When a topic/forum/page/something on the board gets much too much traffic it would be nice to have an option to cache it. The caching could be in the form of complete HTML dump, where when someone visits say, topic id 200, board will redirect the user to forum/cache/topic-200.html.

Another usefull option would be topic redirection. Say, a moderator deletes topic 204. When someone visits that topic from URL (which is very likely, if the page was indexed on google), instead of getting a nasty incorrect use of board files, he could be redirected to a url specified by the moderator/admin.

I noticed the need for caching when one of my articles which was posted on my forum got on digg homepage, and shortly after that the server simply got owned from the excess traffic. o:)

1.00

+1 to both of those wonderful ideas! :D

An AJAX cache with HTML would be a nice touch, personally :)

And I also definitely agree about the topic redirects.

I like theese ideas.

+ 1.

Brandon, what do you mean by an AJAX cache?

Brandon, what do you mean by an AJAX cache?

I didn't know if such a thing could be done (I'm pretty sure I've seen it somewhere before) where it uses a bit of AJAX cache with HTML to redirect the user to the correct topic, without essentially it having to refresh the page.

Just a simple HTTP redirect with the correct headers will do fine - importing entire pages via AJAX is rather pointless.

Meh, was just thinking of some neat ideas :P , but nonetheless, this feature needs to be implemented into IPB somehow.

What might be a good idea is to show cached pages via an iFrame, so if the cached pages don't exist or have been deleted the user doesn't get a 404. Either that, or have a simple index.php file that loads the cached file and if it doesn't exist regenerates it.