What are the practical limitations of vanilla as far as forum size, large number of users/posts?

newvision

I'm brand new to forums and vanilla so please excuse my ignorance. I'm looking at using the hosted service at vanilla, and I have a few questions, as I'm assigned the task of creating a forum for my company.

- Are there practical limits to the size of a forum or number of posts?
- Can I lock a forum / thread ?
- Can I delete user posts ?
- Can I back up my forum locally (on my pc), or other service ?
- How can categories be displayed (we've strong need for these) for users?
- Can I move threads to another more appropriate category?
- Can i migrate easily to my own server / host when I grow ?

Vanilla looks great but we really need to be sure it can handle a large forum with these capabilities.

Thanks for any advice and insight.

newvision

I hope someone can respond with some tips and useful info. Found a few details in the docs but am not really that familiar with forum software.

phreak

Yes (Sink) > - Can I lock a forum / thread ?
Yes > - Can I delete user posts ?
Yes (at least via MySQL and FTP) > - Can I back up my forum locally (on my pc), or other service ?
Yes > - Can I move threads to another more appropriate category?

So far from my experience ...

Greetz

newvision

Are there practical limits to the size of a forum or number of posts?

garymardell

The only thing you may notice is that the search is not robust enough yet. This is currently being worked on to include the lucene search system. Otherwise i don't think there is any limit, and if you don't want to worry about server scaling the hosted version at vanillaforums.com may suit you.

newvision

Are there examples of high volume sites using Vanilla ? I'd like to see it's capabilities as far as scaling is concerned. I've some big projects in mind and would love to use Vanilla if it scales well. Thanks. !

garymardell

Grooveshark use it for their forum: http://forums.grooveshark.com/
Also consider this forum, they imported all the threads from vanilla 1 as well so there are a lot of threads and posts on here.

DanielSchulzJackson

If your forum is public, my feeling is that just using a JS-powered google search form (like w3schools does) is a quick and easy solution. Of course, Google may take a little while to index, but that's not so bad.

Raize

my vanilla forum is very high volume and runs very smoothly and efficiently.. it has 4000 members and gets about 600 uniques per day and i've never had a problem.. check it out: http://talksfu.ca

peregrine

Raize said: my vanilla forum is very high volume and runs very smoothly and efficiently.. it has 4000 members and gets about 600 uniques per day and i've never had a problem.. check it out: http://talksfu.ca

@Raize

check out http://talksfu.ca/about - page not found.