We have been using forums and CMS systems for long time now to run all CAT websites on the internet starting from the ancient CATReloadedt website that was based on Drupal and ending to this amazing and extensible system “H4ck3rZ Network” that’s based on Buddypress and we have faced hunderds of problems that we didn’t really spend the right amount of efforts to learn from and to solve.
We in H4ck3rZ have spent sometime thinking about that and studying how to stop falling into the same problems and how to engineer a system that is really scalable without the loss of users information that is the most precious piece of our software and we could really design a system that can fix most of our problems in a granular manner, so we can fix things as we go and with minimum users intervention. But because we are engineers and our H4ck3rZ community is engineering community, we decided to share you some of the internals and details of what we have done.
The Ancient Problems
For long long time a faced a problem that we didn’t learn from it, that’s having accounts of our members stored inside the system and we didn’t feel the problem until we faced the problem of migration from drupal to phpBB and the booming fact is that migration might not be possible and people have to register again, we also had a mailing list that had its accounts stored in it and it’s a completely isolated island and we had no easy way to check if both systems are in-sync or not. More problems was arisen when we started the foundation system because each foundation started building its own website and again we lost the user base and people started new registrations on each website independently and moreover people used several e-mails and usernames and that was really a hit because now you cannot identify people by username anymore a good example is that I used the username h4ck3r in H4ck3rZ Foundation online systems while I use the username ‘linuxawy’ in PixiCat and please don’t ask me why 
read the rest of this article in my blog Soliman n H4ck3rZ
Ahmed Soliman Farghal is a professional "Software/Systems" engineer with exceptional computer science background and spectacular record of projects and achievements.
