|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 9:26:47 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Dec 12, 2014 9:26:47 GMT -5
If you want to add new moderators or delete old moderators, you need to have admin access. There is only one admin per board, Alan, in this case. If you want to put the board under new management, Alan would have to be willing to surrender the board. If he's forgotten his password, he can ask for a reset and it will be sent to the email address that he used when he set the board up. If he can't remember that email address or he deleted it, I think he's S-O-L for regaining access. Perhaps, there's help in the ProBoards forum but I'm not going to waste time poking around there since I think that ProBoards is a bad environment to host forums in.
I think that the bigger problem is the fact that there are no user controlled backups which means that all the info here is at the mercy of ProBoard's business plan. To me that's a highly risky situation if the information contained here is important. To try and move the message base here to a new forum (probably phpBB which is open source, free and well supported) is a difficult task without some heavy duty programming knowledge. I'd bet that the majority of the Total Threads: 6,996 and Total Posts: 98,527 are not worth saving.
My suggestion is to start fresh. If there's interest in that we can discuss who and how.
|
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 9:36:17 GMT -5
Post by ottawagardener on Dec 12, 2014 9:36:17 GMT -5
What are suggestions for where to move the board? And I guess we could use a team to copy over info. I have been involved in one group that has done it before on a yahoo group. Each post was saved individually. The people involved were computer folk. This was after a threat that the main admin was going to delete the entire board. A team of people worked over 48 hours to save the resource. It was quite the effort.
|
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 9:59:09 GMT -5
Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 12, 2014 9:59:09 GMT -5
I haven't delved very deeply into the pros and cons of pro boards vs other forum ecosystems myself, I'll just trust MikeH and the rest of you on that one. Either way, it would be easier to do any/all of this with Alan's help. |
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 10:03:49 GMT -5
Post by ottawagardener on Dec 12, 2014 10:03:49 GMT -5
Just tried messaging Alan but does anyone know his email or we could write him a letter  |
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 12:37:56 GMT -5
Post by paquebot on Dec 12, 2014 12:37:56 GMT -5
Alan is on Linkedin but did not respond to my effort to include him in my connections.
Martin
|
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 12:57:10 GMT -5
Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 12, 2014 12:57:10 GMT -5
Just tried messaging Alan but does anyone know his email or we could write him a letter I believe he has moved to Kentucky. A letter addressed to his farm would probably still get to him, but maybe not quickly? |
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 13:22:01 GMT -5
Post by nicollas on Dec 12, 2014 13:22:01 GMT -5
I dont know if a new forum could take the lead if this one does not close. So other questions to ask is, are we (members, and the central admin whoever he is) ready to close this board ? And if so is it possible to keep all stuff archived online on this same board, with the old urls ?
|
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 13:57:12 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Dec 12, 2014 13:57:12 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by billw on Dec 12, 2014 14:41:29 GMT -5
From my perspective (FWIW), the board works fine. Administration has a light touch (perhaps because there aren't many mods) and yet spam doesn't appear to be a problem. Backup is a challenge, but one that can probably be sorted out. Migrating the forum is an option for greater control, but greater control brings its own problems, such as paying for the infrastructure and finding people to do the back end work that Proboards currently handles. One of the benefits of this forum is that the content is very well indexed by search engines, which is probably the main thing that brings in new blood (that's how I got here). Move it and we lose that benefit for quite a while. You can, of course, run two forums in tandem and point people to the new forum for posting, but that gets messy.
Unless Proboards is in danger of dissolving, it is probably best not to make any radical changes.
The funny part of all this is that it appears many of the boards that want to leave Proboards want to leave because they can't get their content out. If they could get their content out, then they probably wouldn't feel the need to leave.
|
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 12, 2014 14:48:48 GMT -5
Post by ottawagardener on Dec 12, 2014 14:48:48 GMT -5
To be clear, I messaged him on Facebook  Too many forums, too little time. |
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 13, 2014 13:11:57 GMT -5
Post by Hristo on Dec 13, 2014 13:11:57 GMT -5
Do you really want to move this forum to other host? Are you aware what is required to do that? IMO this will benefit the forum in therms of freedom to customize it as you want and if you want you could somewhat localize it, that is the menus could be in many different languages. In other words you can add useful functions which now are impossible to add. Here what is needed: - Taking the database by download is not possible currently. Scraping it is possible, but if you use the scraped data and add it to the new forum that is not legal. ProBoards owns all the data and they will shut down the new forum, this has happened before. - The good news is that there is a legal way. Recently PB has offered a premium service www.forums.net/ . Basically Homegrown Goodness has to be migrated there. As I understand after 6 months the database will become available for download. That is it has to be paid for 6 months of using it before download is possible. Their plans are insane of course for the parameters they offer www.forums.net/plans and I'm afraid the cheapest plan $9.99/mo would not be enough because HG is already quite big. If that is the case it has to be paid not $60 but $300 - Lets assume the above is in the past. Now: -- New domain name ~$10 a year -- A paid hosting somewhere (definitely not GoDaddy, HostGator and alikes) that is AT LEAST $5+ a month for a somehow decent host and $10+ for good enough hosting - Now the database has to be converted into new forum's software db's format. Probably the attachments will be lost. As an option is to add them manually which would be a lot of work. As of now I know only for one converter and it is for SMF - www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=522954.0 I'm running SMF for past 4 years, so I'm familiar with it. If you have to choose between free forum softwares the good ones IMO would be (in alphabetical order) ElkArte, MyBB, phpBB, SMF, Wedge - Now you have to run the forum, customize, maintain etc. etc. At least maybe, just maybe the financial expenses could be covered by ads. But for all this to happen first you need Alan to give the rights to Joseph or whichever you pick as an admin. Once the new forum is set there could be more than one admin + super moderators + moderators and all the other levels of rights. It could be a lot of work, I know it  I put thousands of hours to customize it to suit my taste and at the end I did not release it ... yet... If you choose to use the stock functionality the chosen forum software offers and use some of the available themes, that will be a lot easier. Briefly, that's it. |
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 13, 2014 14:58:05 GMT -5
Post by PatrickW on Dec 13, 2014 14:58:05 GMT -5
I want to be clear, I don't have the time to take on full responsibility for a busy board like this.
I do have an account at Dreamhost. They provide a standard install of phpBB, and almost certainly will automatically apply security patches and so on for us. I can do this at no cost, except for the domain registration, which is only about $10 a year and I can pay for. You are welcome to just use this for testing, or for a fully functioning board. They are good enough for something like this.
I will happily provide all administrative access I can, as well as a login to the UNIX shell to access the files. You would have full access to the database, and disk space available for backups if you want.
The only thing is someone else needs to take primary responsibility for maintaining it. I do not want to provide 24 hour support for the board, nor do I want to be a moderator. It's completely up to you guys to sort out who has what level of administrative access. I'll certainly help where I can, on a best effort basis.
What I suggest is a few of you who are interested, experiment a bit with an installation, and see if it works as you expect. I suggest forget about copying the old threads over for now, because they still exist and you don't want to start a fight with proboards. When you are sure the new board works, and you are sure you have a solid backup of the old threads, you can think about copying those over.
|
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 13, 2014 17:19:14 GMT -5
Post by MikeH on Dec 13, 2014 17:19:14 GMT -5
Do you really want to move this forum to other host? Are you aware what is required to do that? I've been involved once in the migration of a large forum database. Unless you've got pretty heavy tech resources and time, I wouldn't recommend it. There are a lot of invaluable threads in this forum but far more of little or no value. Perhaps it makes more sense to capture the important threads in the way back machine, initialize threads in a new forum with the same subject used here and have the first post by linking to the way back machine's thread URL. |
|
|
|
Alan
Dec 13, 2014 18:36:55 GMT -5
Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 13, 2014 18:36:55 GMT -5
If any of this becomes necessary, it would almost certainly be worth doing triage with the old posts. There are a lot of posts that don't go anywhere.
|
|
|
|
Post by Hristo on Dec 13, 2014 19:16:21 GMT -5
Migration should be relatively easy once you have the DB and if there is a ready script to convert it to your new forum software DB's structure. You should not be afraid with that. I know exactly why a dedicated forum, where you have full control, is better than free solutions like ProBoards, but that is my point of view. The question is do YOU want to move it and WHY? What are the reasons for that? Do you miss some functionality here or the only reason is because you are not the ones who own the content and you are afraid it may get lost? If it's the latter I do not think there is much to worry about. Leeching the entire forum from time to time is not impossible. I just tried it and there were no big problems, except it will take some time, probably more than 50 hours. If it's the lack of some functionality, please specify what you need? I know the pros and cons, but I want to know if YOU know what you WANT and know how to run standalone forum and run it in a way it will not die fast due to lack of activity. I can judge that by looking at you answers. Nowadays when the competition is much bigger a new forum from scratch on a new domain with no content, no backlinks and only a handful of active quality posters left will take years to rise to the first pages on google. Just for that reason the question is not whether or not the content here has to be moved to the new domain/forum. If it's possible then it's mandatory. This will speed up a lot the new forum. Look at situation now - lots of unique content and still this forum rarely is on second, let alone on first page with results on google when you search for the most popular key words like "gardening forum" etc. I'm pretty sure the fact that it is hosted on proboards is the number one reason for that. As a result after nearly 8 years of existence there are less than 4K members and most of them are spam members. What I mean? Just checked the last 5 members registered here and 3 of them are "spam" members which register either manually or using a bot only to put a link on their profile to some site, called a "backlink" with a sole purpose to help that site climb on google results. They will never come back let alone post something useful. Here they are: alanbishop.proboards.com/user/3926alanbishop.proboards.com/user/3925alanbishop.proboards.com/user/3923This is a problem from a few years now. Running a dedicated forum has many benefits, but requires more knowledge, time, money, dedication otherwise the new forum could die fast. |
|
Too many forums, too little time.
I put thousands of hours to customize it to suit my taste and at the end I did not release it 