Interview: Derek Liu, Gaia Online Anime Community

General Board administration

What made you choose phpBB, and are you happy with your choice ?

Yes. phpBB rocks. I’ve learned so much from phpBB I can’t thank the developers enough.

Did you program all board alterations yourself or are you using public mods or hacks ?

A little bit of everything I guess. There isn’t one mod where I install every line of code, while there isn’t one script that I haven’t left alone. If there is something I don’t need loaded, I take it away. Like wise, I’ve added a lot of codes for features that I implemented around the site. At the same time the numerous mods spun tons of great ideas everywhere that I could never have thought of if I went with a single forum package.

Some posts in the forums have more than 50000 replies, that is more posts than on 99% of internet's message boards. I guess your are experiencing terrible load and bandwidth problems. how much do you have to prune posts and users to help with that issue ?

The database server needed upgrading constantly. At first it was to allow for more connections, then as we gotten more posts, each page took exponentially longer to load. While bandwidth could be solved by just paying our ISP, the load on the database server had been a problem. Luckily I’ve came up with a few changes in the database queries recently that should be able to let me keep growing the database without much degradation in speed.

You probably had to tweak a lot phpBB, mysql and more generally your server configuration. On which side was it the easiest to improve performance ? Was phpBB easy to modify to suit your needs ?

On the php side of things, improving the performance of the scripts seem to yield a linear increase in speed, while I can always drop in another server to handle the load on handling php web pages, so it’s not a big deal. It’s the tweaks in the SQL queries which yielded terrific improvements in speed. phpBB is easy to modify. It’s well structured so it’s easy to read and understand.
I’ve been gathering notes on some of the major changes that I made on a thread on the phpBB forum. Don’t know how many people would benefit from it, but I just needed to do my bit in contributing back to the community.

How do you handle the search feature on you boards ?

Cripple it. (lol) After some serious thinking I’ve thought of a few ways that will truly make a fast search engine, but it’ll take tremendous time involvement in writing the code to support my theories that have yet to be proven. So in return I setup a lot of filters to index only posts within certain criteria from size, location, number of replies, to only making the first 100 words searchable, etc. The main goal is to keep the search table having less than ten million entries so it won’t bog the server down while maintaining a level of usability. The wordlist table also includes a post_id field that allows me to prune it when the time comes. Though I think a more permanent solution is to gear up with a real search engine like Google. No matter what I do the search engine will never be 10% as good as what a real search engine can do.

"Anything free is great! Users pay not in money but in sharing experience and submitting contribution plus ideas to constantly improve itself"

In your opinion, what are the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of phpBB ?

Why is phpBB so great? Anything free is great! ^_^ Users pay not in money but in sharing experience and submitting contribution plus ideas to constantly improve itself. Even if phpBB is poorly written, with all the user input it has the potential of being the best forum out there. But phpBB is NOT poorly written, it is a beautifully crafted piece of software and the latest version looks even more promising. The greatest weakness to any software that is so versatile is the sacrifice in speed. Though I often wonder if phpBB’s concern in speed performance is related to php or SQL related issues.

What were the milestones of the board development (in terms of users, posts, and functionality) which needed improvement in hardware, or important software modifications such as switching some tasks to cron jobs ?

Many features such as the handling of user sessions had already been switched to cron jobs to reduce the system’s load. Most of these changes are pretty much behind the scenes so the user won’t really notice the changes from a regular forum. Those jobs include pruning, updating of “dynamic” data such as post and user count, etc. There were no milestones because the bottlenecks that we came across were never anticipated. We just went through phases where the server was running slow, me making some changes to speed things up, then days or weeks later we’re running slow again… and the cycle just repeats itself. Yes, I’m very inexperienced. ^_^;

Did you have to promote your website, or did your members generate enough publicity by themselves ?

We did promote our site. The forth month after it’s debut we handed out a lot of postcards to anime fans on the two biggest anime convention that we attend annually. We also have an ad in a comic book thanks to a good friend in the business. Other than that, the growth had been pretty consistent, and doesn’t seem to be particularly affected by the advertisements. Just goes to proof that I’m not a good marketing guy. ^_^ It seems that the growth of Gaia relied mainly on the word of mouth from our users.

What have you learned from administering the Gaia boards ?

To put into the simplest terms, I learned that everybody deserves the same level of respect. To discriminate in accordance to a user’s level of etiquette had been my mistake in the past and working on Gaia let me place a high level of control over myself to be an admin that’s fair with everyone. I didn’t realize any of the essentials by myself. It’s all from insights handed down by my friends who I developed the site with. Technically I learned an immense amount of php, MySQL, DHTML, and server administration. The structure of phpBB also taught me a lot in terms of writing structured and optimized codes.

Has the rapid and impressive success of your site brought to you job offers, unexpected partnerships or extravagant propositions ?

One can always dream. ^_^ We haven’t gotten any offers so far. We started the site as a labor of love and today it still is. I’m hoping for the day that we’re big enough that we can start getting support from large sponsors so that we don’t have to worry about covering costs. Until then, though we’re growing, we’re still pretty tiny compared to successful ventures on the net.

It is written on the home page of the website: "GAIA Online is currently in the Alpha Testing phase". Well then it is a hell of an alpha phase, do you have many plans for the future and evolution of your community and can you share some of them with us ?

Right now we’re still on alpha development, meaning that we haven’t got our basic features done yet. The basic features are stuff that aren’t necessarily tied in with the forum itself. One of which is a chat environment that I’m developing, for example. When we’re ready to freeze the major features and start debugging them, that’s when the work on the gaming aspects will begin. We’ll then be on beta stage as far as the site goes. That’s when things are going to be interesting for our users. Everyone on the forums are hungry for activities. I just can’t wait to tell them that every character that they’re customizing actually contains an array of stats, and you can build your character in ways that not only affects your performance in the activities, but they’ll also influence the features that they’ll get on the site also. -_^

If I may add a request for help, I’d like to say that we’re desperately seeking programmers with skills in php, javascript and possibly flash to help out on the site’s development. Please contact us at gaia at anihq dot com if interested. Thank you.

Thank you Derek !