Perhaps we need to discuss some of the issues involved in moving to our own board (if anyone wants to split this into a new thread, feel free).
Some things that come to mind: We should have daily backups, so that at the most, we lose a day's worth of posts.
The backups should go to more than one person. (a disgruntled person who has access to the only backup, and has ftp access to the site, could permanently erase the messageboard
)
I understand that there is an email list of all active members. Is this kept only on the messageboard, or do people have it on their hard drives? I'm just thinking that if the board fails, for whatever reason, somebody should be able to communicate with everyone regarding the restore progress and instructions.
Someone expressed concern about private messages being visible in the database backup file. A mysqldump file is in plain text, so unless the database is encrypted (does anyone know if it is?) then the file can be opened in any text editor, including Notepad. It might be wise to instruct members not to send anything of a confidential nature via PM. When necessary, ask the recipient to delete the message upon receipt, and remember to delete it from your own Sentbox.
That's all I can think of now as I rush to get ready to leave for the day. I'm sure everyone will have more input.