This site has grown to over 500 members thanks to all of you. I never would have imagined that we would have a lot of great people sharing their knowledge about Trainwrecks, Dumbles and amps in general. But with the growth, there have been a number of issues that have been weighing on me:
Bandwidth
Our bandwidth has increased dramatically in the last couple of months. We have gone from transfers of 3-4GB/month to 52GB transfer so far for March. My transfer limit is 20GB/month and I get charged above that. It really bothered me to turn off automatic displaying of pictures last month to save on bandwidth. I feel like I'm cheating you guys.
Hosting Company
The hosting company for this domain had a major server crash a couple of week back that did not affect this site but affected my other website. Because of what they termed a "miscommunication in the server room" the latest backup was erased and they had to restore from a 10 day old backup. Imagine loosing 10 days worth of posts on this board!!!
Not to mention all the directory permissions were messed up. That scared the shit out of me!Domain
This domain "maximoaudio.com" was originally intended for my personal projects. I put this forum up thinking that if it didn't catch on than at least I didn't waste my money on a separate domain. Well, thanks to you guys it's grown into quite a monster so I would like to move this forum to a permanent home.
So with these issues in mind, I started to think about what was needed to move to a new domain.
Domain and Hosting Company
I have registered a new domain and signed up with a new hosting company. I can't say what the name of the new domain is because I'm in the process of testing right now and don't want people trying to post or log on while I'm testing. But I don't think bandwidth or reliability will be such an issue.
Old Board
I have successfully tested migrating this board and all its postings and attachments a number of times. You will not need to re-register and all your posts will be preserved on the new board.
External Links from Old Board
One of my biggest concerns are links to this board from other sites like the Gear Page, Metro Amps, Ampage, etc. I don't want these links to break since people might think that we have shut down. So I learned some PHP scripting and figured out a way so when users click on those external links it will correctly redirect them to the correct posting on the new board. If there is any PHP programmers out there please email me. I would like you to look at my simple script to make sure I didn't miss anything.
New Features
I want to implement some new features on the new board. Here is a laundry list of what I am looking for:
- Image, sound and file galleries that allows you guys to upload files from your builds
- FAQ and Article area where some we could put info for newbies, technical writings, etc
- Board improvements - show images, ability to search posts titles only, private messaging (PM), correctly handle large images so they don't mess up the formatting
- Have more moderators
I've looked at a couple of Content Management Systems (Subdreamer, Joomla, mx-phpbb) but I haven't found anything that fits all these criteria. I looked at PHP-Nuke which 18watt.com uses but it doesn't look like there is a way to migrate this board into PHP-Nuke since the databases are different. If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate it.
So what's the point of this rambling post? I'm looking for input from you guys to see what you think. Any features you would like to see? Know of a good CMS that will integrate with this board? I know moving will be a bit of a pain, but I think it will be worth it in the end. Please feel free to reply to this message with your ideas or send me an email.
Omar
I don't have the script here at work. I'll email you tonight from home.
