Alright; so you're probably wondering what the thread deletion has to do with today's downtime. It's a bit of a lengthy (and somewhat technical) explanation, so I thought it best to leave it out of the announcement in order to keep it brief.

All I tried to do this morning was upgrade the boards (completed in about two minutes) and rebuild the search index in order to improve speed. (The search index is used every time you open a thread, not just during searches). The first step to rebuilding the search index is to delete the old, obsolete index. Thus, once the rebuild is started, it MUST be allowed to procede to full completion; Monkeying around in threads while the rebuild is going on can lead to data corruption (I'm posting this during the rebuild, but I know precisely how far along the rebuild is coming: It's handling threads 11900-11925, and this is thread 20352, so I'm safe).

Rebuilding the index should take five minutes. Dunno if you noticed, but it's taking a bit longer.

Our database is now so huge that the rebuild keeps timing out. There are simply too many old, dead threads cluttering up the works. This has to be done. I've not consulted Scottie or any of the other staff about this--it has to be done, even if everybody doesn't see it.

vBulletin will allow me to prune threads by date of last post--hence, I'll be deleting anything in which the last post was more than 90 days ago. However, it runs through ALL forums, including the archive forums. I don't know a workaround (if you do, please post a reply in this thread ;p).

I'll do a full backup of the database, but for security reasons*, I cannot release the backup to the general public for download

*you shouldn't have to think about that very hard about that one. Everybody's password is stored in the database.

What I'd like to know from you, is
a) How often would most of you be able to handle a pruning operation? Once every month? Once every three? It's got to be done sometime.
b) do you know of any alternatives--Maybe an app that will save the threads? It should be simple enough to write--Just do an SQL dump of the table and then write a php script to parse it...But it's got to be a server-side app, and I have to have access to the source code, so that I can be sure that ALL it's taking from the database is the threads to be saved. We (EoFF staff) are not going to allow even the slightest chance that somebody's password will be taken out of the database.