Hey all,
As a bunch of you may noticed the forum went down for a period of time. In this particular case the database driver that was being used for this driver became obsolete and luckily I was able to bring the forum with a quick patch.
The bigger issue is that I disappear for months at a time even when you guys are nice enough to reach out and I both take full responsibility and apologize for that. I can make this commitment, for about 2 months or so I can check this forum at least once a week on Saturday or Sunday moment to check in and respond to comments. I’m hoping by the time I can work with some of you guys to figure out a long term plan.
I agree with you guys that this forum is a fantastic resource, it’s how I got my start in composites and I would hate for it to go away. I do want to give myself some credit and say that I pay the bills and do some maintenance to keep this place going but clearly it’s not enough and I’m failing you guys.
So there’s two levels in which anyone wants to volunteer can help if they’d like.
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On the existing platform I can make some more people moderators. This means you can approve new users when they post, and delete spam if it appears. This will help the day to day of the forum.
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The bigger issue is migrating this forum. There’s two options I can see here.
The forum can be migrated to a complete different platform. The leading forum software these days is discourse, but it’s pretty expensive to host costing at least $1200 a year not counting migrations https://payments.discourse.org/pricing
The other option is upgrading this forum to Vb4 or vb5. This is easier, and should be cheaper, but even both of those platforms look deprecated at this time. It’ll buy more time but is sort of like buying a used car from the early 2000s.
I can try doing this in the next couple of months, especially given all the issues this forum is having now
I truly am sorry for these issues and I hope this is the last time I need to make a post like this. Thank you all again for being part of a great community