pHOTOS INTO THREADS

[Olivia_jason]

Some good points there. In the early days of the forum, we opted for a simple "meat and potatoes" design. The content and the members were always the priority. We will be updating the site, and possibly looking into investing in some more storage space to enable more photos to be hosted here.

The advantages are as mentioned - hacked photobucket account etc. The only real disadvantage is that if the site had a technical issue and we had to revert to backups, it would not restore the pictures, as they are not backed up. The last backup of the site was a whopping 12 Gig.

But we are aware that the site needs upgrading, and useful threads like this help us plan for the future.

does your host do regular backups?? id say they would do it at least every 24 hours and that should include every bit of data including pictures. our host used to do them every 6 hours. we had our site hacked many many times, and we used to have to resort to host data, it was almost impossible for us to do our own backups as you stated 12gig is allot. we could have paid for an hourly backup service. but 6 hours of data loss was annoying but not a killer. you should ask what their server backups are, if its like 12 hours that would be exceptable imo, just remember you should be able to contact your server and ask them to resort to the latest backup if your site gets hacked and destroyed.

also dont get to carried away with updates, due to me being in direct comp with another forum, we would spend every bit of resource available outdoing each other, lol paying for the best forum software going crazy with the most hardcore design and forum add-ons as they were released.

this forum works fine and its simple so i wouldn't go too hardcore with updates. and if you are talking about going vbulletin you need to know if you don't do it right it is a pain for the users, but when done right its awesome.
It is a $120us a year for it. vs smf being free. and smf does the job. and so it depends on budget, it can be either an investment depending on forum size or waste of funds. it is bloody fantastic software and the add-ons for it are very useful.

I really am not going to bag out aa, so im not taking sides here, but i will talk about their use of vBulletin software and the only reason I joined this forum over them when i was surfing around looking for a pinball forum. was that they have not settup vbulletin correctly and the software is done very wrong and making it hard to use. i dont know anything about the history of the two forums so im just saying knowing vbulletin very well, that was the only reason for my initial choice of forum.
a poorly setup paid software vs a good setup? well the good settup software wins every time, no matter how simple it is. being simple format works here.

[Strangeways]

Daily backup which includes the database and content are performed every night. FULL site backups are different. They are used only when we need to move the site to another hosting server, or if the site was hacked and we could not restore from a daily backup.

We cannot restore parts of the site from a full backup. Full backups are done every three months and stored on another server at our request.

Some good points there. In the early days of the forum, we opted for a simple "meat and potatoes" design. The content and the members were always the priority. We will be updating the site, and possibly looking into investing in some more storage space to enable more photos to be hosted here.

The advantages are as mentioned - hacked photobucket account etc. The only real disadvantage is that if the site had a technical issue and we had to revert to backups, it would not restore the pictures, as they are not backed up. The last backup of the site was a whopping 12 Gig.

But we are aware that the site needs upgrading, and useful threads like this help us plan for the future.

does your host do regular backups?? id say they would do it at least every 24 hours and that should include every bit of data including pictures. our host used to do them every 6 hours. we had our site hacked many many times, and we used to have to resort to host data, it was almost impossible for us to do our own backups as you stated 12gig is allot. we could have paid for an hourly backup service. but 6 hours of data loss was annoying but not a killer. you should ask what their server backups are, if its like 12 hours that would be exceptable imo, just remember you should be able to contact your server and ask them to resort to the latest backup if your site gets hacked and destroyed.

[Olivia_jason]

personally if you guys are looking at doing anysort of stuff to the forum i recon you just do the little things, that a simple but make it look cool. these are just ideas, eg the stock forum icons on the new posts and old post are just little gif files, http://aussiepinball.com/Themes/dark-red/images/on.gif . i recon it would make a huge difference to have like a pinball or something like that there instead of the pyramid thingo.
you guys use cpanel? if so you just go into your file manager follow the image location delete that picture and replace it with the same file name and upload the new custom gif in its place. the image is on.gif and off.giv if you just do little things like that i recon you will make a bigger difference to the site than huge upgrades. keep the site nice and simple.

[Olivia_jason]

Daily backup which includes the database and content are performed every night. FULL site backups are different. They are used only when we need to move the site to another hosting server, or if the site was hacked and we could not restore from a daily backup.

We cannot restore parts of the site from a full backup. Full backups are done every three months and stored on another server at our request.

Some good points there. In the early days of the forum, we opted for a simple "meat and potatoes" design. The content and the members were always the priority. We will be updating the site, and possibly looking into investing in some more storage space to enable more photos to be hosted here.

The advantages are as mentioned - hacked photobucket account etc. The only real disadvantage is that if the site had a technical issue and we had to revert to backups, it would not restore the pictures, as they are not backed up. The last backup of the site was a whopping 12 Gig.

But we are aware that the site needs upgrading, and useful threads like this help us plan for the future.

does your host do regular backups?? id say they would do it at least every 24 hours and that should include every bit of data including pictures. our host used to do them every 6 hours. we had our site hacked many many times, and we used to have to resort to host data, it was almost impossible for us to do our own backups as you stated 12gig is allot. we could have paid for an hourly backup service. but 6 hours of data loss was annoying but not a killer. you should ask what their server backups are, if its like 12 hours that would be exceptable imo, just remember you should be able to contact your server and ask them to resort to the latest backup if your site gets hacked and destroyed.

hmm thats a bit average on the servers behalf. might be worth looking around and asking questions about guys who do full backups that at request can be restored in the event of huge failure or hacking. this would be a D.I.Y style server but they should do full backups at least every 24 hours that can be restored at request. because it would be nightmare and almost impossible for you to do 12gig backups constantly. seriously something you should ask about with them or say you are looking else where. even if they change you a fee to revert back to the latest backup that would be cheaper and easier than you having to download 12 gig of forum then upload it again. but allot of hosts offer this service as a sales point even do it your self style hosting.
see if you are hacked and part of your forum is say deleted or destroyed, if the host just reloads the full backup then the only data lost would have been lost between now and the latest backup done by them. and they usually keep more than one backup, they might keep the last 3 full backups or sometimes more. at one point this used to happen to us so much i used to call it time warping lol, reason being when the host loaded up the latest backup the forum suddenly appears with every post and what the forum looked like 12 hours earlier, lol

btw this is a neat little forum, and well setup and easy to use