Bumping Topics

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Mystic

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Basically, I need to deal with the topic bumping, and it looks like I'll have to prune topics beyond a certain age. This will be good for two reasons:

#1: It keeps people from bumping older topics because they simply aren't there to bump
#2: It saves on server space because there is less data being stored.

The downside to this is that any old topics that are actually useful will have to be moved to Archives before the topic goes off the margin where it auto-deletes it.

If you have any comments or suggestions on this, I'd like to hear them. I'll wait about a week before actually acting to see if someone has a better idea.
 
That was my first course of action. However, PHPBB does not come with a feature to automatically lock topics beyond a certain age. I looked into getting a mod to let me do it, but it appears horridly complex, and since I have a hard time figuring out how to do something simple like upgrading the forum, I don't think having me add a mod that it designed for an older version of PHPBB would be in any way a good idea.
 
I don't think deleting history is a good idea. Topic bumping is at best a minor annoyance, at worst a not-so-minor annoyance. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Geez.
 
I like history, a441, that's why the old topics have lasted so long. However it's gotten to the point where half of the topics on the board display a lock for being bumped at once point or another. If you can find a way to autolock without having way too much trouble for Mr. No-Knowledge-About-PHPBB here, I'd be more than happy to use that instead.
 
Can you move the locked topics to the last page, or to the bottom of the page? Theres no reason to have a locked topic near the... non-locked topics.
 
I've pretty much got the policy at this point of simply deleting the bump post, putting the topic back to the place where it was, since it sorts by last reply.

The only time I leave it locked is if there is significant reason to leave the posts that bumped the topic.
 
Here's the code to set up, say, a 30-day autolock on topics, or at least the Invision Power Board equivalent. If I find a copy of the phpBB source, a more correct solution can be put in place.

Near the beginning of viewforum.php, you'd enter the phpBB equivalent of
Code:
$cutoff = time()-2592000;
exe("UPDATE `vtopics` SET `state`='closed' WHERE `forum_id`=$f AND `state`='open' AND `last_post` < $cutoff")

and in viewtopic.php,
Code:
$cutoff = time()-2592000;
exe("UPDATE `vtopics` SET `state`='closed' WHERE `topic_id`=$t AND `state`='open' AND `last_post` < $cutoff")

Basically, "Whenever someone views a forum, close all open topics in that forum that haven't had a post in 2,592,000 seconds (30 days) or more. Whenever someone views a topic, if it hasn't had a post in 2,592,000 seconds or more, close it."

There is definitely a foreseeable way to get around this (plugging random numbers into posting.php comes to mind), but that's probably more trouble than it's worth, and if anyone does miraculously find an old enough topic that isn't already closed by someone viewing the forum, then they continue to post in it, then what we have is a full-fledged exploit, and the banhammer can come down hard.

The oldest site backup I have is March 10th, while the Invision board replaced phpBB on February 5th, so I don't have access to that right now. When I do, this message will be edited.
 
I was poking around the PHPBB website's MODs section, when I found this:

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/catdb.php?cat=52

Somewhere on this page is a Mass-Lock MOD.Here are the details.

Wed Nov 05, 2003 10:58 pm [2.0.6] Mass-lock

MOD Name: Mass-lock
Author: siavash79
MOD Description: This mod automatically locks the topics that have not any posts for a while.

MOD Version: 1.0.4
Installation Level: Easy
Installation Time: ~ 10 Minutes


Download File: mass_lock_1.0.4.zip
File Size: 10481 Bytes


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