Hi,
I'm a cloud engineer maintaining a large IPS forum with ~200k users. We've been using IP.Board since the early days, but we're needing to migrate our forum to a more modern server in order to keep it maintainable by our small team.
We've looked into IPS cloud as a modernization option, but the current offering isn't viable for us. One of our requirements is that we need to be able to create members from our other internal microservices, and allow these members to login with oauth. At the moment, this isn't possible with the API, and requires direct access to the IPS MySQL database.
So, in order to modernize our forums hosting infrastructure, we are moving our forums from our outdated AWS monolith, to a modern containerized Digital Ocean system. One important change with this new infrastructure is that Digital Ocean's managed MySQL databases require primary keys on all tables. It is not possible for us to use tables without primary keys on our new infrastructure.
We have been able to run IPS in our Kubernetes containers just fine on our new servers, but the main roadblock we've encountered here with the IPS software is that many of the tables that it uses do not have primary keys, which is preventing us from migrating our forums to our new server. Other forums software such as Discourse do not have this database issue.
The solution we've come up with internally is to simply issue ALTER TABLE commands for these tables to add an auto_increment primary key, which will add a primary key to these tables without affecting IPS's database code.
We wanted to get your input on the impact of such a move. Are there any possible issues that you can see with this auto_increment plan, and are there plans to update these IPS tables to use primary keys by default in the future?
This post is a continuation of another discussion, I'm creating a new post to avoid excessive necromancy.
Thanks,
Justin