Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

decryption · 2008-08-17 16:10:26

I run a pretty busy forum (16,000+ users, 3 million page views a month, 40,000 posts a month) currently on vBulletin 3.7.2
It gives me the shits. I loathe vBulletin. It's hard to manage, has a billion features I will never use and is a total bugger to customise. I really want to convert it over to FluxBB.

I am a little scared however, for a few reasons.

Stability of the project - will I be stuck with a forum package not receiving fast security updates?
Plugins - there's some pretty basic features (like PMs and polls) that require plugins. Will maintenance of these plugins keep up with maintenance of FluxBB? I don't want to be put in the situation of having a vital plugin hold back me moving to a new verison of FluxBB and miss out of security updates.
Plugin development - is there a good developer community that is enhancing the package via plugins? Is there the ability for me to put up a cash bounty for a certain feature?
Scaleability - can FluxBB handle 50,000 - 100,000 users on a busy forum?
Converting what we have now to work reliably. How would it work in regards to users passwords?
Security - last thing I want is to be hacked and embarrassed. How does FluxBB go in comparison to vBulletin in terms of exploits? I'm sure there's a bit of security by obscurity, but are there things that make it more/less vulnerable than vBulletin?
SEO - we installled vbSEO on our forum and it's done wonders - bringing in lots of traffic! How can I ensure that this traffic doesn't disappear due to not having vbSEO on a FluxBB install?

Just a few questions from a nervous forum admin looking for a better way

Last edited by decryption (2008-08-17 16:21:02)

Jérémie · 2008-08-17 16:30:23

decryption wrote:

It gives me the shits. I loathe vBulletin. It's hard to manage, has a billion features I will never use and is a total bugger to customise. I really want to convert it over to FluxBB.

Welcome to the club. We got jacket

Security: PunBB had a good security history. Very few holes, very quickly fixed. You can check that by yourself.

Plugin: that's the question. It should work out, but to be honest no one can really know right know how smoothly it will happen. However, one feature of Flux is great: security patches as hotfixes (plugins). It means you can wait for a plugin update safer, without updating the whole forum core.

Plugin development: right now the community is a little scarce. Still bigger and more active than a _lot_ of other open sources net project (you can check the forums yourself), but in a hold. We're all waiting for the developers to put 1.3 out. However, once 1.3 is out, the community will awake, and will grow too: I think many people will come from others software (like Pun) once they have a clear vision of what's Flux.

I'm hoping it will get to the level of something like Textpattern, where you can definitely ask for a professional help and have to choose between at least half a dozen serious people to do the job.

Scaleability: Flux should scale like PunBB 1.2, you can check the biggest Pun forums out there. PunBB 1.2 has one serious issue with search scalability iirc, I'm not sure it has been addressed by Flux 1.3 but there's an official fulltext search plugin that should put the scalability search issue back into MySQL hands.

Converting: shouldn't be an issue. Has for user password I don't know, I'm sure someone has the answer. What might be (or not) an issue is the custom bbcode vB uses at length, I don't know how the convert script will handle that.

Security: Flux should be more secure than vB imho. Check PunBB's record by yourself to verify that

PS: I'm talking a lot about PunBB here. If you don't know why, check the history of the fork. And I would advise you to wait for the final release of PunBB 1.3. Yes, i could be months and months away, but there's no point in doing the hard work to convert to the 1.2 branch and then again to the 1.3 branch.

Last edited by Jérémie (2008-08-17 16:31:13)

orlandu63 · 2008-08-17 18:01:55

FluxBB is able to generate SEF URLs (just look at this one for an example) and generates HTML with use of semantic elements, the latter of which vB lacks. If anything, FluxBB will heighten your traffic ranking.

Jérémie · 2008-08-18 13:11:12

Indeed, FluxBB vanilla should be even better than vbSEO (and doesn't pump nearly as much resources as vbSEO, that thing is damn hungry).

Last edited by Jérémie (2008-08-18 13:11:31)

katexter · 2008-08-18 15:18:02

It's great that FluxBB included the pretty URLs in its core. It's definitely more important than private messaging.

Jérémie · 2008-08-18 15:45:06

To be honest, vbSEO is more than just URL with keywords in it. It also tries to fix everything vB does wrong (not needed with Flux, since it already does it right), and it add meta headers and small things like that (things Flux doesn't do).

SuperMAG · 2008-08-18 16:42:27

Jérémie wrote:

To be honest, vbSEO is more than just URL with keywords in it. It also tries to fix everything vB does wrong (not needed with Flux, since it already does it right), and it add meta headers and small things like that (things Flux doesn't do).

can u explain this sentence (things Flux doesn't do) , just curious, may be someone will make an extension for that.

orlandu63 · 2008-08-18 16:48:12

katexter wrote:

It's great that FluxBB included the pretty URLs in its core. It's definitely more important than private messaging.

And subforums I've learned not to argue with the devs though, they're pretty solid on what they want and don't want in the core.

Jérémie · 2008-08-19 04:10:18

I won't get into the details, just read the vbSEO feature list, or try it.

The one thing that comes directly to mind is the meta description header. Google uses it, but it's tricky to do it in a really meaningful way (in fact, I don't have a clue at this advanced hour as how to do it). Iirc vbSEO does this quite simply, like the n first characters of the first post. It might be better than nothing.

I think vbSEO also does a real deep work against proper link to avoid duplicated content. Flux label 90% of its pages as no index, so there is no duplicated content. But I'm pretty sure the regular user that generates outside links to the forum will provide Google with noindex links, and I'm not sure if Google is smart enough to transfer the weight of the backlink to the proper, indexed, url. But again, this feature would have a cost in speed and lightness, and not a negligible one.

Last edited by Jérémie (2008-08-19 04:11:27)

SuperMAG · 2008-08-20 04:54:37

Jérémie wrote:

I won't get into the details, just read the vbSEO feature list, or try it.
The one thing that comes directly to mind is the meta description header. Google uses it, but it's tricky to do it in a really meaningful way (in fact, I don't have a clue at this advanced hour as how to do it). Iirc vbSEO does this quite simply, like the n first characters of the first post. It might be better than nothing.
I think vbSEO also does a real deep work against proper link to avoid duplicated content. Flux label 90% of its pages as no index, so there is no duplicated content. But I'm pretty sure the regular user that generates outside links to the forum will provide Google with noindex links, and I'm not sure if Google is smart enough to transfer the weight of the backlink to the proper, indexed, url. But again, this feature would have a cost in speed and lightness, and not a negligible one.

actually i was doing some research about that long time ago, when there was no 1.3, but leaved it.
i some what understand what you say, but about meta description , fluxbb doesn't seems to have problem with it. try searching in google, the the description that is shown in searches are first lines of the post.

if you dont like that , then some one can make an extension for fluxbb, that asks users for description along with title like IPB, and that describtion should be placed as a meta description for search engine too.

another thing is the redirection problem with fluxbb, vbseo redirect all the old urls or different urls to the current one.

do you know that wordpress has a plugin called redirection that make it possible to enter a url on your site like
http://fluxbb.org/forums/new/reply/1667/quote/13369/
and enter another url that the link is redirected
http://fluxbb.org/forums/topic/1667/usi … ser-forum/

that some good plugin and along with other features check here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

New features include:
* 404 error monitoring - captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
* Custom 'pass-through' redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
* Full logs for all redirected URLs
* All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don't exist
* Redirection methods - redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!
* WordPress 2.1+ only
Existing features include:
* Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post's URL changes
* Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
* Full regular expression support
* Apache .htaccess is not required - works entirely inside WordPress
* Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages
* Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
* Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
* Fully localized

FBI · 2008-08-20 09:55:08

Currently
We have more 32.000 user, 32.000 topics and 440.000 more post with 300 MB PunBB MySQL size (excluding Search)
I've been running PunBB for a year, my old SMF has few security flaws. I've been hack twice. And their resources make me switch for one into another host
I believe VB has need more cpu resources that SMF. But, both SMF and VB are design for profesional needs (if you can pay host/server cost).

After finally I found simplicity PunBB (similar with new FluxBB). I don't need many feature. It just simple PM, karma rating etc..

My visitor satisfied with PunBB performance. And I am glad, its easy to modified or adding custom code. But, if too many code you hook, PunBB (1.2x) will make you crazy

Hopely latest PunBB and FluxBB beta release can solve that.

Just like textpattern blog, PunBB/FluxBB did it.. Simple..

Nick Newman · 2008-08-25 12:44:43

decryption wrote:

I run a pretty busy forum (16,000+ users, 3 million page views a month, 40,000 posts a month) currently on vBulletin 3.7.2
It gives me the shits. I loathe vBulletin. It's hard to manage, has a billion features I will never use and is a total bugger to customise. I really want to convert it over to FluxBB.
I am a little scared however, for a few reasons.
Stability of the project - will I be stuck with a forum package not receiving fast security updates?
Plugins - there's some pretty basic features (like PMs and polls) that require plugins. Will maintenance of these plugins keep up with maintenance of FluxBB? I don't want to be put in the situation of having a vital plugin hold back me moving to a new verison of FluxBB and miss out of security updates.
Plugin development - is there a good developer community that is enhancing the package via plugins? Is there the ability for me to put up a cash bounty for a certain feature?
Scaleability - can FluxBB handle 50,000 - 100,000 users on a busy forum?
Converting what we have now to work reliably. How would it work in regards to users passwords?
Security - last thing I want is to be hacked and embarrassed. How does FluxBB go in comparison to vBulletin in terms of exploits? I'm sure there's a bit of security by obscurity, but are there things that make it more/less vulnerable than vBulletin?
SEO - we installled vbSEO on our forum and it's done wonders - bringing in lots of traffic! How can I ensure that this traffic doesn't disappear due to not having vbSEO on a FluxBB install?
Just a few questions from a nervous forum admin looking for a better way

What site is this? lol

Utchin · 2008-08-25 12:55:21

Nick Newman wrote:

decryption wrote:
I run a pretty busy forum (16,000+ users, 3 million page views a month, 40,000 posts a month) currently on vBulletin 3.7.2
It gives me the shits. I loathe vBulletin. It's hard to manage, has a billion features I will never use and is a total bugger to customise. I really want to convert it over to FluxBB.
I am a little scared however, for a few reasons.
Stability of the project - will I be stuck with a forum package not receiving fast security updates?
Plugins - there's some pretty basic features (like PMs and polls) that require plugins. Will maintenance of these plugins keep up with maintenance of FluxBB? I don't want to be put in the situation of having a vital plugin hold back me moving to a new verison of FluxBB and miss out of security updates.
Plugin development - is there a good developer community that is enhancing the package via plugins? Is there the ability for me to put up a cash bounty for a certain feature?
Scaleability - can FluxBB handle 50,000 - 100,000 users on a busy forum?
Converting what we have now to work reliably. How would it work in regards to users passwords?
Security - last thing I want is to be hacked and embarrassed. How does FluxBB go in comparison to vBulletin in terms of exploits? I'm sure there's a bit of security by obscurity, but are there things that make it more/less vulnerable than vBulletin?
SEO - we installled vbSEO on our forum and it's done wonders - bringing in lots of traffic! How can I ensure that this traffic doesn't disappear due to not having vbSEO on a FluxBB install?
Just a few questions from a nervous forum admin looking for a better way

What site is this? lol

You know, I was thinking erlier that we are so glad to get rid of you. Guess I was wrong

orlandu63 · 2008-08-25 13:41:23

Nick Newman wrote:

decryption wrote:
I run a pretty busy forum (16,000+ users, 3 million page views a month, 40,000 posts a month) currently on vBulletin 3.7.2
It gives me the shits. I loathe vBulletin. It's hard to manage, has a billion features I will never use and is a total bugger to customise. I really want to convert it over to FluxBB.
I am a little scared however, for a few reasons.
Stability of the project - will I be stuck with a forum package not receiving fast security updates?
Plugins - there's some pretty basic features (like PMs and polls) that require plugins. Will maintenance of these plugins keep up with maintenance of FluxBB? I don't want to be put in the situation of having a vital plugin hold back me moving to a new verison of FluxBB and miss out of security updates.
Plugin development - is there a good developer community that is enhancing the package via plugins? Is there the ability for me to put up a cash bounty for a certain feature?
Scaleability - can FluxBB handle 50,000 - 100,000 users on a busy forum?
Converting what we have now to work reliably. How would it work in regards to users passwords?
Security - last thing I want is to be hacked and embarrassed. How does FluxBB go in comparison to vBulletin in terms of exploits? I'm sure there's a bit of security by obscurity, but are there things that make it more/less vulnerable than vBulletin?
SEO - we installled vbSEO on our forum and it's done wonders - bringing in lots of traffic! How can I ensure that this traffic doesn't disappear due to not having vbSEO on a FluxBB install?
Just a few questions from a nervous forum admin looking for a better way

What site is this? lol

http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/

khosk · 2008-08-25 14:13:14

Converting what we have now to work reliably. How would it work in regards to users passwords?

I use both FluxBB and vBulletin for a couple of sites. I have converted one FluxBB install to a vBulletin site for the social networking features of vBulletin but that was for a feature vBulletin offered and not a knock on FluxBB. I love FluxBB and almost always use it instead of vBulletin. Getting back to my conversion, I did run into an issue with passwords. vBulletin uses md5 and does double encryption of the password. With FluxBB 1.2.x, you will probably have to make a slight modification to the code because FluxBB doesn't always use the md5 algorithm, it first checks to see if you have sha1 support and then mhash support. If you don't then it uses md5 and if I remember correctly doesn't double encrypt the password like vBulletin. But this modification should be a very minor one and automatic conversion of passwords should be no problem with a slight modification to the authentication code of FluxBB.

As far as performance, it would depend on add-ins, modifications, etc but I can confidently say that a clean FluxBB install is faster than a clean vBulletin install until a tipping point in traffic is hit where vBulletin will then have the advantage. FluxBB will start to be slower as the amount of traffic increases because of vBulletin's optimization options. An example where vBulletin probably scales better than FluxBB is the option to delay updating "thread view count". I am not aware of an option like this with FluxBB. During heavy traffic, enabling this option can make a huge difference. With the size of your board, I would probably guess that you delay updating of thread count but if you don't then you have nothing to worry about. It depends on your hardware, traffic pattern, etc and is probably specific to each site when this point is reached.

vBulletin offers more features but is much more difficult to customize and sometimes does become a pain to manage. This is the reason I almost always use FluxBB.

Last edited by khosk (2008-08-25 14:41:38)

orlandu63 · 2008-08-25 14:47:12

khosk wrote:

Converting what we have now to work reliably. How would it work in regards to users passwords?
I use both FluxBB and vBulletin for a couple of sites. I have converted one FluxBB install to a vBulletin site for the social networking features of vBulletin but that was for a feature vBulletin offered and not a knock on FluxBB. I love FluxBB and almost always use it instead of vBulletin. Getting back to my conversion, I did run into an issue with passwords. vBulletin uses md5 and does double encryption of the password. With FluxBB 1.2.x, you will probably have to make a slight modification to the code because FluxBB doesn't always use the md5 algorithm, it first checks to see if you have sha1 support and then mhash support. If you don't then it uses md5 and if I remember correctly doesn't double encrypt the password like vBulletin. But this modification should be a very minor one and automatic conversion of passwords should be no problem with a slight modification to the authentication code of FluxBB.
As far as performance, it would depend on add-ins, modifications, etc but I can confidently say that a clean FluxBB install is faster than a clean vBulletin install until a tipping point in traffic is hit where vBulletin will then have the advantage. FluxBB will start to be slower as the amount of traffic increases because of vBulletin's optimization options. An example where vBulletin probably scales better than FluxBB is the option to delay updating "thread view count". I am not aware of an option like this with FluxBB. During heavy traffic, enabling this option can make a huge difference. With the size of your board, I would probably guess that you delay updating of thread count but if you don't then you have nothing to worry about. It depends on your hardware, traffic pattern, etc and is probably specific to each site when this point is reached.
vBulletin offers more features but is much more difficult to customize and sometimes does become a pain to manage. This is the reason I almost always use FluxBB.

IIRC, PunBB automatically delayed updating thread view count. The devs did some testing and found no real benefit of delaying it, so they removed the functionality altogether.

Also, I'm pretty sure that VB, with all its bloat, is much much slower than FluxBB. Have you done some benchmarks?

Last edited by orlandu63 (2008-08-25 14:48:11)

khosk · 2008-08-25 17:00:51

Have you done some benchmarks?

Of a comparably sized vBulletin and punBB install with traffic of say 300-400 concurrent users? No, the only benchmark I have is the conversion I did and punBB is faster. I will be the first to admit that. Out of box, punBB is much faster than vBulletin and probably every major forum software for that matter. With my one conversion, I do have immediate thread view update turned on for vBulletin and the site is not a big site where it will hit bottlenecks. So it is not a good example of a benchmark.

Both punbBB and vBulletin have thresholds and punBB's threshold is higher with an out of the box install than vBulletin, I know that for sure. On the same machine, vBulletin may hit the out of the box threshold at 150 users and punBB may hit it's threshold at 200 concurrent users but one thing vBulletin does is you can turn expensive features off through the admin panel and quickly extend vBulletin's threshold. Obviously you lose some functionality but when it is a choice of your site staying up or keeping features on, take the first.

I have a vBulletin site that carries 400-500 concurrent users and spikes to 600-700. There is no way I could hit that number with features , like immediate thread view update, sorting of online user names, etc turned on, with the current hardware I have. If I had all of these features on I would probably start seeing serious performance problems at 300 users online and be in serious trouble at 350-400. I would guess the same board on punBB would start seeing performance problems at 400 and be in serious trouble at 500. That's a guess but with a feature like turning off immediate thread view update as well as some other easy to configure optimization options added to punBB I could go well beyond 500 on punBB and blow past vBulletin's threshould with maximum optimization. PunBB, with similar features turned on is the faster software but currently there is no easy to use administration module to turn off resource expensive features.

I don't know what hardware, set-up, etc that the poster has so it could all be a moot point anyway. He could have all the features turned on for vBulletin, be running fine on his hardware and then he can definitely expect better performance with punBB. Hopefully what I write isn't confusing I just have experience with both products and I do like punBB better in most situations. But I also know that vBulletin has some extremely large message board installations and has added some features large boards need for scalability.

And this statement

It's hard to manage, has a billion features I will never use and is a total bugger to customise.

I couldn't agree more.

Last edited by khosk (2008-08-25 17:04:52)

Smartys · 2008-08-25 18:21:36

orlandu63 wrote:

IIRC, PunBB automatically delayed updating thread view count. The devs did some testing and found no real benefit of delaying it, so they removed the functionality altogether.

We actually used a feature of MySQL that we thought provided that functionality but really provided no performance benefit. The way vBulletin does it is different and more effective.

yann · 2008-08-26 13:48:14

orlandu63 > no I think he is speaking of a different one

To come back to the original question: punbb 1.2 can scale, but you need to completely remove the search. Punbb1.3 will make the move to innodb easier, and make it easier to overwrite the search engine, which should allow punbb to scale to a couple of 100ks users

decryption · 2008-08-30 08:27:05

Thanks for the posts guys
I think when 1.3 goes final (not a beta), we will probably move to it and hire a programmer to do things with extensions that we have our own custom hacks for on our current VB install.

ProWeb · 2008-09-10 05:54:43

Khosk, those are probably the best first 2 posts ever made, well said!

Honestly, I've played with the idea of moving one of my biggest forums from punBB to vBulletin since my community is screaming for more features. I love punBB / FluxBB and have been with it for 4 years, but as khosk said, there are different needs and different tools to fit those needs. If 1.3 had been out for a year and had a ton of great extensions that could be added and turned on / off easily then it wouldn't be a question, but unfortunately that's not where we're at.

You can see more of my comments on the subject here: http://www.theadminzone.com/forums/show … stcount=22

Forums

#1 2008-08-17 16:10:26

Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#2 2008-08-17 16:30:23

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#3 2008-08-17 18:01:55

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#4 2008-08-18 13:11:12

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#5 2008-08-18 15:18:02

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#6 2008-08-18 15:45:06

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#11 2008-08-20 09:55:08

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#17 2008-08-25 17:00:51

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

#18 2008-08-25 18:21:36

Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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Re: Using FluxBB in Production Environment - 16,000 User Forum

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