Post storage

[Skeptical]

How is the text of vbulletin posts stored? Does vBulletin translate the vBCode and smilie codes to pure html and then the end result saved in its raw form? Or is it stored unaltered with vBCodes and smilie codes untranslated?

If it's the first, then obviously vBulletin has to do a reverse translation when a user tries to edit a post.

If it's the latter, then when the thread is displayed, vBulletin has to dynamically translate the vBCodes back into html.

If someone can help me with this I'd greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

[pablo]

latter AFAIK

[Floris]

When I submit a new post (see attachment for screenshot) it is stored in the database like this. (see second attachment for screenshot - grabbed that from post table with phpmyadmin)

[Skeptical]

Would it be better for performance if it's stored twice, once with the vBCodes intact and the other rendered into html? That way when displaying it's quicker.

Obviously the database size will increase, but will it not be worth the performance gain?

[daemon]

I believe in the Server Settings / Optimization part of the options pane in the ACP, there's a post caching feature that will do just that.

[Skeptical]

ACP? Administrative Control Panel?

How is the caching done?

[daemon]

Yes, ACP = Admin Control Panel.

I'm not sure when it is done but the post is turned from BBCode into HTML which makes rendering faster. All the BBCode templates are parsed (quote, PHP, HTML), along with standard bold tags. Then when the thread goes to render, it just pulls the post and renders it.

The attachment is a picture of the quote template parsed in:

[Skeptical]

Hmmm so the post text IS stored twice? Once with vBCode intact and the other rendered into pure html? What table is pagetext_html stored?

[daemon]

It's stored in the post_parsed table. And it's only stored twice if you enable it.

[Skeptical]

It's stored in the post_parsed table. And it's only stored twice if you enable it.

I can't locate the feature in the administrative control panel for this feature. Where is it? I tried looking all over.

[daemon]

I believe you enable this by going to:

Admin CP --> vBulletin Options --> Server Settings and Optimization Options

Then set Cached Posts Lifespan to be a number of days. Generally this should be about 5 to 15 to 30 days depnding on how active your forum is. Then you should run:

Admin CP --> Import and Maintenance --> Update Counters --> [Rebuild Post Cache]