Bob's Board: Cfc4me - Viewing Profile - Bob's Board

So confused with this... people being called barnacles yet I thought as of last week those people weren't in charge of making decisions now, but they're still getting the blame for something that might not even be happening.

Fwiw I can't see them risking us going on the pitch while there's still games to be played but who knows

It wasn't Carson that said it. It was Mike Goodwin.

Here's the dt report from 12 months after...
https://www.derbyshi...-charge-3340392

It's funny how the people that want to criticise the trust never tell you why they didn't try saving the club themselves, and what they would have done differently with no money and no experience.

 moondog, on 08 February 2024 - 09:02 PM, said:

Providing it's the self hosted version we have (and I think it is) then yes it should be possible to do that or migrate it to a different Web hosting company. The only thing that's not clear is if we currently pay invision an annual licence/support fee every year. If so then we would have to carry on doing that.

As this one get closer to closing down I'd suggest we copy all the files and database from the current Web server onto a laptop somewhere so it can either be moved or converted to a different forum later.

Firstly, a big thank you to whoever has agreed to sponsor our forum.

Just a few more of my thoughts/things to consider...

Proboards
- Looks good and easy to use and set up, fully managed service so no issues around upgrades etc.
- Quick look on their forum seems to imply that they seem reluctant to give you access to your data if you want to leave. Not a particular problem while ever you stay with them, but worth thinking about for any future forums
- Limit of 50,000 page views per month unless you pay more to remove the adverts. Obviously I don't know what the current stats are but I'd guess we're not far off that. This tally would also include guests/lurkers just browsing. As (hopefully) we make our way up the leagues, chances are this figure will just get higher.

PhpBB
- This is for the admins... It's likely you already have this free forum on the current hosting account, there is a simple install via softaculous. Some instructions can be found at https://www.ukhost4u...ng-softaculous/
- it's well supported, plenty of how-to's on YouTube etc.
- A bit more effort required to set up initially (config / template style etc.)

Invision Power board (current system)
- £150 per year (quoted above) doesn't seem too bad. No idea if this price goes up if you were to upgrade the current version (assuming it's the self hosted one we have), but would mean we get to keep all the topics, users etc. whilst getting some of the current niggles fixed.
- Is the licence fee for a newer version a one-off payment or recurring every year?

Personal section - If we're keeping it, I'd suggest locking it down to a private topic that you need to log on to view, to stop search engines from trawling it. If for example you google 'Bobs board islam', it doesn't show our forum in a particularly good light, and certainly not representative of a football forum.

Finally, if you want to consider any other forum software, there's a decent comparison site at https://www.forummatrix.org/

Morning all, I've been a software/web developer for over 30 years so should probably add some of my thoughts/suggestions to this...

Current system - As someone mentioned above, at first glance it does appear to be a closed book, in that you don't seem to be able to migrate the whole thing to a different web hosting company. At the figures suggested above it also seems expensive. As a comparison, unlimited web hosting charge £50 for the year for a package with 99.9% up-time and unlimited data storage. Cheaper packages are available elsewhere but limit the amount of data you can store, which could become a problem very quickly with a site this size. Key is to find someone that doesn't limit the data, and provides regular back-ups.

Data migration - Providing you have access to the database (probably via phpmyadmin) then its not impossible to migrate to a different platform. Unless there is a tool that will migrate the data to a different platform for you however, it could take days, weeks to manually move all this over. This would mean locking the current system down while the migration takes place, otherwise your forever playing catch-up with new posts, threads, users etc. Obviously not ideal. Someone else suggested outsourcing the data migration, which is a good idea but likely to come at significant cost.

New forum - Personally, I'd take a look at phpBB. It's free open-source forum software, with good community based support. If you google football forums using phpBB, you'll see quite a few, including Man City, Arsenal, Bayern Munich, and (dare I say) stagsnet, to name a few. It's also most likely that some web hosting companies offer this installation as part of their package.

Domain name - you could ask the current owner to have this transferred to you, then all the dns entries will need changing to point to the new system. This should be the VERY LAST THING to be done however, else everything will stop working. Alternatively, someone like 123reg will sell you a new domain name for around £12 a year (currently 79p for the first year). So you could register for example bobsboard.co.uk , then move the other one over later so they both point to the same site.

Mods - As goku said, definitely needed.

So my suggestion for the easiest/ cheapest (£62 per year) option would be to :
- Buy some cheap reliable web hosting and a new domain name.
- Install phpBB as a new forum and run the 2 forums in tandem for a few weeks to give people time to register on the new one and start using it.
- Freeze this one and get a database extract, and see if we can get someone to try and migrate it as an archived forum /sub-domain on the new site.


Just my thoughts, and apologies for the lengthy post