board77

A strike team would be fab! Pooling resources and all :mrgreen:

Eru has set up a 'practise' board - seeB77 experiment

Lidless has taken care of <<3. Register domain name >>

I'll write an email and/or post on the phpbb board to find out about <<1. Confirm a backup is available here>> with copy to the B77admin email (which is btw b77_ad@yahoo.co.uk ) so they are up-do-date aswell and could relay any info if it happens while I'm gone next week.

Who-else?
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Resident witch

Does anyone know....Is it possible at all to work on a board design offline? I mean, to download and install phpbb on a computer with no internet connection so that you can work out your design?

*goes to peruse phpbb website*

No idea.

I've spoken to the IT department I'm with, and more than one of them have suggested www.xeran.com for hosting and gave me a quick tour.

It seems to have what we need (especially if we use the ePro choice - USD 300 / year) - especially advert free, 24 hour help line etc.

I'd like Ethel, Griff, Squiddy and whoever else to have a quick look and ask people in their department if they agree. If so, I'll make the purchase.

Give us a few days, Steve - I'll speak with the techies I know and do some research as best I can, but I'll need till say early next week to get info back - I'm so desperately busy at work at current :|

I think I might have some bad news re backup. Went cruising on the support site and found this:

Quote:

<<anyway, at this point of time we don't provide any individual forum backup.>>
<<we are having 1 database with hundred of thousands table ... default PHPBB backup feature will fail due to our customisation.
we will only start developing/offering backup solution after we've upgraded to phpbb Olympus (('couple of months from now')).>>

Thread reference

And also an announcement here

They say a couple of months..... but considering the info in that thread I fear it could take considerably more time.

But then again - it will take us time to set up 'shop'
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Resident witch

Well, with that in mind, I echo an earlier question I had of Squiddy...do we want to stick with phpbb, or go to a product which we might need to pay for, but would be superior to our current system? If we quite literally need to "pack up and move" instead of just wheel the entire house to a new plot of land, why shouldn't we upgrade our residence?

What I'm wondering (but then I must stress I really don't know anything about this stuff) is...

- irrespective of whichever 'system' we might be going for (phpbb or something else)... can we not backup threads ourselves? I mean.. erm yes I'm just going to show you what an ignoramus I am ...
anyone can backup threads into e.g. webarchives (*.mht) or entire webpages (*.htm / *.html). Would not that be possible?
I'm aware that we'd not be able to continue posting to threads saved thus - but they could be used as link reference and then a new thread opened over at our board.
... but then why save + transfer them when we can link to them to here?

Yeah! Forgive me... I'm not making much sense, or am I?
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Resident witch

Alandriel, yes, I think that's possible, but it would still be starting from scratch.

If you visit Squiddy's board you'll see that there are links to the posts on the old board, but the board as such was starting from scratch, everybody had to re-register etc.

Maybe not a bad thing, seeing so many people here want to leave history behind, though.

Alandriel wrote:

I think I might have some bad news re backup. Went cruising on the support site and found this:

Quote:

<<anyway, at this point of time we don't provide any individual forum backup.>>
<<we are having 1 database with hundred of thousands table ... default PHPBB backup feature will fail due to our customisation.
we will only start developing/offering backup solution after we've upgraded to phpbb Olympus (('couple of months from now')).>>

Thread reference

And also an announcement here

One database????!?!!?!? Holy shit on a stick!

I can NOT believe that.

That reallty confirms my concerns about this place. One database means all thier eggs are in one baseket. I have 3 running for my little place. They should have one SQL database per board.

I think a backup is hopeless.

Moving would mean losing all data.

Just looking quickly at Xeran I think we can do better. The first plan that mentions MySQL is eUser which is $18.95 a month. I think we can do better than that. I will look into it further anyway.

Besides word of mouth looking up a host at various hosting review sites is a good thing to do so there arn't any surprises. I had found a host for my site that looked awesome but it turned out to be one guy and the worst customer service I have ever experianced in my time on Earth.

For phpBB a host must be a Unix server, have the latest php (I think it is up to 4.X), and MySQL databases. You really only need one database for one board.

I really wouldn't worry too much about space and bandwidth since the bottom rung of most hosts will be fine for this board which is pretty little and doesn't get much activity (relativly speaking in web terms). The board itself isn't big and I don't think you are expecting thousands of people to look at the board each day.

Ro, there is actually a way to run a virtual server on your computer. The info is on my other computer so I'll have to get that to you another time. Just as a warning it will take a lot of research to figure it out and run it. It was too complicated for me and I didn't feel like figuring it out at the time.

Just to give you an idea about what is involved in making your own temolate I found this.

I don't know how much I can do right now since I really need to work on my own site right now. However I do think more discussion is required so everyone understands is confortable.

Since we can not move the data over then we could use anything, not just phpBB.

As much as I think this host sucks I don't think there is any immediate danger.

I think we should take our time. Research what is best. If we are going to put all this effort into moving it is important to do it right.

*volunteers*

Ahem, what for? :mrgreen:

okay, I voted yes for moving.

I'm willing to pay - I paid on TORC, I can pay on B77.

I'm willing to help moving - if somebody tells me what to do. :mrgreen:

And about moving the threads... I quite liked what Alandriel did when moving the Seekers RP. Could we just set up the board, then choose some "movers" who would register all members and move the posts? And when everything is moved, open the board and pass out passwords to the members, so they can register themselves?

Just an idea - don't know if that is possible at all.

Thanks for 'confirming' that stuff Squiddy and giving us some more info to check out :mrgreen: I'm 100% with you that we should take plenty of time over this.

Areanor: just love it when you volunteer :mrgreen: Copying things over post by post... needless to say its a royal pain in the backside... but I think for some threads this could be done. To do that for *all* threads .... ay ay ay faints at the thought...
I guess we would need to vote (;) )which threads to move e.g. maybe a top 10 or so....

anyways... I'm just glad Squiddy said: <<As much as I think this host sucks I don't think there is any immediate danger. >>>

Phew!
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Resident witch

A top ten? And leave all the other threads behind?

This is a very complicated issue and I'm sorry to say how little I have to contribute, but seeing as how long and hard the admins had to work at deleting threads and forums here, I can't say I'm excited to leave 'em all behind yet again. And by the time we get our own site, we'll have posted several thousand times more. That's a lot to start from scratch!

*continues wishing she was a techno geek*

Sort of.




*E*

We could save the threads, it's moving them in a way that allows us to continue them as if nothing happened that's the problem. So we can save everything, *E*, but some threads will just have to be started over....

Right?

What I did on my board was use the printer friendy button, save the HTML and post it on my server.

There is no printer friendly button so everything is in php.

Without a backup the only way to move things over is to cut and paste each one.

Shit.

How about if this board stays here, and we just use links, or "ghost" images of what is left on this site?

We could use ghost images, or we could all really chip in with copying and pasting. While B77 is not tiny anymore, it is not big either. We could work out a schedule to do the donkey work should we need it when we move. I for one would be willing to spend hours and hours copying stuff over to preserve it But maybe that's just me :mrgreen:

I see paypal being bartered around as a means of payment. I know most of you are in UK and USA or other non-backwards countries ... Paypal doesn't do business with South Africa so I won't be able to contribute if we settle on that ... just sayin of course ...

Never mind, Griff. you can contribute in other ways, I'm sure of that.

Okay, I thought a bit about that moving thing.

Would we really want to leave the ruins here behind then?

What I thought was this:
- set up the new board witht the fora.
- register all members and give them all the same password: "move"
- take up some movers and start with moving the oldest threads first.

procedere:
on B77: copy post
on new place: log in as X, post the post added with original date, log out
on B77: delete copied post.

So we could see how far the process is gone.

If there are two movers on the same task - maybe in touch via YM, they could move one thread together - sometimes they wouldn't have to log out on the new board even some time, when moving a dialogue between two posters.

When there are more movers around, we could share the fora - let's say for example: Griff and I move The Turf, Alandriel and Rodia move Books and Movies and so on........

When we do it like this, I think we can take some time and only have to close this board for about one day, the day we move the most recent threads (considering that The Turf has already three or four pages of Threads )

But it would be a way for us to keep the postcount - so Rodia and Ber don't have to start their race anew.


Did I make myself understandable?
or did you go

by now?
:mrgreen:

Moving posts......
it's not that I shun the task or anything but Areanor this kind of thing on that scale as we have it here would only work if the threads that are being copied over are not active. For very active threads there will be a time-lag - I'd estimate 3-4 hours to move it post by post depending how big the thread is.
Meaning... to move a thread it would have to be locked first and then copied over post by post.
Easy to do with the somewhat 'older' and less active threads.. and it's probably with those we can start first.

I like the idea very much of having a couple of movers assigned to each forum here - to re-create it over at the new place (once the admin has re-created the fora).
But it would also entail (with the locking of threads etc.) to give those movers some powers Dare I say the 'dirty' word possible make the movers MODs so they can do the task?

It's an option .... so long as everybody knows and see this process and the MOD function is of course tied only to this particular job -- and then 'abolished' once completed.

Possible?
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Resident witch

Makes sense to me!