What are the risks if connecting both a live forum and a developer testforum to the same database? Same invision software version.

I have a huge forum database, so it would be easiest to connect both to same database. If not advisable, please explain why?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

Don't. Simply don't. It will cause all kinds of issues. And if you enable IN_DEV mode on the dev forum, there's no way to know what will happen.

 

If you want to have a dev forum, make a copy of both database and files.

Edited February 7, 2024Feb 7 by teraßyte

I wouldn’t even know what the goal would be. If the database is live, the only thing left to test with independently is IPS files, which shouldn’t be touched anyway. 

If you share the database, anything you do in dev happens to prod which defeats the purpose of separating them in the first place. 

If you’re going to do that just save yourself the effort of setting up the dev site entirely and just do whatever you want in production. 

6 hours ago, georgebkk said:

What are the risks if connecting both a live forum and a developer testforum to the same database? Same invision software version.

I have a huge forum database, so it would be easiest to connect both to same database. If not advisable, please explain why?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

The short answer to the first question is "It will break". Dont do it.

If you connect both to the same database, its simply not a developer forum, as anything you amend/change will affect both instances. You could end up with files being saved to one location, when they should be saved to another, anything cached on disk will be saved to 2 different locations. And these are just the things I can think of from the top of my head.