How much would it cost to damn well fix this board

About This Message Board
1

And can we start some sort of a collection? I’m of course happy to pitch in, in case that was not clear.

2

I’d like to see them consider selling it, let some interested party take over it. They could keep the name if they like, hopefully all the users and moderators would stick around. The current owners are obviously not really that interested in it, and this problem has been around since it’s inception. I used to be around in 2002 under another username, but left for many years, because the problem was far worse then.

This is bad, but it’s been far worse. Frustrating as hell, which is why I’ve always limited my use here, anyway.

3

502ed trying to load this thread.

Anyhow:

  1. Give root access to Tuba and someone else who knows what they’re doing. Enough of this back-and-forth stuff with some techies in Tuscon whose main job is maintaining content management systems for alt-weeklies.

  2. Software

XenForo 2 - $160 first year, $55 every year afterward. (The price went up just recentlty.) Easy conversion from vBulletin 3, and much, MUCH faster. The interface looks cleaner and more modern. Old-timers won’t like it.

XenForo 2 enhanced search (not really necessary, but nice to have for faster search) - $55 / first year, $10 every year afterward.

  1. Managed hosting options from high-end hosts, considering the SDMB will get ~2000 posts/day, and admins block nuisance CIDR blocks from spam/hacking/scraping-friendly Web hosts and ISPs (Nobis, ColoCrossing, Hivelocity, Enzu, Hetzner, Yesup, OVH, Psychz, Kyivstar, etc).

Liquid Web (dedicated cloud): 4 core Xeon E3-1230 v5, 7.7GB RAM, 220GB SSD RAID 1, 5TB bandwidth - $1,308 / year, probably $10-$20 / month for management (based in Lansing, MI). (I think the SDMB will do fine on a cheaper VPS, if the admins get tough on junk traffic.) I’ve been a satisfied customer for about 15 years.

KnownHost (VPS): 3 vCore, 4 GB RAM, 125 GB storage, 3 TB bandwidth, 2 IPv4, management - $100 / month. Heard nothing but good things.

URLJet (specializes in forums, shared): 1.5 GB RAM, 30 GB storage, 1 TB bandwodth, managed w/vBulletin or XenForo optimization - $125 / month. Expensive for what you get, but Giraffe swears by them.

It can’t cost that much more than what STM Reader is paying Foundation/DesertNet for IT services related to the SDMB…
Will this happen? Nope. STM Reader is supposedly losing money. The Straight Dope column is dead. However, the SDMB still shows up in Google results, and draws in web traffic. “The Straight Dope” name is still a trademark. The SDMB is a cash cow, essentially. End-of-life vBulletin 3 powered by end-of-life MySQL and end-of-life PHP. No investment except a stipend for Jen, and some bandwidth costs. It’s been slow and crashy for 20 years, and people still love it. What do they have to gain by updating vBulletin or the back end, tweaking the server settings, moving to a faster server, or giving the site away?

4

I’m not an IT guy, but how much does a server to run a board this size cost exactly?

5

If you’ll look up a couple posts, elmwood has pretty thoroughly lined out the relevant costs and improvements.

6

I don’t know a thing about forum software, but when you guys have ironed everything out, I’d be happy to chip in with $ as well.

7

Yeah, I definitely can’t help us here, looks like elmwood is our guy.

8

I take that back for now.

God no. Could I do it? Yes. I’d be afraid of fucking up the conversion, though – missing one critical thing. The list of troublemaking CIDRs – no problem.

9

I don’t know about elmwood’s other choices but www.christianforums.com uses xenforo and I’m quite satisfied that it works well. Apparently, it is very configurable.

10

That was ignorant of me. My apologies.

11

De nada!

12

So wait a minute… Elmwood’s lined out a set of solutions that would cost around $150 a month for the first year on the high end, if the costs are distributed across a full year.

Annual cost 1st year:

$160 = XenForo2
$55 = enhanced XenForo searching
$1500 = URLJet hosting

$1715 total annual cost for first year.

$1715 / 12 = $142.92 / month.

Second and subsequent years are a little cheaper - $110 + 1500 = $134.17 per month.

Even at twice the price, that’s chump change for something like this.

13

If whoever is in charge set up a gofundme, I’d chip in some, as long as it directly went into fixing the board.

14

This budget has nothing for the conversion costs. In my experience, they often are much higher than the hardware costs. Often equal to 12-18 months of operating costs.

And we do want a good conversion!
A clean switch over of all user names, login info, keeping all pending thread notifications active, etc. Plus keeping all the history of past threads & links to them live – that’s one of the best parts of this site. And also one of the ways many users find us – outside searches or links that lead here.

15

Unless there’s something really quirky about the SDMB’s implementation of vBulletin, conversion won’t cost much. Jen set up a board during the Winter of Missed Content, and I have no reason to believe she couldn’t make the switch herself, if she had the right privileges.

  1. Buy, instal, and configure the new software, whatever it is.

  2. Make a new template or theme. The non-Sultan SDMB theme is close to stock vBulletin, with some color and header tweaks. The default templates for most new message board systems are clean, simple, and tasteful. Just change default colors and files to use the SDMB indigo color scheme and header image, tweak another setting (through the admin control panel) to display full avatar images (rather than a round porthole image), and you’re done. I could probably make a SDMB theme on my message board in about 10 minutes, if you want to see what it would look like.

  3. Run a database conversion script, using a web-based interface. It’ll take about 18 hours to a day, maybe a bit more, for something the size of the SDMB. If plugins didn’t change the data types of any critical database columns in the source SDMB/vBulletin 3 database, there should be no issues. The source database should be backed up, optimized, and checked for errors beforehand, though.

You really only need to call in specialists if you’re converting from or to an obscure message board system, where there’s no conversion script. vBulletin to Xenforo, IPB, Woltlab, or phpBB? Kinda’ easy. FluxBB, UBB, or Vanilla to something else? Call in someone who specializes in forum conversion, and knows MySQL inside and out.

These are the manuals for Xenforo, IPB, and Woltlab.

https://xenforo.com/xf2-docs/manual/install-upgrade/

https://www.woltlab.com/media/232-manual-burning-board-4-0-pdf/

I’m not an IT professional, or a Linux/PHP/MySQL/Apache guru, but I was able to upgrade from vBulletin 4 to XenForo 2 with no issues, and no outside help. There were tweaks in later days, but the basics --installation, configuring, making a template, converting the database – took about three or four hours, from a cold start to a new, fully working message board with the same users, posts, privileges, passwords, private messages, and (basic) account and profile settings as before. I had that white knuckle feeling as the conversion script ran, hoping there weren’t any oddball errors because of Unicode or an old plugin. However, the script ran without incident, I checked out the new site, and everything was there except old avatars.

\

16

Unless there’s something really quirky about the SDMB’s implementation of vBulletin, conversion won’t cost much. Jen set up a board during the Winter of Missed Content, and I have no reason to believe she couldn’t make the switch herself, if she had the right privileges.

  1. Buying, installing, and configuring the new software, whatever it is.

  2. Making a new template or theme. The non-Sultan SDMB theme is close to stock vBulletin, with some color and header tweaks. The default templates for most new message board systems are clean, simple, and tasteful. Just change default colors and files to use the SDMB indigo color scheme and header image, tweak another setting (through the admin control panel) to display full avatar images (rather than a round porthole image), and you’re done. I could probably make a SDMB theme on my message board in about 10 minutes, if you want to see what it would look like.

  3. Run a database conversion script, using a web-based interface. It’ll take about 18 hours to a day, maybe a bit more, for something the size of the SDMB. If plugins didn’t change the data types of any critical database columns in the source SDMB/vBulletin 3 database, there should be no issues. The source database should be backed up, optimized, and checked for errors beforehand, though.

You really only need to call in specialists if you’re converting from or to an obscure message board system, where there’s no conversion script. vBulletin to Xenforo, IPB, Woltlab, or phpBB? Kinda’ easy. FluxBB, UBB, or Vanilla to something else? Call in someone who specializes in forum conversion, and knows MySQL inside and out.

These are the manuals for Xenforo, IPB, and Woltlab. I’m not an IT professional, or a Linux/PHP/MySQL/Apache guru, but I was able to upgrade from vBulletin 4 to XenForo 2 with no issues, and no outside help. There were tweaks in later days, but the basics --installation, configuring, making a template, converting the database – took about three or four hours, from a cold start to a new, fully working message board with the same users, posts, privileges, passwords, private messages, and (basic) account and profile settings as before. I had that white knuckle feeling as the conversion script ran, hoping there weren’t any oddball errors because of Unicode or an old plugin. However, the script ran without incident, I checked out the new site, and everything was there except old avatars.

https://xenforo.com/xf2-docs/manual/install-upgrade/

https://www.woltlab.com/media/232-manual-burning-board-4-0-pdf/