Yes, I very much agree: the transfer of content and users to a new forum is something that is definitly not done between lunch and coffee, but has to be set up and managed stringently as a project, with project members that are commited to this task. It needs time, effort and expertise, especially if the aceboard crew is not cooperative.

On the other side, if the risk is that someday the whole forum will collapse, then we should act soon as long as we have the freedom, and not wait until we have to re-act to a desaster.

Separating the Website from the forum, as Shark mentioned, also lowers the risk, so that is something to be taken into serious consideration, and OVH is a good start to look at.

Proposal
I suggest to collect the tasks that have to be performed in order to successfully replicate and migrate this forum to another platform. Then we can structure these tasks, assign resources, effort and prerequisites and get to a work breakdown structure that could serve as a basis for decision --- a decision on if, what to do, when, how, and who will be involved.

Even if a migration is not to be implemented this year, it is good to have a plan ready in the drawer that can be put to work when the time has arrived.

Does any of the fellow lagooners already have some previous experience with a project of moving a forum from one platform to another? Then we could possibly use an already existing WBS as a start.

Best regards,
qbv8

On the question of hosting a new forum on, maybe this site is worth checking out:
http://www.hostingdelivered.com/index.hs

I have no idea what the catch is but at least they claim it is free AND without banner ads or ads in any way...
I also don't know how easy or hard it would be to migrate the current forum to the new one.

TrenchCart wrote : On the question of hosting a new forum on, maybe this site is worth checking out:
http://www.hostingdelivered.com/index.hs

I have no idea what the catch is but at least they claim it is free AND without banner ads or ads in any way...
I also don't know how easy or hard it would be to migrate the current forum to the new one.

I looked around I'm curious about lack of a catch too but they already have quite a few that accepted the offer.


I've never participated in a move but am willing to learn. I'm semi-retired and probably can demote more time than most. All you need do is teach me how.
L

Petite recherche sur la toile :
Pour commencer une discussion avec des adresses d'hébergeurs (si tu veux gérer toi-même ton forum, voire héberger le lagon) : http://www.commentcamarche.net/faq/suje ... -ou-payant

Des hébergeurs de forum :
http://www.vosforums.com/ n'a pas l'air très actif (voir le forum http://vosforums.vosforums.com/ messages pas très récents)
http://www.easy4forum.com/ le site a l'air très récent (voir le fourm http://forums.easy4forum.com/ peu de messages)
http://www.forumshotel.org/ idem (voir le forum http://supports.forumshotel.com/index.php)
http://www.free-bb.com/fr/ a l'air actif (voir le forum http://forum.free-bb.com/)
http://www.forumactif.com/ a l'air actif (voir le forum http://forum.forumactif.com/)
http://www.forums-free.com/fr/ très récent ? (voir le forum http://soutien.forums-free.com/ ou http://support.forums-free.com/forum.html)

Sinon pour la migration du forum, je peux revenir à mon métier de base, à savoir informaticien...
Et pour les étapes de migration :
- Créer le nouveau forum
- Etudier les structures de l'ancien et du nouveau forum et voir ce qui peut être repris et/ou transposé
- Faire les tests et mettre au point le nouveau forum
- Quand tout est prêt, fermer l'ancien forum, effectuer le transfert, ouvrir le nouveau.
- Verrouiller toutes les sections de l'ancien forum et faire un lien vers le nouveau

Et j'oubliais, la communauté phpbb semble très dynamique, et remplie de férus, comme en témoigne leur forum http://forums.phpbb-fr.com/. J'y ai même trouvé une discussion avec un mec qui a monté un outil de migration depuis des forums FSB2 (rien que pour le fun, quasiment)

hummm faire un transfer de forum sa permettrai deja de faire le tri non ???? sinon moi pour faire mes fofo je vais sur xooit que je trouve pas mal. pour forums.phpbb j'ai aussi fait quelque fofo dessus je ne regrette pas ^^ sinon j'avais un site il te fournissait tout les codes source de le forum tu pouvait l'administrer nivo develloper mais faut avoir du temps et si connaitre en prog ( surtout php XD )

et les mecs! me balancez pas dans une usine à gaz... j'ai déjà du mal à m'en sortir avec le site et les jeux! heureusement que le forum est peuplé de bonnes volontés... (merci)

Luke already made a list, but it's in French, so it's not so easily readable for all. Here's my rough translation and some additional thoughts. (maybe some of them were in the original, but I sometimes miss details in French)

Create a new forum
Find a suitable place to open it and research about the pros, the cons and the reliability.
questions: How many active users, how many viewers, how much bandwith would you need and is offered. Google can help to research if it's reliable.
If it's a place where phpbb3 is available, would that be enough? You have quite some settings available on it, my guess would be that it would more than suffice.

Study the structures of the old and the new forum
How is this one structured? Do you have access to the database? The user database is the first thing you would need to migrate. That ought to be the easiest part.
I wonder how the forum itself is structured. You only see html pages, but there has to be some database behind it, that generates the pages.
The new database is either gonna be mysql or presql, in the case of a forum and the statements you need for migration, you won't see much difference.
But if I understood correctly someone already made some tool which could be used or is it not available publicly.

Run tests
If it's a pre-setup environment, the code has already been well tested and you would need to do little testing. As long as users do not have too many (or too little) rights.

I everything works fine, close the old forum and give the public access to the new one.
I would suggest keeping this one online for some time, but not allowing new posts and put a migration message on-line. This way it would also end up in the internet archive and the clever searcher could always find the new location.
Oops you already said that in your last point, but I did not understand it, so I pasted it into google translate.

The next thing you would need is volunteers to help on the different phases. My life is in a bit of a migration phase itself, so I doubt if I can offer much immediate help.

coder, well done, good translation

Here is a little poll : who is volunteer for working on the transfer of the forum ? Especially in the study of the database structures of the old and the new forum.

I'd love to do a study on the database structures. I do find that quite interesting. Any reading material on the structure of the old forum. I can easily install PHPBB3 (that's what you're planning to use, isn't it) on my laptop. So that should not be a problem.

By the way it's important that you either have the rights to import a database on the new forum, or be able to write custom php, so you can migrate.

I've made an observation that I find a bit curious, and this seems the best place to make mention of it. A time or two I have looked for a specific thread that I know is present and had difficulty finding it. (The current thread would be Pusooy: Cheerleader Party)

Anyway, it would appear that when I view the forum, there is a gap between the items on page one and page two. I did a search and located the Party thread this time and found that its most recent edit was 26/06/2009. Page 1 of all sexy games ends for me with

[H-GAME] Bursting Breasted Police 03/07/2009 whereas Page 2 begins with

3d Adult Chat 21/06/2009

Obviously the 26/06/2009 date falls prior to within this gap and explains why I had been unable to locate it. Anyway, thought I would pass the information along.

Arnulf has relocated comments which have not been located in appropriate areas, qbv8 has noted some issues in deletions and then ensuring correct flow of a thread.

Then too there have been issues cited about the software base of this forum.

Hmm. Or do we have our own "Back to the Future"?

Hi, squire, I've noticed this leak already long time ago. I've discussed this with Shark and he pointed out that this would be a fault which lies beyond the means of the Admin. There is a non-defined area between page 1 and page 2 of the content list of "All sexy games", as I call it: the "Nirvana", where the topics disappear from the base line of page 1 and if they move their way further down, they would once a day appear again on the top of page 2. But these topics are only hidden and not deleted, they are still alive and if you have significant data of such a topic available, you can find it by using the search function. Then write a small post (such as a ? and a smiley) as reply post and the topic will be placed again on top of the list on page 1. And to avoid that the topic you are interested in moves away in the Nirvana, you always can tire back it on top by writing in a post reply.

This can be subsumed under the title "Rotten Software" (in Germany we say "Saftware").

Time to go.

Thanks guys. Arnulf's descrïption basically matches what I had decided was going on. Not really a big deal, but I thought I would make mention of it in case it was unknown.

It looks like there are some people out there willing to help. But it's all talking about theory as long as we don't know what can be extracted from this forum.
I can really understand you don't want to start from scratch. It would be an enormous loss.