[Sigia-l] Forum software

[Adrian Howard]

On 12 Aug 2005, at 01:51, Listera wrote
> Adrian Howard:
>>> Database, not flat-file based
>>
>> Why?
>
> The volume is high and the industry is regulated. The DB allows many
> different ways of slicing and dicing posts, backup, search  
> optimization,
> logging, admin, etc.

That's what I was getting at :-) Things like scalability, backups,  
search optimisation are interesting requirements - but not  
necessarily associated with having a DB back end.

>> For me web stuff seems broken these days unless it has RSS/Atom
>> syndication feeds.
>
> While I'm subbed to several hundred RSS sources myself and couldn't  
> live
> without them, this will be a problem fairly soon. Both for RSS  
> publishers
> (frequency, server load, bandwidth, etc) and users (sheer volume  
> and keeping
> up).

True. Although I don't think the publisher side isn't going to be  
that big an issue outside the short term. People will invent more  
intelligent caching/proxy mechanisms and/or pay for more bandwidth/ 
cycles.

The user side is a much more interesting challenge. I have a stupid  
number of feeds in my RSS reader and it's getting more of a challenge  
to organise with existing aggregators. That said, it's still vastly  
more effective than the ghastly e-mail/web combination I was using a  
few years back.

Adrian