Big Boards - It may be too late to change but...why so secret?

[!wooha]

I was noticing a thread about big board owners and blah blah blah- and all about it being "hidden" and I was wondering...why?

I mean, I can see a reason for not letting 1 post Johnny and his 40 post forum (30 posts made by Johnny himself) mucking about in there, but they could be read-only?

I'm thinking more visibility of big forums (fora?) would be a good thing and would be good selling point for people who would otherwise consider IPB or VBulletin?

I mean,other than SMF here, I dont know of ANY big boards using SMF... as a matter of fact, SMF seems quite rare on the web to me for some reason, especially considering how long its been about and how full featured it is. Every  site that has a forum or "community" link, I always give it a click to see what they're using, and its usually something else... just wondering if maybe this "closed club attitude" has anything to do with it?

Obviously, it may be hard to change it now, as there may be posts in the big board private area that are..well..private-ish so it may be hard to fling the door open, but still.....

[Trekkie101]

The Big Boards forum is very big, well the last time I had access, and the list of big SMF forums is way over a hundred. Certain things are discussed in there relating to performance issues and setups, a lot of things in there can be tests before SMF takes it mainstream.

The Sphinx search feature is now implemented after a lot of heavy testing based on feedback from those boards.

Look at it as a quality control measure to ensure SMF can develop with performance testing in mind. Anything useful coming from it gets posted in a refined manor, that's useful to admins, rather than "tests" that may not work.

[!wooha]

thanks, I gathered as much (as to how useful it is) - that still doesnt say why it should be 'secret?'

I mean, at the very least it would be good advertising to show how the big boards do it?

[IchBin™]

Why it should be secret, is because there is a lot of information posted by Big Board owners that they don't want public. There's also code and features released to big board owners that shouldn't be released to the public because its not applicable to smaller sites. Perhaps instead of letting everyone see the board, a list can be made for those who have a big board to be on?

[!wooha]

well that certainly makes sense, especially as the BB is already up and running for a while, so those previous posts were made with an expectation of privacy which would be hard to revoke at this late date, the idea of a "Hollywood Row" is a good one, nothing shows how valid SMF is as a forum choice than a forum with a 1/2 million posts, I say!

[Brettflan]

There are plenty of SMF forums out there with well over a million posts. I don't mind posting a link to the one I administer, with 1.3m posts running on a very modest old dedicated server (AthlonXP 2100+ processor, 1 GB memory):
http://forums.taleworlds.net/index.php

And yes, the Big Forums board does tend to have a fair amount of experimental stuff posted which most people probably shouldn't mess around with.

[metallica48423]

some of which stuff can actually harm performance on smaller boards, such as innodb conversion.  there is also experimental things there which can be unpredictable and possibly destructive as well.

that said, i wouldnt mind seeing the board made read only so that it is searchable and indexable by all, but that is ultimately up to the big board owners.