The Forum, The Future.

[Chris_Sav]

Yesterday's finding that Proboards appear to be in financial trouble is immensely worrying.

To lose the forum would be an absolute disaster. Proboards say they mean to carry on in a more limited fashion without any work to improve it for the foreseeable future, but that gives me little comfort.

We cannot export Proboards forum content as things stand, so all would be lost if Proboards collapses.

It might be an idea to think about setting up a free forum mirror in readiness if things get worse. I have some experience with phpbb but it's long ago.

Does anyone have the capability of administering a phpbb forum or similar. The future needs to be thought about and my health is not getting better of late.

I have asked JB what is the situation with the AEBBA web site and who can advise me on webspace available, capabilities and access if needs be.

Thus I consider we need to formulate a battle plan now, ready in the event that Proboards looks like folding.

Hopefully it will never be needed!

Chris Saville.

[taffy]

who and what are Proboards Sav?
what kind of money scale are we talking of?

this forum is a great asset to Bar Billiards.

Taffy

[Chris_Sav]

Proboards are the parent company that run and host these free forum offerings of which we are one.

The forum is totally free at present but we are pushing the limits of the hard and fast free storage as I keep reminding people.

The announcement from our parent company;

Hello to our wonderful administrators, moderators, and forum members.

It is with a heavy heart that today I must announce the suspension of work on ProBoards Version 6. With the changing landscape of our current economy, we’ve found it necessary to reprioritize projects and have had to place v6 on indefinite hiatus.

Let me say it has been a pleasure working with many of you on bringing v6 into existence. Your feedback, thoughts, ideas, support, and suggestions have been invaluable.

I want to reassure everyone that nothing is changing in regards to v5 and ProBoards will continue to provide free self-serve communities to anyone who wants to start their own forum. V6 beta forums will remain online and functional. ProBoards is still supported by a small but dedicated team. Support will continue to be offered 5 days a week from 9am to 5pm Pacific.

ProBoards continues to remain a home for the wonderful, diverse, and enthusiastic communities we host. Without your unbridled dedication ProBoards would not be the remarkable place it is today. Your communities have given us direction, purpose, and a reason to keep working hard. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being a part of the ProBoards family.

We have all seen such assurances that the future is safe on previous occasions and then the company goes bust. I hope it will not be necessary but to set up our own forum would lose the past twenty years of history here, there is no way to export anything apart from your own personal data.

Cost of an entirely independent owned offering would be around £150 per annum. AEBBA has a website that could potentially host a forum and I have asked for details.

The easiest option is to remain where we are but that cannot be free for ever either as we run out of space, extra storage would cost around £50 a year for a reasonable amount.

Basically I just want to start a discussion to see what resources we have on offer.

[tommo III]

Just a thought, but I would suggest that the Quiz Room has run its course:

It was great while it lasted, but I don't think anyone would miss it now if you were to kick it into touch.

I would imagine quite a bit of storage space could be saved if that were the case. 

"Sergeant" Tommo
  

[Chris_Sav]

Cheers Tommo

Post text is not a problem, there are no limits that threaten us.

Despite my fighting reducing attachment size (images) for years we are down to our last 50meg of attachment space. I keep asking people not to post oversize photos but they still do. I am no longer prepared to tackle oversize pictures myself, identify, download, edit, compress, upload and represent correctly.

Small sizes and compression reduces pictures to less than a tenth of their original size, none should be bigger than 150k.

[therealmc]

A few thoughts.
Can any parts of the forum be archived to a separate cloud storage and remain accessible on a view-only basis?
If that is possible then whole years-worth of threads could be saved so that only the most recent couple of years, say, are actually active.
If it is not possible to selectively archive parts of the forum is the only other alternative to delete?
If we went to a new forum platform can the existing forum be exported from pro boards and imported to the new platform to pride a seamless user experience?

[Chris_Sav]

To clarify, there is no export facility. Nothing can be exported apart from a current users personally posted data, thus no continuity of any multi-posted thread or time period can be preserved.

The current structure can be rebuilt on any platform, but any new offering will be a lot of work, empty and a fresh start, everything we have built in the last twenty years would be lost.

Hopefully Proboards will survive the current difficulties, but I am looking to establish what options we have if they look like they might fold and we could lose everything.

[Chris_Sav]

The "Wayback Machine" internet archive looks like a possibility for safeguarding our content at least.

Am investigating

[jelly]

If not already done, it's worth an email to proboards support to ask if they can give you a manual dump of the data from their database.

[Chris_Sav]

There is no export ability.

Proboards have replied to my question by saying that the cancellation of forum development was a precautionary measure and that the way forward is secure.

Proboards have recently been bought out, so the parent company may be rationalising things.

We will still try to be good boy scouts and "Be Prepared"