[Mark Barnes]

Slightly intrigued to come across this. I’m behind find-answers.net although it’s not in my profile, because (a) it’s not a personal site, and (b) it’s not officially released.

_ck_ How did you find it? I’ve not linked to it nor told anyone about it! Check the administrator profile, you’ll find the site has only been up four days! (So it wasn’t even live when the September top 100 was put up.) That is one reason I’m not yet sharing the code. Quite simply, it doesn’t work properly yet.

The other reason I’m not yet able to share the code is that I need to make sure the licence I want to use is compatible with the licences of the borrowed nntp libraries.

If it’s any interest, one of the forums currently has around 475,000 posts. That equates to 411Mb of MySQL data in all the bbpress tables (including indices). The posts table has 208Mb of data and a 162Mb index.

_ck_ They’re not fake sub-domains. I’ve simply grouped forums into helpful ‘clusters’ and added a subdomain (actually a separate bbpress installation) for each cluster (why buy a new domain for each site?). They look fake because find-answers.net just contains a tiny bit of php code which scans my database tables for the separate installations and presents it in a forum like view. But each site is a separate installation.

Finally, the main purpose of this was to present data from non-propagating newsgroups which most people can’t access. It was largely curiosity that led to me create subdomains for publicly accessible newsgroups. I’ve no idea whether Google will like it or not. There’s certainly other NNTP mirrors out there that do get indexed.

And you’re quite right about me needing the SuperSearch plugin! It is me that you’re talking to here: https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/fulltext-searching-very-slow