Programming your own forum

[daman371]

They rely heavily on databases. It's the easiest and most secure way to store data.

[subsilver]

Probably true, but I still use purely PHP, it seems easier to me.

Eventually, files holding posts, threads etc. will rise to few megs and even more so your application will use more server resources and there will be performance drop. Your forum will become sluggish. Yabb, one of the oldest forum software, is written in Perl and uses flat file and it is not a good solition for large communities.