When strange things happen on the forum.....

[electra225]

This is a little story that I should have shared before the forum migration. It happened rather suddenly and we needed to act quickly. I didn't have time to give you guys a heads up on what to expect.

To make a longer story really short, our old forum host was HostGator. They promised no ads, no spam, 24-7 phone technical support. And at a price I thought was reasonable to start a new forum. Well, the 24-7 tech support only lasted the 45 day "money back guarantee" period. On day 46, they decided they did not support forum software, period, end of discussion. I was on my own. Forumotion, PHPBB's in-house hosting service, wanted $12 a month to have no ads. Every other feature was extra money. HostGator included these features as a part of their package deal. The issue with HostGator is that they did not provide SEO services. Search Engine Optimization, which basically sets the forum footprint on search engines, how much traffic we receive. They also did not provide protection from the tens of thousands of spambots we fight each January. I got sick three months after I started the forum. There were several updates to the forum software issued during that time. HostGator's website designers wanted $2500 to do those updates, in advance, with no guarantees they would work. The wife and I started calling around to local website designers. We finally found Mark, and we all know how relationship has evolved. If it were not for Mark, you wouldn't be reading this today. I decided on "Day 46" that HostGator would not be our forum host when the time came to renew. I had no plan other than that.

Mark has migrated the forum to his server. He is our Global Administrator, technical guru, and, now, our forum host. Everything in one place. If I want to give up the forum to someone else, it will be more easily accomplished now. If you guys pay attention to the "users online" ratings at the LH lower corner of the index page, you may have noticed
we have been receiving really good traffic lately. We have gone from an average of 0 to 20 users online during a 5-minute period, to an average of 150 to over 200 users online. Our "record" is currently at 214. More, incidentally, than ARF, at least for the last couple of weeks. They have more members logged in at a time than we do, but they also have been around for almost 30 years, so they have more members. This increased exposure to search engines will give up a greater possibility of gaining new members. We are a niche forum. This forum will never be the size of ARF or AudioKarma/Vinyl Engine.

There have been reports of certain features on the forum not working right. Having trouble logging on. Having the "remember me" feature not working right. All I can advise at this point is to make sure you have cleared the cookies and cache on your browser, on every device you use for the forum, then clear the cookies on the forum. You may need to do this more than once. I had to do mine three times before I got everything working right again. Don't ask me why, I don't understand why. There is a technical explanation, but it's way over my head. Suffice it to say, that these issues will go away in time if you have cleared the cookies and cache as recommended. I appreciate everybody working together on this and apologize for any inconvenience during the transition.