it's not possible via the automatic methods.

But your post above seems to indicate some kind of site performance is generated only if we're using the automation tool.

"While the archiving feature will work after the transition, please take advantage of this time saving and performance enhancing opportunity while its available. To take advantage of this opportunity, the automated archiving feature must be turned on prior to your upgrade to 1.2, this means that you should have it turned on by 2/7/05 at the latest. "

Are you saying we receive some additional site benefit if we're using automation or just that you assume most of us don't want to do the extra work to archive/prune by hand?

quote:

The major problem with automatic archiving (or pruning) as it currently stands is that we can't do it on a forum-by-forum basis; it's either all or nothing. So if we have boards set up where we want to delete all threads in a certain forum older than 30 days, not touch a forum that gets lesser activity, and then archive all topics in a third forum that are older than 60 days, it's not possible via the automatic methods.

Totaly agree with what visualtea said, a couple of months ago I turned the automatic archiving and deleting feature on just to give it a test, at that time I was creating a forum for uploading MP3s, videos, etc that only Premium Members would be able to download, I paused that project because I didn't have enough time to work on it. I left all my files in that forum, the automation feature was on and because all the post in that forum hand't had a reply in 2 months or more all the content got deleted and part of it archieved. Some of that content was already being linked to from the public forums.

So it would be great if we could control this in a forum-by-forum basis.

I also agree on the forum by forum basis, that would be a big help for myself as well.

In regards to why you should set this feature on before the 1.2 upgrade, is I'm assuming that during the upgrade process, it will quickly be able to archive everything as a part of the upgrade process. Whereas if you have to later do it manually, it can take a lot longer.

For example, have you ever tried to archive over 100,000 posts manually? It can take many many hours. And I'm guessing that as part of the upgrade to 1.2, it will be handled in a much quicker method.

Of course, I'm only speculating at this point

quote:

I'm assuming that during the upgrade process, it will quickly be able to archive everything as a part of the upgrade process. Whereas if you have to later do it manually, it can take a lot longer.

100% correct. That's why we're encouraging people to chnage the setting before the upgrade.

quote:

Are you saying we receive some additional site benefit if we're using automation or just that you assume most of us don't want to do the extra work to archive/prune by hand?

Hi Visualtea-
I see that you have received a number of responses but just to be sure we have answered your question, you are correct. The benefit is in the use of archiving period (either done manually or autimated). The upgrade just provides the added benefit of getting a lrage "chunk" done at one time.

Best Regards,
Denise

I don't recall receiving an e-mail notification about this. Probably went into my Spam quarentine and I overlooked it. If I did not choose the Auto-Archinving feature before 2/7 does this mean it won't work for my forums now?

Also, I was unable to find the Auto-Archiving feature using the path you provided. The path I had to use is as follows:
UBB.x > Content Management > Archiving

Hi Mike,

The archiving function will still work, its just that there is a chance during the upgrade to have it all done very quickly. I can see that your server has not been upgraded yet, so you never received the e-mail regarding when you will be upgraded because it has not been sent yet Keep watching for it.

Rechecking the path now...

Denise

Mike,

I just verified the path that I posted in the first thread and it was correct. I did just add a clarification to step 1. In the new verson of Eve the control panel link names have changed (ie; UBB.x now is called Forums, Chime is now called Chat, Thrive is called Premium Memberships, etc...). The path you noted is to the manual archiving function. You will need to go to the automation tab from the content management link to set up the automated archiving.

Regards,
Denise

My bad. I should have typed "Automation"!

I actually activated the Auto-Archiving this morning not realizing I overlooked the date in your post. How long does it take before it "kicks in"? I have it set for 90-days. All topics older than that are still active.

The archiving will be done with the upgrade -- very quickly. This is why we are recommending setting things now, not later.

*After* the upgrade, archive processes are run once a week or once a month as selected in the CP.

Hi Mike,

It will try to archive next on the day of the week you specified. However, the day we upgrade your server to 1.2 it will archive everything older than 90 days in one fell swoop. You will receive a an e-mail at least 24 hours prior to your scheduled date to let you know when it will occur.

Thanks,
Denise

Thanks!

Can you speak more to what the user experience is? For example, do the edit and reply buttons simply go away?

Is there any functionality to have a topic automatically un-archived should someone choose to reply to it or is it something the administrators have to do? If not it would be cool to see that added in the future. Perhaps something that pops up saying "You are replying to an older message. Please wait a moment while we unarchive the message...".

Finally it sounds like archiving is going to be turned on whether we want to or not. Is that correct?