i am relatively new to E-Blah. i did some research on different free forum offerings before choosing to go with E-Blah for my site's forum. i must say that i'm pretty pleased so far.

i have gone through the setup of the standard E-Blah and everything seems to be working correctly. i am still in somewhat of a customization/testing phase with it, and i saw that there is a beta for an sql version of E-Blah. i am not very experienced in the ways of running a forum, but my general thinking is that having a database backend is better than having a flat-file system. any input on that would be greatly appreciated.

am i right in the assumption that E-Blah:sql is still very much in beta stages? should i wait to use it as my primary forum until a later version? or is it generally stable and useful at the current version?

i can see that there is a new install doc and a converter for the flat-file version to the sql version of E-Blah at blahdocs.com. if i do decide i want to try out E-Blah:sql, should i do a new install? is converting from the standard flat-file forum recommended?

my primary desktop OS is ubuntu linux, the server is running linux (centOS i think?) and it does have mysql installed. the forum site is http://www.sk8dork.com/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl. if you register you will not receive any email notification as i have yet to get that set up on the server.

For small forums, a flat text database should be quite sufficient.  If you expect it to grow larger, you might want to consider using the SQL version.  It's more flexible.

You can convert the forum to SQL from flat-text, and it works fine.  A new install will really (probably) be the same thing for, so whichever you feel is easier would be fine.

Either way, if you feel you want a MySQL version later, you can always upgrade.  And yes, the Beta 3.5 version is quite stable from what I've heard (or I've not seen any bug cries as of late :)).

thanks. i think i'm going to work on the conversion tonight. it is obviously just a small forum for now, but it will grow so i might as well get it done now. =)

conversion didn't go too smoothly. i decided to go ahead and just start it from scratch with sql. it's up and working, but i have some questions mainly in the tune of differences from the flat-file version.

first, i installed the latest beta. i attempted a nightly upgrade, but i'm not sure how well that went since some files seemed to be incomplete so i overwrote them with the previous versions, but i noticed the following things prior to attempting the nightly upgrade.

why does the 'category setup' item in the quicklinks section actually lead to the boards configuration page (i can see that the url points to a-boards rather than a-cats, but why? it's probably an easy fix, but that's how it is set in the latest version, so i thought i'd point it out.)

how does the 'order'ing work? the main view of my categories only appear in the order that i created them. i tried to set numbers in the order field for the categories, even for the boards, and nothing has changed. i even tried starting from zero. ideas?

where did 'view member list' go in the admin panel? in the admin panel i only have the following:
Member Setup and Controls
Member Groups
Mailing List
Ban Users Panel
Validate Members
Pre-Register Member
i can go to the member list from the main page, but that's annoying. again, i'm sure this is an easy fix.

and now a general question about functionality, not really a problem as far as eblah is concerned: can i set up a special text formatting color that can be used for 'spoilers'? i.e. i have a film board, as a rule i want people to hide spoilers. my default theme is dark, and i had to customize it further so that black text is unreadable when in quote. but obviously it would be easily readable in a light theme, like X2. can i somehow set up some special variable and create a text color like 'spoiler' which will either make the text invisible or default to the color of the quote background depending on the theme being used? so they could say [ color = spoiler ]?

ok, i've just properly (i think) upgraded to the latest nightly, and none of the issues i described above have changed. i've noticed another issue:

the topic count shown for each board is inaccurate, it is just the same number as posts in that board. also, i think it's related, at the bottom in the forum stats it shows the correct number of boards, incorrect number of categories (just shows the same number as boards), incorrect number of topics (same number as messages), correct number of messages, correct number of members.

it would be really awesome if i could get some insight to my problems here...are the answers already posted somewhere else in the forum? i tried to search for the problems but didn't come up with anything.

It's on my list to one day add a recounter script, because when your forum is converted the old counts are not always accurate.

Quoted from Justin

It's on my list to one day add a recounter script, because when your forum is converted the old counts are not always accurate.

hmm...but really it's not converted. i tried to convert, it didn't go so well, i deleted it all and started fresh.

is there a known problem with ordering the categories? i found that ordering the boards in the categories works fine, but categories never budge from the spot when they were created.

What do you mean?

as mentioned in my earlier posts, the 'order' field in category administration does nothing. i can put any numbers in there and the order in which categories show up in the main board index does not change. the same 'order' fields work fine when choosing the order for boards, but not categories.

Export the boards and categories tables and I'll try to look at it (this may take a while though).  You can also send me your FORUM login and the control panel to look at your MySQL.

Any word on the Topics and Posts counts in the SQL version?

I have a test copy working fine but this is a big issue as it looks bad.

Thanks

You mean the template need to be change ? You can edit css accoeding your style right ? :-/

Not css its the topic & post counts are the same on the forum homepage.

http://www.atlantic-salmon-access-point.com/forum/

Justin is a genious with this stuff, maybe more a Perl man than SQL. haha

I have been watching this thread for a while, figured he would have a fix by now.

Have you tried recounting the posts?  I don't have this problem on my SQL forum, so I am wondering what is causing it.  You might also try uploading Install.pl again and running an upgrade one more time.

If that doesn't work, download the latest nightly (28 May 07) and upgrade.

Thanks craig for the ideas, have been just patiently waiting for a fix, have not tried anything yet.

I've not had a lot of free time.  I work and go to school now.