TWiP Forums – Growing Pains
Have you ever heard that phrase. “he was a victim of his own success?” That's pretty much what's happening to the TWiP Forums.
When we relaunched the TWiP website a while back we made the call to use WordPress Forum software from Simple-Press.com. Unfortunately, due to the increase in traffic it looks like we underestimated the amount of stress the software would have to withstand. And as a result over the past several weeks, you may have noticed sluggish and unpredictable behavior in the forums.
All of this came to a head last night when the forums decided they would no longer display correctly for users not logged in. Things work ok when you're logged into the site. Not cool.
So, we've temporarily taken the forums down to investigate this issue. While simultaneously evaluating new forum software. If you have any comments or suggestions for new forum software please sound off in the comments below.
Apologies for the inconvenience, the TWiP Forums will be back online soon — and better than ever.
We'll chalk it all up to “growing pains”.
Don’t you just love coding issues 😉
vbulletin – its the most robust out there. I have about six boards running it and it works great with few issues but does actually cost money.
Would be happy to help if you are looking for help or moderators / admins….
If you want something that’s integrated with WordPress, you should look into Vanilla Forums. I honestly don’t know how well it scales, but there is a straightforward method for integrating it with your WordPress database so that it can replace the entire comment structure (I’ve done this; clicking the comments link on a post will create a new forum thread, on an as-needed basis) and will use the WordPress userbase as well. It’s a very elegant solution that doesn’t appear to be database-heavy, and if you’ve got any experience at all with MySQL it’s not very difficult to do.
Hmm, actually, it looks like it’s even simpler now: they appear to have written tools and plugins specifically for integrating with WordPress.
https://www.vanillaforums.org/ – This is the download-and-install version; I guess they offer a hosted version for pay at their .com side.