We are having problems with the company hosting and managing these boards. Their service has been less than desirable and they just socked us with a $100 overage fee for having too many posts. Sheesh.

Because of the rising costs to operate the boards (very considerable) we are wanting opinions on switching to another type of board.

I'm sure many of you frequent other boards. There are a few other boards out there that are somewhat standards, so to speak. What do you like?

More importantly, if we switch boards, we will most likely lose everything - usernames, profiles, all posts, etc. unless we can figure a way to export it all.

I hate to have to make this decision. I really would like your imput, please.

A lot of places use ezboards and its not too bad. You can have a pretty big board on there i think.

check out www.sounddomain.com go to forums i believe they have a very large forum. Dont know how much better than this one it is though.

now that i look at it it might actually be the same company.

quote:

---

Originally posted by southpawslingr13:
now that i look at it it might actually be the same company.

---

Same company. Different product.

If you need help working on the exporting, let me know. I like hacking stuff like that together.

Jason

What sort of volume are we looking at anyway?

Jason

maybe it would be cheaper in the long run to do your own server and host it in a datacenter???

Actually it would be at this point for what they are charging us. We already own our own server for Rockcrawler.com. The original idea was to keep it off of our server in order to cut down on bandwidth and resources here. However, the service has been less than stellar, so once again we are ready to bring this one last piece of outsourced stuff back in-house.

I wish I had one, but this stuff is beyond my knowledge. Our club has a decent board system, but I think we run it on our server. I can PM our Admins and find out. Also, I believe after so many days, or months, all archived posts are wiped from the server. It sure keeps members post counts going up and down. Good thing is, most of us there really don't care about post count anyway, since it's a club board.

I would really hate to see all the great info on this board to be gone. This board is a history book into the evolution of a lot of peoples vehicals. A lot will be lost if you decide not to keep it running. I hear you about the money thing but there is so much to be lost

well just throw some more ram in there and a couple of 300gb scsi drives and call it good, what kind of bandwidth does this message board consume? also when your looking at bbs program get ahold of the tech side and see what they can do to help import/export the info.

Well, I say do it. It seems to me that it would be better for you, and the entire site if we could cut down on cost some how....not to mention a better server is cool too

Just as long as nobody takes my user name!

Mike how many gigs per month are you averaging for bandwidth? I might be able to host the board on another server for free that I own. I have about 20gbper month free

Server is hosted from a company out of canada called 100megswebhosting. I have several of their advanced plan hosting services that are being used right now and I could put it up on there

Personally I like using phpbb2 for the message board. Im far from being a competent php programmer but Im sure people are out there that can get it looking exactly like the RC boards

also if you decide to do this we might have enough free bandwidth to bring back the sites hosted on rockcrawler. Like monkey.rockcrawler.com. The package I have lets me add unlimited sub domains

Thanks, but the point is to bring it back in-house here under my control.

I can't really help in any way, but if you've got to switch to another bbs system do it. This is a great place to come and slowly we can rebuild the wealth of knowledge back up. Now as for boards, what about the one JU uses?

PHPBB and SNITZ are what most of the small to medium sized forums I visit run on.

vBulletin seems to run the majority of gigantic forums I visit.

Personally, vBulletin has the most features, but I prefer the way PHPBB works.

2¢

Maybe we could go back to the "old school" boards?

I'm with Renegade the old RC Boards where fine...

I also like the Boards at Colorado4x4.org which I believe is vBulletin 3.03.

- Shawn