Wedge

Yeah, because SimpleDesk's is massively complicated. Let me explain why:

* Fields can be attached to tickets and/or replies, or both.
* Fields that are attached to tickets can be displayed on the left under the ticket information, just above the replies, or as a prefix to the ticket title.
* Fields can be configured to be visible and editable by user/staff/admin (by role), so you can have fields that are hidden from regular users but visible to staff and editable only by admins, for example.
* Changes to custom fields are logged in the action log.
* Text, large text, integer, floating point number, select/dropdown, radio buttons, checkboxes and multi-select are supported (multi-select is not finished yet)
* This all needs to support being moved from ticket to topic, that's not implemented yet.
* Fields can be configured separately per department (analogous to per-board settings, yes SD has department support now)

It really isn't pretty. Implementing that in Wedge, well we'd do it more simply because the needs are physically simpler (the visibility and logging complexity can be streamlined or even removed, as can a few other things)

(Did I mention that SimpleDesk 2.0 is a monster, that's grown 5k lines of code since just mid March?)

Yup. I don't plan on implementing every single possible feature into it because while that seems like it would be efficient, it really won't.

What I will do, however, is really try and make the core as flexible as possible.

I dunno, it feels like they keep trying to sell it as an 'out of the box' CMS when it really isn't up to that task. It's that slightly holier-than-thou attitude that keeps discouraging me from subscribing, even though I bought the last couple.

I haven't had Linode contact me where I've gone over any limits; and I've had things consume 100% CPU for periods at a time, as well as massive I/O spikes and bandwidth spikes. I pay a bit more than some but I get exactly what I pay for...

I always amaze folks who pay under $10/month when I tell them, followed by the lightbulb moment when I explain that I don't have to contend with TOS-buried hidden limits.

They would be remote avatars, yes. But they would be remote avatars from a single specific provider rather than any arbitrary provider.

How, exactly, would making YOUR forum do more work than offloading the work to another site entirely give you faster response? Gravatar does caching, your browser does caching, and likely more usefully than many crappy hosts do - consequently, pulling it into your server does not benefit your users, and just ramps up your load - unless you have a setup more powerful than Gravatar does...

You just did :P

Real prepared statements have a truly marginal performance improvement because the parser doesn't have to parse the query. For us, Amdahl's Law applies.