The amount of time PLANET Z must take to John, is crazy

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 1:41 pm

Wow...

I am moderating a forum with 20 people, and now I could realise how much work there must be moderating a forum like this one, so big and with so many people.

Congratulations John, for your patience and work, my respects

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Mon Aug 06, 2007 3:23 pm

Ni Nestor,

You now realize how impossible it is for the moderator to read every post! For the first couple years, I certainly tried to read everything on planetz- but it became an enormous timesink as our user population grew, and as the number of posts became so huge.

Planetz has become a very successful self-moderating community! The amount of moderation I do now is limited just to the occasional spam, and helping out users with forum problems. And of course the occasional total freak-out that requires much more attention

Also, fortunately, I'm not so involved in developing the forum software itself anymore. Thank goodness

-John

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Tue Aug 07, 2007 11:22 am

Fortunately few and far between!

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 5:46 am

It’s a hilarious description the “occasional total freak-out” of the members. This is rare, but when it comes in the Z, it comes hard, true…

When I mean that there is a lot of work to do, I’m not talking about reading posts only but solving software problems, tuning up, upgrading, making backups and dealing with personal needs also. That takes quite a few hours.

John, what do you use here for backups and every how many days or weeks do you make one?

Note: I can tell Planet Z works very fast... I remember it used to be slow, perhaps 60 to 70% slowler that today when it was in a different server, a few years ago. But now it works truly nice.

FrancisHarmany · Post by **FrancisHarmany** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 6:47 am

Yes mucho respectos!!!

John Cooper · Post by **John Cooper** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 8:42 am

Hi Nestor,

Yes, agreed. It is very time consuming dealing with the software, setup, bugs, and feature requests. Fortunately, once you get things set up and they're running smoothly, they tend to continue to do so with less intervention (until it breaks

For example, one thing I have to deal with again is how to expire our old mp3's off the site- they take up huge amounts of disk space. I had a scheme set up to auto-expire as necessary, but it's broken since I upgraded our forum software.

As for backups, I have a nightly cron job running that dumps the entire forum database into a SQL file. I periodically transfer the file off the machine.

I depend on the service provider to back up the machine itself at some regular interval...

Let me know if you want any more specific assistance. If you're on Unix and MySQL, I can send you my backup scripts for you to use...

-John

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 11:37 am

That's very cool of you John, If I see the need of any specific change or demand, I will ask you here. Thank you

In fact, I'm in a very revolutionary new platform which is Unix and Windows at the same time. It is a new technology offered by Netfirms.

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Wed Aug 08, 2007 1:50 pm

It's crazy to see how much love those guys at PhpBB pun on their amazing product... These people do know hot to well use their time.