Hi, the title pretty much says it all really, I've noticed that rebuilding all boards and rebuilding all members fixes quite a few things, but what exactly does this function do? does it delete them all and recreate them? If so how can that fix an issue because surely it would write the same copy it just deleted so any error should still exist?

Thanks.

It can be handy when moving a forum or restoring a forum. Sometimes the boards get out of sync and a rebuild will fix it. I've used it a couple of times. Recounting members just checks to see if the member count is correct and adjusts the database accordingly.

Member rebuild -- it'll rebuild the actual "quick database" that all members are located in.  Users are kept in .dat files, but there is also a "quick" database to quickly search for members so that E-Blah doesn't have to open hundreds and hundreds of files just to find one user.  That file gets out of sync, from time to time, due to server issues usually.

Board Rebuild -- it opens all of the board data files and then checks to make sure the counts are correct.  It rebuilds every listing in the datafile, so usually if you upload Messages in ASCII, but forget to do "Boards", a rebuild will fix the issues.  Sometimes a message split, move, merge, etc, may not function 100% correctly.  This will fix the counts and errors that it could possibly cause.

ahh "only now do I understand"   Thanks!