This forum provider

[JohnMSeymour]

Hi all and Merry Christmas.

I have been on another forum for years. It's for early (61-66) Ford Econolines and is part of yahoo. For the past couple of years it has become a nightmare. Members can't access files, images, etc.

My question is- Who is the provider of this forum? I have seen this format on other forums, so I guess it is somewhat generic.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you,
John

[rockne10]

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[alex54]

There is a lot going on to make a forum work. vBulletin is the forum application software. It is generic, but is somewhat customizable by the end user (website admin). This application runs on php, which is the server side scripting software, and sql, which is the database. Some aspects such as pictures and files, are customizable on how they work, such as size, format, downloadable if logged in or not, etc. These are determined by the administrator of the site. Usually, the size of storage determines these things. If the server is privately owned, hard drives cost money. If the server space is rented, the limit is how much $ per month per GB of storage space you are willing to spend. Also, how much bandwidth is needed. The more multimedia going through the server, the slower it performs, unless you pay more as the admin of the site.

Now none of this precludes issues that affect the site. Anything from the operating system of the server, the forum applications, the database etc., can affect the site. If the site exists as a virtual machine in a bigger, hosted aytem, there is another layer of complexity.

So your question on provider, it depends who you are talking about, and who actually physically runs the site. You have the site admin who can can be some settings, and the server admin, who can potentally change anything, depending on the agreements. Sometimes it is the same person if it's a private server, or multiple people if it's hosted.

I did run at one point, 12 websites on a 2 server cluster at work. Some sites were public, some private. Out of the 12 sites, 3 were forums. I had to be creative since the servers were old and very limited on power and storage. I'm glad I don't have to do it anymore.

Edited to fix the autocorrect mis-spellings