The status of the forum

[Zarkow]

Technology advances and kills what is left behind. The platform we have used to drive the forum and the CMS for the website was phpBB2 and CategoriesMod -- both have been out of development for years and the latter even disappeared from the web around 2012 and no trace of the author can be found.

The forum was written for PHP 4 and later adjusted up to PHP 5.3 - sadly our webhost has now pushed through the upgrade to PHP 7 that removes a lot of functions that was deprecated in 5.x branch of PHP, causing the old PHP to fail completely.

An attempt have been done to upgrade the PHP code, but the work needed is so extensive and it would still mean we would be on an out-dated core of an unsafe and poorly written forum platform that we have now decided to migrate to a new platform.

Sadly the usage of phpBB2, being as old as it is and then us using the fully modded back-end in CategoriesMod, removes any chance of using existing upgrade/migrate solutions.

So...currently there is no chance to save all the old data from forum-posts, without coding a custom migration tool ourselves. Currently we do not have the time or resources to do this undertaking. Just extracting user-data and migrating the minimal amount of data needed to generate a user profile, together with getting a new forum platform up an running, has taken the full weekend, thanks to impure data, slow connection and issues stemming from shared web-hosting.

[Zrix]

So...currently there is no chance to save all the old data from forum-posts, without coding a custom migration tool ourselves. Currently we do not have the time or resources to do this undertaking.

Bummer. So many years of memories "gone".

[Mr Nice Guy]

So...currently there is no chance to save all the old data from forum-posts, without coding a custom migration tool ourselves. Currently we do not have the time or resources to do this undertaking.

Bummer. So many years of memories "gone".

Very sad.

[EmBra]

So...currently there is no chance to save all the old data from forum-posts, without coding a custom migration tool ourselves. Currently we do not have the time or resources to do this undertaking.

Bummer. So many years of memories "gone".

Very sad.

Very, but what about a new gather? Create new memories?

[Zarkow]

To avoid sending announcements to de-activated or uninteresting accounts, we have aggressively culled old accounts that have not logged in for the past 2 years (i.e. since the platform switch).

If you have an account that doesn't exist anymore or a friend of yours had their account removed, the username is now free and a new registration can be done using up to date and current information. This also helps us deal with the new GDPR legislation.

[Zarkow]

To help with spam-bots invading in waves all new accounts must now be email-verified AND admin-approved. The latter will usually ONLY happen if a person enters our DISCORD server, enter the SH channel and post a msg asking to be approved. Discord invite --> https://discord.gg/FGMWtCc

[Zarkow]

An FYI -- If nothing else is announced, it is the plan to let this site softly go to sleep by 2023-11-01 -- it will then be days short of 20 years and it is time to let it go.