Big Board Optimization

[pegasus]

The initial posts should not be read as suggesting that VaultWiki had then had poor handling of 200 users online. As the tech who dealt with the case in question, I can say there was a bug in the import script at that time (VaultWiki 2 Beta period) which caused database corruption in certain situations because of a malformed query. It was not a question of how many users were online at the time. At that time, the particular bug was fixed and since then, the script has matured very much.

To answer your first question, I will have to do some research into our client base, as personally I don't know the numbers and am only really familiar with the clients who have posted in the forums for help. I will try to get an answer for you before the end of the day.

At first we believed that the vBulletin 4 version of VaultWiki would have some features not available in the vB3 version. To be more precise, we first develop new features on the most up-to-date version, and only backport what can be implemented in vB3. At first we thought the search improvements (more search options and filters) would be limited to vBulletin 4, but we may be able to add vB3 support soon - it just hasn't been attempted yet. The one feature I'm aware of that can't be backported is the integration with vB4's Asset Manager.

[pegasus]

mp3car.com - http://www.mp3car.com/vbulletin/vaultwiki/
stats - http://www.big-boards.com/board/1379/

I see another few big-boards that appear to be using VaultWiki in areas hidden from guests. They are either testing, have disabled it, or haven't gotten around to migrating for some reason. Like I said earlier, I will mention something in the newsletter to hopefully get some response from the big-boards. If there are any technical issues, we want them to be fixed.

[kmike]

Thanks for the response. Though mp3car.com is nowhere near a big board, the visitor activity isn't that low according to Google Ad Planner.

Regarding the search, my understanding is that VaultWiki uses first post in a thread as an article content. Does VaultWiki have a special script for handling just article searches? I can't see any dedicated wiki search fields in the demo pages, and the search field on the main page (http://www.vaultwiki.org/demo/) seems to be broken. For example, searching for "namespace" throws this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined method vB_Search_Criteria::get_notequals_filter() in /home/crackede/public_html/vaultwiki.org/packages/vaultwiki/search/type/vaultarticle.php on line 91

[Alfa1]

While its hopeful to see a fairly active board using Vaultwiki, mp3car doesnt use Vaultwiki its full functionality. There are no chapters/ ToC. I wonder if they just turned functions off by preference or if they needed to turn them off for some reason.

Requesting feedback trough a newsletter works for me. I'll await the response.

kmike: I havent migrated to vaultwiki and like you i am still researching.

[pegasus]

Regarding the search, my understanding is that VaultWiki uses first post in a thread as an article content. Does VaultWiki have a special script for handling just article searches? I can't see any dedicated wiki search fields in the demo pages, and the search field on the main page (http://www.vaultwiki.org/demo/) seems to be broken. For example, searching for "namespace" throws this error

Thanks for reporting this error. I guess vBulletin changed the search model on us with 4.0.2.

While there aren't any dedicated search fields visible in the demo pages, fields have been added for filtering based on group and link content - currently these are mainly used by Special pages to provide statistics data and rank pages that way. So yes, there are a number of special scripts for handling just article searches.

[kmike]

Alfa1: Fortunately we're going to start a fresh wiki so we don't have to worry about importing.

pegasus: I see that you have a special content type for searching just Wiki. What about vB 3.8, which doesn't have content types, how to search just Wiki articles there?
The reason I'm so interested in search details is that we're running a customized search solution based on Sphinx search, so we'll most likely need to adapt it to VaultWiki's search needs.

[pegasus]

We have a special content type for searching in vB 4 only out of necessity. In vB 3.8 search was easy to manipulate, but vB 4 practically requires you to make your own content type if you're modifying search criteria.

[Alfa1]

Like I said earlier, I will mention something in the newsletter to hopefully get some response from the big-boards. If there are any technical issues, we want them to be fixed.

Did your newsletter result in any word from active boards or big boards?

[pegasus]

I'm not sure that the newsletter had anything to do with it per se, but over the past few months we have had more participation from big boards. They have yet to do anything like post a review of how VaultWiki scales, but one of our biggest clients (8+ million posts) has made a number of suggestions on improving performance in such environments, and many of these suggestions (save for the content-type rewrite) have already been put into effect in 3 gold.

The new class and file structures are 2 improvements that have come from such discussions.

We have also known for a while that the vault_link table doesn't scale well (and thus why there was an on/off switch for it), and for the next release we have made improvements that reduce disk usage and multiplies the speed of some queries on that table (our tests were using 350,000 records) by almost 25x over the previous table design. I'm very excited about the speed (and stability) increases this will bring all-around. That patch will be out later this week.

[Alfa1]

I really like the effort you are putting into improving Vaultwiki for big boards and your general support.

Would it possible for me to take a look at those big board(s)?