I have a question. Matthew, do you delete private messages after a certain amount of time, or otherwise filter through PM's between other folks on the forum? Some of my old messages were deleted a while back, and I just figured you just cleared out the system of PMs that were older than a month or so old. If I missed the thread you made informing us about this, sorry.

CathInfo is getting too big (almost) for a typical "shared" hosting account. Shared hosting is your typical web hosting, which costs around $10 a month.

The next step up, unfortunately, is a dedicated server which costs around $150 - $180 a month. No thanks.

But I have a few more options than that. Since I'm a programmer, I have a few tricks up my sleeve to minimize accesses to the database (which is the only problem, by the way). I can rewrite the site to only show thumbs up/thumbs down count to logged-in members, for example. I allow members to see 5 posts per page, but guests can only see 3 posts per page. Every little bit helps.

Anyhow, PMs are not the kind of thing I want to archive. Private correspondence from many weeks or months ago? Content that no one sees anyhow? That's why I just tell people -- if someone sent you an interesting article, or anything else you want to save, just save it off to your PC (text file, word docuмent, etc.)

Because I can't afford to be your Gmail :) I don't have that kind of server resources.

I DO however let people post large files, etc. on the forum, and I host those indefinitely. Storage space is NOT a problem. Just database traffic.

The posts database is enormous -- but those are worth it. They're the primary content CathInfo has to offer. I don't want to trim those (for the most part). So they get priority.

But the whole site is database-driven. Most "features" such as Ignore involve looking up database records. When you have 60 users doing that, it can add up to quite a load on the server.

I've also mentioned -- I know that trad Catholics aren't a rich sort. I'd rather have CathInfo do the "voluntary simplicity" thing so I don't have to pass the hat. Everyone needs your money these days -- I'd like for CathInfo to not be one of them.

You must have missed this post of mine, just 2 days ago:

http://www.cathinfo.com/catholic.php?a=topic&t=27068&min=20&num=5#p4

No, I do not read PMs.

Trimming the PM database looks something like this:

DELETE FROM pm_database WHERE pm_id < 70000;

And in less than a second, a bunch of PMs are gone. Poof!

I also just deleted 35,000 "likes" in between my two posts in this thread -- again, it only took a second.