User cleanup

[solarchat]

Anyone who joined but has not signed in since January 2019 and has also never posted anything was removed today to speed up the database a little.
I did a search for spam emails and there were hundreds of suspicious emails registered. In order to maintain the safety of the forum, these users were removed.

[pedro]

thanks Stephen

[MAURITS]

Well done Stephen.

[ffellah]

Thank you, Stephen.

Franco

[Rudi]

Out of curiosity, how many was purged?

And btw, I’m the founder and administrator of the Danish forum astronet.dk, which is also phpBB driven.
If you need any help here, let me know.

[solarchat]

about 2200.

[DanielBrousseau]

Fine !

[solarchat]

Rudi, how would you rate your skills in advanced forum coding to fix problems, cosmetics and database structure/access?

[Rudi]

Rudi, how would you rate your skills in advanced forum coding to fix problems, cosmetics and database structure/access?

Well, since I launched astronet.dk back in 2027, I have only had a couple of incidents, which was easily fixed.
I'm comfatble in coding php, even though I prefeer C++, which I have 35+ years of experience with ;-)
For example, the front page on astronet: https://www.astronet.dk/, I have coded in php. Also the Sun/Moon gadget, which is rendered runtime from some php code, and the "pulse" graph, which I also coded, and the RSS feeds, interface to astrobin and a lot more. I have a lot of SQL experience from my professional carieer, and much of the code I have on astronet, accesses the phpBB DB.

I learned very early on astronet, that MOD's are a bad idea, since they can be a major hinder for updating phpBB to a new version. So at an early stage, I stoped making MOD's and tampering with the phpBB code myself - well, only small cosmetic changes ;-) Now I prefer extensions.

If you like, we could meet on Teams and have a chat?
We can exchange e-mails by PB.

[solarchat]

awesome. So you are clearly on a much higher level than I am. I have had this forum running under three different types of forum software since 2010. I did the big export and import of all the databases into different packages twice, with moderate success , and don’t want to ever do it again.
I know how to use this forum software and how to add extensions and things like that but I do not have experience in coding. I retained a consultant that I met a decade ago who takes care of any major problems that come up at an hourly pay rate.
Our database is enormous which required me to go to a much larger commercial host as all of the basic hosts limited database size to one gig maximum. We have far exceed that.
We also pride ourselves in not restricting uploads to any particular size so after 14 years we have over 60GB of attachments.
We currently have our own server at Dreamhost and I have been quite happy with their performance and tech-support. It is very expensive annually though.

I looked at your danish forum and it was really attractive and laid out well.

[Rudi]

Ouch, sounds like a lot of hard work, you’ve put into it. Shifting from one board system to another can be very challenging. I have faith in phpBB and that they keep it up to date, in my opinion, the best and most userfriendly forum platform. Even NASA uses it ;-)
If you encounter any challenges, don’t hesitate to contact me, I would be happy to help, but I may not be able to ;-)