New Forum?

[bobtheenchantedone]

Holy crap I have no clue what all that means.

[C is for]

...

What's FTP? Sounds suspiciously like something we don't have.

[Giovanni Schwartz]

Yeah. I realized that neither of us probably have FTP access (not that I know what that is.)

[bismark]

File Transfer Protocol...

hmm, yeah, those are instruction for moving a phpBB database over to another server.. probably not what you are looking for. I bet informe.com doesn't give you direct access to this board's database anyway... I nominate Laser Jock to write the screen scraping script.

[Giovanni Schwartz]

Well, I nominate you, bismark.

[Laser Jock]

I'm willing to do the screen scraping, if we do want to try that. I'm curious, though, what we might be able to do without scraping. Do you guys have any access to backups of the forum, for instance? Do you have any way of getting in touch with the original forum creator to see if she has access to that, or to the database in any other form? If we can get the database, migrating would be much easier.

Also, you guys were saying that the forum creator had special powers that admins don't. I'm not sure if that's a phpBB thing, or if that's an Informe thing. Basically, I don't know if that would still be the case wherever you go. (I've never set up phpBB, though, so I can't say.) Even if it is, I'd suggest that you don't use the "creator" account as a personal account; instead, call it something generic like "editor" or "admin", and use it only for administering things. That way if the current admins want to pass the baton, they can just change the e-mail address for that account and give the new person the password.

[Commander Keen]

Powers, ya know?

Like...levitation. Grappling-hook-hands. The ability to dress fancily. Milk curdling. The works.

I'd kill for some of those powers. Then once I got them, I'd dress fancy, levitate around, and grapple people just for the heck of it.

[C is for]

Powers, ya know?

Like...levitation. Grappling-hook-hands. The ability to dress fancily. Milk curdling. The works.

I'd kill for some of those powers. Then once I got them, I'd dress fancy, levitate around, and grapple people just for the heck of it.

Unfortunately, we only have milk curdling.

[Giovanni Schwartz]

Powers, ya know?

Like...levitation. Grappling-hook-hands. The ability to dress fancily. Milk curdling. The works.

I'd kill for some of those powers. Then once I got them, I'd dress fancy, levitate around, and grapple people just for the heck of it.

Unfortunately, we only have milk curdling.

and that's not intentional.

[C is for]

Here's just about everything we've got (I only took pictures of the ones I thought might be relevant, let me know if you want to see something else) :

Admin main page
What we see when we log into the admin panel.

Backup Database
The Backup Database link takes us here.

Forum Management
the Management screen.

Configuration
Configuration.

There doesn't seem to be any place to put a script, or anything like that. Can we scrape it without?

[Giovanni Schwartz]

What does backup database do?

[C is for]

What does backup database do?

Your guess is as good as mine.

No, actually, it does this: Here you can back up all your phpBB-related data.

But I don't know what that means.

edit2: I just tried to post and got this message. Who tried to kill me?

message_die() was called multiple times. This isn't supposed to happen. Was message_die() used in page_tail.php?

[Laser Jock]

Sweet! The database backup option looks like it'll most likely do what we want (as long as we find someone who'll let us import our database for free). For "gzip compress file" choose yes, and then click "start backup" and it should start a download. (Note that you'll want to do this again before we actually switch, if we do, to use the most recent version. However, getting a copy now would still be useful for making sure importing actually works.)

Also, if we can't find someone who offers free forum hosting that will do what we want, we could always pay for hosting. That would give us nearly complete freedom to do what we want with the forum, would eliminate odd ads, and would eliminate the chance of being locked in with a particular company (like we were worried about here). I know of a place that would cost on the order of $10/year (if that). However, that would also mean having someone who could administer the site from time to time. (I'd be glad to do it, but of course I wouldn't be around forever. We do have a number of computer-savvy folks here, though.)

[C is for]

Well, I can't get the backup to work at all. It tells me 502 Bad Gateway every time I try.

I'm going to try one more time on one more computer, then we're going to have to look at other options.

[Laser Jock]

Hm, I wonder if that's Informe's doing...I'll try and find out if they offer some other way to download the database.

[Laser Jock]

The good news is that Informe doesn't try to keep people from migrating forums away from their site. The bad news is that it may not be a straightforward import, since apparently they've modified the version of phpBB they use. (See this discussion for evidence of both.) However, that's hardly insurmountable. Given a copy of the database, I wouldn't mind tweaking until I could get it to work on a vanilla installation of phpBB.

The 502 error you were getting should normally be resolved fairly quickly; it indicates a problem on their end of things. If you try again now and are still getting it, I'd recommend complaining to them (or let me know, and I can).

[C is for]

Here's the sitch.

502 error is still coming up.
My support.informe account won't let me in.
Bob and I are getting conflicting messages from the forums we thought about switching to about whether or not they'd let us move our content.

...

That's about it. Thanks for being willing to help thus far, Laser Jock!

[Laser Jock]

Have any of the other admins had better luck with getting a backup of the database, just in case? (If not, I'll go ahead and try complaining, especially if no one else can get support through their official channels.)

I know I've already suggested this, but if you can't find someplace you trust to let you get the forum's contents out again, you might want to consider hosting the site someplace that's not free. Like I mentioned, I'd be surprised if it amounted to more than about $10/year, which I'm pretty sure we could handle. I also don't doubt that we have people willing and capable of what little maintenance it would require. (I'm certainly willing.) And if it ends up not working out, it would be quite easy to pack up and move things elsewhere: no lock-in, or even dysfunctional management interfaces! What's to lose?

(If you're curious, the host I'm thinking of is NearlyFreeSpeech.net, which has particularly good terms for small, low-traffic sites like this one.)

[bobtheenchantedone]

We have actually been looking at paid forums, and are planning to move to one. I'll check out the one you suggested. I haven't seen that one yet.

Thanks for all your help!

Edit: forgive me, I'm dumb, but are you saying we don't need to transfer or it would be easier to transfer if we go for something paid? Or are we still stuck with leaving behind all of our content here? I am so easily confused...

[C is for]

I'm willing to learn how to be capable!