opinions on database resetting #25

it is possible that the development of certain future apioforum features would be made easier if the database was wiped during certain updates, instead of performing complicated migrations to preserve everything. i would be interested to hear people's opinions for and against this, so that i can know whether people strongly want things on this site to not be deleted, or if they don't care that much.

it isn't guaranteed that wiping will ever be necessary, or preferable; i am just curious about how people feel about this, if it ever does become a thing that might be useful for us.

please deposit your opinions about this into this thread, where they will be ignored considered thoroughly.

ok

i do not really care

i feel like wiping the database would be a very bad thing that should be avoided at all costs.

I do not consider the migrations to be particularly complicated

they have been exceedingly simple so far. however, things are a bit spammy presently. perhaps a reset at some point is warranted for that reason instead? do not reset accounts, however.

i'd agree that account resetting would not be a very good thing; i don't care about the posts that much, although it would ofc be nice if that wouldn't have to happen

we must preserve this forum by any means necessary so we can show our descendants what life was like in 2021

spoiler alert: it involved a lot of bees

there's not much here atm, but when the forum's been around a bit and meaningful discussion has actually occurred, migration is probably the best option

we have done migration multiple times now, haha. it is not that hard. I do not understand the point of this thread

sqlite is slightly annoying about what kinds of columns you are allowed to add to tables after already creating them. specifically i want to have the forum column on the threads table be NOT NULL DEFAULT 1 REFERENCES forums(id) but when adding columns with ALTER TABLE the default has to be NULL if the column includes a foreign key. it would therefore be slightly easier if i could delete all threads and create a new threads table.

however i can still just create a new threads table, with the column i want, and then copy all the existing rows into it, and that can all be done in pure sql so it will even still work with our exisitng migration thingy. so you're right this isn't even much of a big deal at all.

hmm there was something else involving moderators that i think would make this a bit more difficult but i have forgotten what that was about now. i'm sure i can figure out a way around it. and anyway, the worst case is that i have to manually run a python script on the server or something. there is only one deployed instance so this isn't that hard.

i think all is to be reset as soon as subforums exist, because then things would be less spammy due to categorization

once subforums exist all existing threads will be sent into one of the subforums. i haven't decided what kind of subforum that should be yet. deleting everything would be unfortunate, perhaps

Is it possible to archive the posts instead?

the subforum could be read-only, perhaps

as much as this doesn't need a post, i feel like necroposting in all places possible right now.