I've been increasingly frustrated with the Angels site in recent months... I had hand coded the forum - partly as an excuse to learn ASP but also because I wanted something that would work with the existing Angels database... and being as that had been something I had also set up myself when learning MSSQL it wasn't something that conformed too well to industry standards.

In recent weeks the site itself has started to really struggle under the load. The number of visitors hadn't changed, we were still pulling in the usual hefty bandwidth, but I think some of the sloppy SQL queries I had used to draw information out of the database and display it on the site was starting to take its toll.

There were also many more reasons for getting a decent piece of forum software - I'd like to be able to set up private messaging for example. And moderating it was a real pain, I could delete odd posts, or whole threads, but I couldnt lock a thread. Being able to lock threads, add stickys, polls and have easy moderation were all things that finally made me bite the bullet last week and look seriously at the alternatives.

I was also interested in setting up a forum for a work-related site I am doing, so I tinkered with that one first to get the idea of how to get it all set up before I went and set up the Angels one.

So one shiny new MYSQL database later I went and downloaded a copy of phpBB to test out. I also downloaded a few of the mods that would let me play with the look and feel of the site.

So anyway things were working well. The only problem was that I was going to have to take the etch-a-sketch approach to site building and totally start again with the membership database. I had always wanted to avoid this.. but the more I thought about it the more I realised it was something I had to do. The current database was full of duplicate entries, malformed email addresses and girls who had long gone. It was time to prune things back anyway.

So yesterday the brand new Angels forum went live.

What I hadn't realised, having not had a chance to visit there recently was that the Roses forum had been struggling themselves with server issues and had been taken down until they can fix it. Can I just assure the conspiracy theorists that I had nothing to do with that.. it was purely a coincidence.

Honest....

Anyway, this meant that there were many Roses members, twitchy at the lack of forum access, who have descended on the new Angels forum and set up home there. It's great to see the site being used since a) there's no point in having an empty forum b) it stress tests the new site for me and c) I worked out how to put my Google ads on the site before it went live ;-)

At the time of writing, just over 24 hours since going live, there are 170 registered members which is pretty good in my book.

So if you haven't been there yet, please pop along and say hello!