Drupal didn't work out the way I hoped, and since automatic user contributions are uncommon outside of the forums, I'm thinking about moving them to better forum software, such as vBulletin. Drupal registrations would be locked, and only available to those interested in helping to maintain the site.
Any thoughts?
Actually, it looks like Drupal supports vBulletin now, so we wouldn't even have to split it.
Might it help speeds? I get slow responses and long waits very often when making posts. At times it's well over 30 seconds from when I hit post until it starts to load the next page. I'm very sure this is what causes the common multi-re-posts we get here from new users.
I'm an admin of a forum that supports about 30,000 users and I've had nothing but good luck with vBulletin. It puts mysql through its paces, though. Together, they're RAM hogs.
I'm hosting my own vBulletin site off my Dual G5 at my house witch is off of Comcast cable. Check it out www.x970.com
Sorry, I mean this in no way to be advertising or spam, just a reference.
From what I was reading on drupal.org, it looks like vBulletin ought to speed up the forums a bit. Given that they're the most actively used portion of AF it's probably worth the effort.
I'm also quite tempted to throw in a little javascript onSubmit to the post form so that the button can only be clicked once and then is made inactive.
-BW