Forums: engines, servers and all-all-all
Web forums. After the boom of social networks began, many predicted a quick death for them. But they are still alive, and, moreover, are actively developing.
What engines use successful forums? What servers do they work on? What encoding is used to store user-written messages? Will the encrypted HTTPS protocol suppress the good old HTTP?
The study uses the statistics of "Rating forums Runet, Uanet and Bynet . " This rating contains over 400 of the largest Russian-speaking (more than 1 million messages), Ukrainian-speaking (more than 50 thousand messages) and Belarusian-speaking (more than 2 thousand messages) forums.
')
As can be seen from the diagram, the paid engines of Invision Power Board (now IPS Community Suite) and vBulletin are fighting for the first place. In this case, the leader, albeit with a small margin, is still the IPB.
On the 3rd place with a slight lag goes free phpBB , distributed under the GNU GPL license. Besides him, SMF (Simple Machines Forum) is also quite popular - the heir to YaBB SE , which in turn traces its history from YaBB to Perl. This engine is also free, but unlike phpBB it has a BSD license.
Of particular note is the paid XenForo , the first public release of the beta version of which took place in October 2010, and the first stable version was released on March 8, 2011. Despite payment and strong competition, he managed to get into the top five of the most popular engines. Moreover, some forums abandoned the previously used software and switched to XenForo. The largest of them - BMW Club , containing more than 27 million messages. He previously worked on a paid vBulletin.
Interestingly, some large projects use forum services - mostly free hosting on uCoz .
The use of old engines, such as IkonBoard 2 ( Ru.Board Computer Forum ) or YaBB 1 ( Absolute Games Forums Central ), is due to the age of these forums, as well as, apparently, the conservatism of administrators and / or users who do not want to switch to modern software. In addition, these forums are largely modified and have little resemblance to the original IkonBoard and YaBB.
As you can see from the table, more than 2/3 of all major forums use nginx. True, this percentage includes not only forums running on pure nginx, but also using it as a front-end to another server (as a rule, to Apache). Such high popularity of nginx in large forums is due to its steady work on high-load projects.
On pure Apache, only about 16% of the forums work.
Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) is even less prevalent. It is used by less than 2% of forums. The largest of these is the SQL.ru forum, containing over 19 million messages.
A significant part of the forums from the "Other or not defined" item is made up of sites that use services to protect against DDoS attacks - CloudFlare , Qrator , DDoS-GUARD .
Among the codings, unsurprisingly, UTF-8 leads. Surprisingly, Windows-1251 almost does not lag behind it. But this is not unusual, if we recall that the statistics take into account the largest forums. And the largest ones are, as a rule, quite old forums, created during the times of dial-up, when every byte was on the account. It is worth recalling that Cyrillic characters occupy 2 bytes in UTF-8, while in Windows-1251 and KOI8-R - 1 byte each.
Even more interesting is that there are still forums using the KOI8-R encoding. Among the largest are Farit.ru (over 8 million posts), the HiTV Portal Conference (over 2 million posts) and the Kuking Culinary Forum (over 1 million posts).
In recent years, there has been a gradual transition of sites to the HTTPS (Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure) protocol. Its main advantage is the encryption of all transmitted traffic.
Previously, HTTPS was used only for certain parts of certain sites where secure data transfer was required (for example, Internet banking). But over time, normal sites began to move to HTTPS. Among the largest are “Google”, “Yandex”, “Wikipedia”, “Facebook”, “VKontakte”, “Classmates”.
Has affected this trend and forums. So, today more than 10% of the largest forums use the HTTPS protocol, and their number is constantly growing. In part, this may be due to a more favorable attitude to such sites by Google ( “Google promotes sites with HTTPS in issue” ).
However, for the time being about 90% continue to work on the HTTP protocol.
As a bonus, statistics on PHP versions installed on the servers of the largest forums have been added to the article. Surprisingly, more than 1% of forums continue to use PHP 4! PHP 5.3 remains the most popular version, and the new PHP 7 is installed only in 2 forums.
Such conservatism can be explained by the fact that large forums, as a rule, work on dedicated servers. And administrators usually don’t rush to update software without serious need.
Summing up, we can distinguish the following trends observed among the largest forums of Runet, Uanet and Bynet over the past few years:
What engines use successful forums? What servers do they work on? What encoding is used to store user-written messages? Will the encrypted HTTPS protocol suppress the good old HTTP?
The study uses the statistics of "Rating forums Runet, Uanet and Bynet . " This rating contains over 400 of the largest Russian-speaking (more than 1 million messages), Ukrainian-speaking (more than 50 thousand messages) and Belarusian-speaking (more than 2 thousand messages) forums.
')
Software
As can be seen from the diagram, the paid engines of Invision Power Board (now IPS Community Suite) and vBulletin are fighting for the first place. In this case, the leader, albeit with a small margin, is still the IPB.
On the 3rd place with a slight lag goes free phpBB , distributed under the GNU GPL license. Besides him, SMF (Simple Machines Forum) is also quite popular - the heir to YaBB SE , which in turn traces its history from YaBB to Perl. This engine is also free, but unlike phpBB it has a BSD license.
Of particular note is the paid XenForo , the first public release of the beta version of which took place in October 2010, and the first stable version was released on March 8, 2011. Despite payment and strong competition, he managed to get into the top five of the most popular engines. Moreover, some forums abandoned the previously used software and switched to XenForo. The largest of them - BMW Club , containing more than 27 million messages. He previously worked on a paid vBulletin.
Interestingly, some large projects use forum services - mostly free hosting on uCoz .
The use of old engines, such as IkonBoard 2 ( Ru.Board Computer Forum ) or YaBB 1 ( Absolute Games Forums Central ), is due to the age of these forums, as well as, apparently, the conservatism of administrators and / or users who do not want to switch to modern software. In addition, these forums are largely modified and have little resemblance to the original IkonBoard and YaBB.
Web servers
As you can see from the table, more than 2/3 of all major forums use nginx. True, this percentage includes not only forums running on pure nginx, but also using it as a front-end to another server (as a rule, to Apache). Such high popularity of nginx in large forums is due to its steady work on high-load projects.
On pure Apache, only about 16% of the forums work.
Microsoft's IIS (Internet Information Services) is even less prevalent. It is used by less than 2% of forums. The largest of these is the SQL.ru forum, containing over 19 million messages.
A significant part of the forums from the "Other or not defined" item is made up of sites that use services to protect against DDoS attacks - CloudFlare , Qrator , DDoS-GUARD .
Encodings
Among the codings, unsurprisingly, UTF-8 leads. Surprisingly, Windows-1251 almost does not lag behind it. But this is not unusual, if we recall that the statistics take into account the largest forums. And the largest ones are, as a rule, quite old forums, created during the times of dial-up, when every byte was on the account. It is worth recalling that Cyrillic characters occupy 2 bytes in UTF-8, while in Windows-1251 and KOI8-R - 1 byte each.
Even more interesting is that there are still forums using the KOI8-R encoding. Among the largest are Farit.ru (over 8 million posts), the HiTV Portal Conference (over 2 million posts) and the Kuking Culinary Forum (over 1 million posts).
Protocols
In recent years, there has been a gradual transition of sites to the HTTPS (Hypertext Transport Protocol Secure) protocol. Its main advantage is the encryption of all transmitted traffic.
Previously, HTTPS was used only for certain parts of certain sites where secure data transfer was required (for example, Internet banking). But over time, normal sites began to move to HTTPS. Among the largest are “Google”, “Yandex”, “Wikipedia”, “Facebook”, “VKontakte”, “Classmates”.
Has affected this trend and forums. So, today more than 10% of the largest forums use the HTTPS protocol, and their number is constantly growing. In part, this may be due to a more favorable attitude to such sites by Google ( “Google promotes sites with HTTPS in issue” ).
However, for the time being about 90% continue to work on the HTTP protocol.
PHP versions
As a bonus, statistics on PHP versions installed on the servers of the largest forums have been added to the article. Surprisingly, more than 1% of forums continue to use PHP 4! PHP 5.3 remains the most popular version, and the new PHP 7 is installed only in 2 forums.
Such conservatism can be explained by the fact that large forums, as a rule, work on dedicated servers. And administrators usually don’t rush to update software without serious need.
Conclusion
Summing up, we can distinguish the following trends observed among the largest forums of Runet, Uanet and Bynet over the past few years:
- The most popular engines are paid IPB and vBulletin;
- transition of some forums to the new commercial engine XenForo;
- use of the nginx server, as well as services to protect against DDoS attacks;
- a slow transition to the UTF-8 encoding while maintaining a strong position in Windows-1251;
- The overwhelming majority of forums still use the HTTP protocol, but there is a gradual transition to HTTPS.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/320082/
All Articles