As you might know Mamboportal.com is one of the larger Mambo based community websites. During the last month more and more users registered at our website. Since today we had more than 100,000 registered users. Although we are very proud of the many users, this also made the website nearly impossible to administrate anymore.

Why? Mambo's user management is very simple and has not changed much since the early days. For example Mambo uses a drop down menu in the content items to select the creator of an article. While this works fine for websites, which do not have many registered users, it also is a pain when you have many users. I gues you can imagine how long it takes to load a page with a 100,000 entrys drop down menu.

Another even larger problem is the user manager. With many entrys Mambo produces a tremendous load on the mysql server. This lead to regular crashes of the whole mysql server and downtimes of Mamboportal.com. I already talked about this problems to Andrew Eddie last year and also submited it to the Bug Tracker about a month ago as we started to build up the new team for Mamboportal.com (Infos at http://mamboforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=6590&group_id=5&atid=101). Sadly the bug isnt even assigned to anyone at the moment.

However as I want to move forward with Mamboportal.com and the new team I decided to clear the whole userdatabase today. Every of the 100,000 registered users will be informed about that via Email the next days.

A personal note

I really hope this will be addressed sooner than planed and some development time will be spend on the bad usermanagement in the future. I guess everyone understands that clearing the userdatabase is inacceptable for professional users of Mambo. It was a hard decision for me (again) and it will be the last time I do so.

I really thought about to move Mamboportal.com to Typo3, which has an excellent usermanagement. But it would be a bad day if I had to setup Mamboportal.com on another CMS only to handle the daily business.

The only other option would be to fork Mambo to adress the well known problems like the usermanagement or the possibility to display a website barrier-free. I know that this could split the community, but if we on the other hand get a better Mambo, which is more focussed on the needs of professional developers, this could be an option.

I guess this is something which have to be talked about. If you want to do so, please use the forums over at www.mambers.com and not the comments. Thanks.