Below is my message about what happened. Feel free to ask any questions once you have read this.
June 13, 2009
Once again our Bulletin Board has crashed! This is the second time in 30 days and the third time in 2 years.
The short version:
We have a new Bulletin Board. It is here
http://spinnin4s.50.forumer.com/ You will need to re-register. We have lost all data. I am in the process of copying over a few important threads, but most will not be copied over.
Read below for the long version:
Here is a little history of our website. Scott Nissley pays for our domain registration each year, thanks Scott. Scott also arranged for us to have free web hosting with unlimited traffic through his cousin Chris who owned an ISP in Las Vegas. Great deal!
Chris sold the ISP a while back but still had enough pull to have us keep our free web hosting. It was about this time that we started having problems. Our database gets corrupted and we lose data, our email notification stops working, and my login to the domain doesn’t work so that I can go in and to fix things or do updates.
Chris, once I finally have been able to contact him, has assisted somewhat in the past. But, obviously, his motivation to give us support just isn’t there.
Ron and Scott have told me that they would get me a contact number. That was three weeks ago.
The problem is we have no support from the new owners and I currently have no way to contact Chris. Not such a great deal after all!
I still do not know what caused our last crash. We just lost 3 months of data and there was no communication from the ISP.
Sunday, 6/7/09, our Bulletin Board crashed again. You can view everything but you cannot post messages. When you try to post a message you get a database error.
I made a backup on Friday 6/5/09 and could restore to that, but my login to the domain doesn’t work (again) so I can’t even get in to fix anything. Even if I could log in and fix the database, I have no assurance that there is not some problem with the ISP that is causing these issues. Hours of work could be destroyed again.
My frustration with the ISP was very high after the last crash. Now, I am done with this ISP. It is time to move on.
There are two main parts to our website. 1) The web pages you see when you go to spinninfours.com and 2) the Bulletin Board which runs on separate software. We can deal with each part separately. We can move the Bulletin Board somewhere else, but it will cost us a monthly fee.
I have researched various free Bulletin Board hosting sites on the web and found one that I like a lot. It uses an upgraded version (phpBB Version 3) of the same software we are using now (phpBB Version 2), so it will be familiar to us. It also has a lot of features we do not currently have, such as uploading pictures to your post.
We will not be able to import our data to the new Bulletin Board so we will have to start over.
So, where do we go from here?
Register on the new BB and start using it. If there is a conflict over old and new usernames I will make sure that you get your username from the old BB.
I have copied over some important threads and will continue to do this as I have time. I may also be slowly customizing the look and organization of the new BB.
Once I have access again to the domain I will make some changes to links to point to the new BB. I will also attempt to keep the old BB around as an archive, but this may not be possible.
After we have transitioned to the new BB we can decide what to do about the website. In my opinion the BB is a much better tool. It provides instant communication and documentation in one place, easily accessible and searchable. We could even lose the website entirely.
Mark
