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| IMPORTANT: Please backup your data before running the compactor. In the unlikely event of the utility failing, you may lose all your data. |
The Compact Messages admin control panel will compact FUDforum's message storage files. It is normally not necessary to use this control panel. Unless there is a lot of deletion and message editing on your forum, the amount of space saved will be minimal. This control panel can also be used to change the character set encoding of messages. While this process is running, your forum will be disabled.
During normal operation, FUDforum only writes to its message files, never deletes from it, this is done because it has great performance benefits and is a very fast way to store message bodies. If you are running low on drive space, you can try to have FUDforum try to compact its message files, this will remove all the old unused bodies off all edited messages.
Search and replace text
Text in message bodies can be changed during the message rebuild process. This is handy if a frequently used URL changed, or if you just need to change/get rid of some offensive text.
To use this feature, you need to first setup replacement rules in the forum's Replacement and Censorship System. When done, enable this feature by clicking on the provided check box.
Character set conversion
The character set conversion feature can be used to change the character set encoding of the message bodies. This feature is normally hidden and will only be visible if your PHP installation has the iconv module enabled AND your forum is in DEBUG mode (see toggle in Global Settings Manager).
Non-English forums that are not using UTF-8 are encouraged to convert their messages to UTF-8. Please leave empty if you don't require a character set conversion or if you are unsure.
Please note that converting twice, or picking the wrong from and to character sets will corrupt your messages, after which you will have to restore your forum!