modperl-ultimatebullboard-proprietary-code-sucks-again

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To: kyle dawkins <kyle@centralparksoftware.com>
From: Tom Servo <tomservo@cnw.com>
Subject: Re: Ultimate Bulletin Board? Jezuz.
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 15:25:15 -0700 (PDT)

> i am tasked with the job of integrating "Ultimate Bulletin Board" (or 
> "UBB", from http://www.infopop.com) into a client's site.  they have an 

I'm sorry.   We were running the UBB for a while and have had a few
headaches.

> 1. the quality of [perl] code in UBB is so phenomenally bad i can't 
> believe people pay money for it.  i can't believe it works (but it 
> does).  has anyone else ever "experienced" it?  i guess i need a support 
> group... it makes me cry and cuts me to the bone when i think that there 
> are actually people out there who think that code like this is good.  oh 
> my god. it should be drop-kicked off the planet.

Good lord are you right.   You'd think that after all the revisions
they've had of this software so far, somebody might have found a tab key
or something.   Also, note that it technically doesn't always work.   The
big thing you should watch out for is if one forum gets too many threads
(usually when one of ours would reach around the 3000 mark), the software
will just die.   It'll completely lock up and use almost all the CPU until
you go in and kill the apache processes.   This was on a pretty fast
machine in the meantime...

> 2. any problems with it under mod_perl?  I have it running fine under 
> PerlRun but I am not so sure it'll behave under Registry.

I believe we ran it under PerlRun as well, but Registry I remember having
some issues with.   I'm sure that it can be tweaked to run under Registry,
but as you said, the code is so horrific that after a couple of hours of
pouring over that madness, I decided that I preferred jamming nails into
my forehead as opposed to trying to get it to work right.   This was an
old version, btw, about 1 year old from now, so maybe things are better.

*chortle*

BTW, we ended up shifting over to vBulletin (PHP) and that's been behaving
well, though the conversion to Slashcode is underway...

===
To: Tom Servo <tomservo@cnw.com>
From: Wim Kerkhoff <wim@merilus.com>
Subject: Re: Ultimate Bulletin Board? Jezuz.
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 11:04:25 -0700


Tom Servo wrote:
> 
> > i am tasked with the job of integrating "Ultimate Bulletin Board" (or
> > "UBB", from http://www.infopop.com) into a client's site.  they have an
> > 2. any problems with it under mod_perl?  I have it running fine under
> > PerlRun but I am not so sure it'll behave under Registry.
> 
> I believe we ran it under PerlRun as well, but Registry I remember having
> some issues with.   I'm sure that it can be tweaked to run under Registry,
> but as you said, the code is so horrific that after a couple of hours of
> pouring over that madness, I decided that I preferred jamming nails into
> my forehead as opposed to trying to get it to work right.   This was an
> old version, btw, about 1 year old from now, so maybe things are better.

A friend of mine runs a community server that runs various sites.  The
server has decent hardware and gets a medium amount of traffic. However,
one of the sites is running a UBB. It's causing a ton of disk I/O,
driving up the load to a consistent 3 or 4. I've tried getting it to run
under Registry as well, with little success. Basically my conclusion was
that it needs a good rewrite, to properly use an SQL database and
caching. Each page should be loading in .01 seconds, not 2-3 seconds. I
believe it was the lastest version that we were working with as well.
UBB is easy to use... to bad the code isn't.

This reminds me of Bugzilla. It is plain nasty to debug and extend that
code, never mind to get it to run under Registry.

===

To: kyle dawkins <kyle@centralparksoftware.com>
From: Sander van Zoest <sander@covalent.net>
Subject: Re: Ultimate Bulletin Board? Jezuz.
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 19:04:07 -0700 (PDT)

On Fri, 27 Jul 2001, kyle dawkins wrote:

> 1. the quality of [perl] code in UBB is so phenomenally bad i can't 
> believe people pay money for it.  i can't believe it works (but it 
> does).  has anyone else ever "experienced" it?  i guess i need a support 
> group... it makes me cry and cuts me to the bone when i think that there 
> are actually people out there who think that code like this is good.  oh 
> my god. it should be drop-kicked off the planet.

At mp3.com, we ran UBB for the first year or so and ended up totally
rewriting the bottom end to make it perform better and actually make it
semi-secure. Finally we ended up getting rid of it for some other in house
code.

you might want to look into vBulletin, it is used on a lot of different
sites is written in php with a MySQL back end and looks very similar to
UBB.
  
> 2. any problems with it under mod_perl?  I have it running fine under 
> PerlRun but I am not so sure it'll behave under Registry.

Our old version was written in perl 4 and definately wasn't able to be
run under mod_perl. We actually fork()/exec()'d like mad for the first
year, UBB looked nice, but is hell underneath.
  
===
To: modperl@apache.org
From: Joachim Zobel <nc-zobeljo@netcologne.de>
Subject: Re: Ultimate Bulletin Board? Jezuz.
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 11:07:35 +0200

At 18:16 27.07.01 -0400, you wrote:
>1 the quality of [perl] code in UBB is so phenomenally bad i can't believe 
>people pay money for it.  i can't believe it works (but it does).  has 
>anyone else ever "experienced" it?  i guess i need a support group... it 
>makes me cry and cuts me to the bone when i (free scripts) out there which 
>is read by newbies to leslike this is good.  oh my god. it should be 
>drop-kicked off the planet.

There is a lot of such dirt here. Lots of free perl scripts are like this. 
And they are read by newbies to learn.

UBB won't scale well. They are doing linear searches on textfiles to find 
users, where they load the whole file into memory.

We decided to go with yabb, after I had a look at these sources. We needed 
to integrate it with our users database, and yabb has readable, structured 
sources.

If you need info on getting yabb to run with PerlRun, send me a mail. I did 
this and I might be able to find out what I did.

===

To: kyle dawkins <kyle@centralparksoftware.com>
From: alex@gossamer-threads.com
Subject: Re: Ultimate Bulletin Board? Jezuz.
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 08:41:46 -0700

Hi,

>> you might want to look into vBulletin, it is used on a lot of different
>> sites is written in php with a MySQL back end and looks very similar to
>> UBB.
>
>
>yes, but as an engineer i can't condone the use of PHP, sorry...

You might want to consider WWWThreads (http://www.wwwthreads.com/). Code
is simple to read/understand, and it works out of the box under 
Apache::Registry.

>>>2. any problems with it under mod_perl?  I have it running fine under 
>>>PerlRun but I am not so sure it'll behave under Registry.

Give up on this. If you have the resources to run mod_perl, no reason
you should be using UBB. Use something with an SQL backend. If you do
decide you want to stick with UBB, feel free to drop me an email as
I've written several conversion scripts and can give you some pointers
on how the member database is stored.

===

To: <alex@gossamer-threads.com>, "kyle dawkins"
<kyle@centralparksoftware.com>
From: "Les Mikesell" <lesmikesell@home.com>
Subject: RE: Ultimate Bulletin Board? Jezuz.
Date: Sat, 28 Jul 2001 10:53:39 -0500

It has been a while since I did a comparison but I have
mwforum (http://www.mawic.de/mwforum) running under
mod_perl without any trouble.  I think it is distantly
related to wwwthreads but still under the GPL.

===

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