Forum Overview :: Site Comments :: I'm also curious about a few other things

[quote name="considerate of your feelings"]How do you differentiate between "above the line" forums and below the line ones? Can forums be deleted as well as added? Does pointy use files for postings or a database? It's interesting that you get proponents either way for forum software. I think the big thing for non-database systems was when you could get cheap hosting (the under $4 a month offerings) or free hosting which allowed files but not databases, and hosting including a database which ran probably at least $10 a month, very expensive for some kid that just wanted to run the equivalent of a blog or a BBS. I have a hosting plan that cost me $75 for three years that allows basically unlimited everything and up to 50 domain names and 50 MySQL databases. That's less than $2 a month. The only restriction is that they stop backing up your data if you have more than 30GB stored on their system. With service that cheap I don't see where file-based hosting really offers an advantage. If for no other reason than searching and such is well defined in SQL and the database (MySQL or occasionally Postgres) is an application program running as a specific task as opposed to an interpreted application such as a PHP program. I suspect that you're not going to get a significant speed improvement for file-based systems over database oriented ones. [/quote]