Hello everyone!
I hope this finds you well. As you know there has been some troubles with the server where we have the forum hosted. It appears our hosting company has been purchased by another company, and (I assume) since then they have made some changes with the resources allocated to each customer account. I have quite high demands on performance so the current setup wasn't good enough anymore for my own hosting needs.
A few months back, my husband and I created another hosting solution for ourselves, and we are not going to keep the account where the Praise Whistlers forum is now hosted. On new server has a different technology and I'm not going to get through the trouble to learn how to install PHPBB on there - also because I think PHPBB is a very outdated software and the support community is very un-supportive about making it more functional for the modern internet.
Now my question is -Is there interest in keeping it as a forum? There's been very little activity in the last 2 years. I haven't had the time to try to keep discussions going, and have also been overwhelmed by personal stuff.
Do you, as long-standing members, want to have the forum?
What I can do is to use Wordpress to build a forum. Wordpress has been greatly improved in recent years and has very good anti-spam and security plugins these days. It would be brand new and look different but would have forum functionality. You will need to re-register new accounts since it's a completely different platform (I haven't found any import/export functions that work).
I have paid for the domain for another year, and recently realised how much there used to be on the site besides the forum. I have all the old files on my laptop and could build an archive of sorts.
I won't be able or willing to spend the time of building the new forum if there's no interest. So please let me know your thoughts.
Building an archive website is different since it can be a static website from just folders and text files, and it wouldn't require any big maintenance other than building it.
Our hosting will expire at the end of this year but feel free to contact me by e-mail after that.
Cheers
Susanne