Please consider upgrading to a more modern forum

[jonzo]

One thing that does seem interesting is the Xenforo gallery plugin they have (the official one). It's always concerned me in terms of potential hosting costs if everyone uploads a thousand photos of their car, but it'd certainly be a cool feature to have.

I don't know enough about Xenforo and what the config options are, but we have a lot of photos on our forum as well (it's about leisure boating in a specific region). Invision offer teirs within their SaaS offering and you get a certain number of GB depending on your plan.

However - You can also just specify your own S3 buckets and use those so you have complete control over the spend. In addition, with the bucket being in our own control we have the option of checking it all out somewhere and running an image optimiser over it to reduce the footprint of any files which the forum software hasn't done a good job of compressing. You could also periodically reduce the size of any photos over x years old, for instance.

Invision queried why we didn't just use their buckets as it was "simpler" and we said "cost, mate!". Another reason is that their infrastructure is primarily in US AWS zones and we're in the UK so wanted to choose something closer for lower latency.

We moved images to S3 some time before we moved to the SaaS and obviously there was a noticeable change in disk utilisation, but also in RAM, CPU and bandwidth as our server was only doing the compression part rather than outbound traffic. The other benefit was that when we needed to move to a different server, it was pretty quick and easy as there was FAR less to copy since the majority of content was in the CDN (ie S3). The actual application and database are pretty small and can be moved in minutes.

With my work hat on now, we basically never store/serve anything like images on web servers any more. It's all in AWS / Azure / GCP (depending on system / client) and actually even static pages can go in there sometimes.

You've mentioned upgrades, and that's an area where we have seen a big difference. It's so easy with Invision, whereas phpBB was basically just using a diffing tool and expecting us to know the impact to merging a code change. And I say that as a senior dev / platform lead with knowledge of just how irresponsible phpBB's upgrade process is.

Please don't take any of what I'm saying as criticism - It's more me sharing thoughts / observations from my 16ish years of running our forum, and my experiences of pulling my hair out with phpBB versus how much easier things are now.

[jonzo]

Cheers mate... I do love this stuff, so although I don't want to commit to anything I would likely setup a test site for a while and see how it goes before migrating anyway. That way I could get a feel for things and also take the pressure off.

That's what we did.

[sp3ctre]

We moved images to S3 some time before we moved to the SaaS and obviously there was a noticeable change in disk utilisation, but also in RAM, CPU and bandwidth as our server was only doing the compression part rather than outbound traffic. The other benefit was that when we needed to move to a different server, it was pretty quick and easy as there was FAR less to copy since the majority of content was in the CDN (ie S3). The actual application and database are pretty small and can be moved in minutes.

With my work hat on now, we basically never store/serve anything like images on web servers any more. It's all in AWS / Azure / GCP (depending on system / client) and actually even static pages can go in there sometimes.

Interesting regarding S3. From what I see on my server there is limited benefit to doing that as I am using Cloudflare, so once an image is served once it gets served crom the CDN next time. Seems to be working well and the server load is pretty ok. So unless disk space becomes an issue I think I'll probably keep operating this way as cost-wise it's definitely the best.

I am loathed to do anything that increased cost, as with search traffic decreasing, add revenue tanking etc, I don't want to end up in a situation where it's no longer viable. That said, I do have a value on my time, so whichever way I go the quicker and easier upgrades become the happier I will be

[jonzo]

Yeah, keeping forums going is hard. Much harder than it was 10 years ago, and even 5 perhaps.

Facebook groups wiped out a good percentage of our traffic. In our case, there are probably 20+ different groups covering our subject matter. We used to be the second-biggest of about 5 forums and we're basically the only one left. We do have the pick of sponsors now though...

I'm a big fan of forums and much prefer them. There's generally a real sense of community with forums and you tend to find that the people with really useful knowledge hang out on them.

Another massive benefit is of course that they exist to be a community, not as a way of keeping people on Facebook so that Meta can sling ads at them and harvest data about them and their interests.

It's a shame that a lot of the car forums have sold out to Verticalscope, but given the complexities of keeping them running I guess it's not that surprising. My daily is a Kia and I really hate using the UK owners' forum, similarly the Honda forums were nicer before they were sold.