Chapter 60. Maintaining the Forums

Other than the day-to-day Forums module moderation I discussed in Topic 58, "Moderating a Forum," the Forums module doesn't require much in the way of maintenance. The one thing you'll want to do on occasion, however, is prune the forums. You can set PHP-Nuke to do this automatically on a per-forum basis (see Topic 55, "Managing Forums and Categories," for instructions), or you can do it manually.

Just click Pruning under Forum Admin on the Forums module's main administration menu. You can prune all the forums or select a specific one. As shown in Figure 60.1, you specify the number of days that you consider a topic to be inactive; the pruning process removes topics that have been inactive for that long.

Figure 60.1. Pruning the Forums module.

So how does this work? Let's say I post a topic to a forum and it's incredibly popular. People post replies to it over and over, keeping it going for a year. Then one day everyone loses interest. Thirty days go by without a single reply. If I then prune that forum (or all forums) and specify an age of 30 days, my popular post will be gone.

Regular pruning is a good idea. Like trees, pruning helps cut away dead material and make room for new material to grow. Personally, I recommend the hands-off approach: Configure your forums to autoprune, and stop worrying about it.

Sidebar . FAQ

What happens if I don't prune the forums?

Nothing horrible. If you don't prune occasionally, your database will continue to grow in size, since it's the database that contains the forums discussions' actual text. If disk space isn't a concern, you can prune much less often, especially if your forums aren't very active. However, larger databases will also become slower over time, which is another reason to prune at least every so often.