Should we prune our forums anymore?

[mark7144]

With space costing so little and home connection speeds getting so fast... do we really need to prune our forums anymore?

I have a forum and I wonder whether I should bother pruning it at all. Ungzipped it is around 70mb but is it so bad if it were increase to 1gigabyte in the future?

I would love to never prune my forum allowing it to be one big resource with nothing being lost.

Can you guys please advise me on whether or not pruning should be done?

[SleePy]

I have never pruned my forum and I don't think SMF has either.. Its just an option for those who want it. Not that many use it though...

[Dannii]

I don't prune. I even keep all deleted posts in the trash board forever. If your forum gets to the size where you have a 1gb database, it probably wouldn't bring much advantage to pruning it then as you'll need a big powerful server anyway.

[mark7144]

Just out of curiosity, can someone tell me the size of the SMF database uncompressed and compressed?

[SleePy]

Just out of curiosity, can someone tell me the size of the SMF database uncompressed and compressed?

Depends on how big your database is..

The default compressed is very very small.. and uncompressed is small as well.
But once you start getting users, posts, boards, cats, topics, etc... it will start to build up..
Mine compresses down to about 7 mb right now from about 80 mb.. which is really good compression I have it set to do...

[mark7144]

Sorry Sleepy, I meant the size of the database on this forum

Mine also compresses pretty well, gzip is great!

[SleePy]

smf forum...

Last I remember hearing it was like 1.2 gb I think... I am not sure since I don't got access to SMF's database...

[vbgamer45]

I would probably never prune the forums. Space is cheap. You want more posts to make the forum look active and to bring in people from the search engines. Sometimes old information can be helpful to people as well.

[Lilac]

I have a daily crontab backup of the database going on mine.  At 400,000 posts+IM's it's about 250MB, verbose.