time to move this forum to a more stable platform

[jannuss]

Friends,

This forum has a very iffy reliability reputation.
Recently it was down for three days.

I recommend we ask the Redlers to move it to a more trustworthy platform.

Any suggestions?

Janet

[shades]

Don’t have any suggestions, but there have been several times over the last 2-3 months when the board was down 2-3 days at a time. I wholeheartedly support Janet’s suggestion.

[macsailor]

I have to agree on this one as well. To often down to many times the last 6 months.

[rpcameron]

I agree, but I think there are a few issues that need to be singled out to determine what the problem is. The forum has already been rebuilt/replaced once (due to a massive influx of spam accounts), but it was replaced with another install of phpBB. So, the question remains, what is the cause:

• Server OS/Host Is it the actual machine/VM that is having problems? Are these security related, or is it just bad maintenance?
• Web/HTTP Server Is the problem the HTTP server hosting the forum? Is it Apache2, Nginx, lighttpd, something else?
• Database Is it the database backend? MySQL, Mariadb, Postresql?
• Application Framework Is the problem with the PHP installation? Is it time to move to something else? PHP-FPM? Hack/HHVM perhaps? Or perhaps some other (Fast)CGI platform, such as Go, Rust or Ruby?
• Forum Platform Is the problem with phpBB itself? Should it be replaced with an entirely different forum stack?

The problem seems most likely to be something above the web server itself, since most of the errors I get are about database issues. To me this implies that there is either a problem with the database, the application framework or the connectivity between the two. But, regardless of what the problem is, something ought to be done about it.

(Of course, perhaps all of the forum problems are because the developers are too busy adding important features to Mellel, such as more flexibility with cascading styles, better PDF export options and Auto-Title/structure handling, parallel/linked columns, tables that can handle being split over multiple pages, table styles, &c. Of course that's doubtful, but one can hope that features that have been asked after for many years consistently might actually appear ...)