Agreed about format, although I guess some people care about reading it on phones?

As long as whatever is chosen doesn't have the weird dichotomy between formatted quotes and clickable links, I'll be happy :)

I am in but don’t see it as the end

In terms of cost, it is unlikely to be that great. The server load would be pretty small and bandwith unlikely to be excessive. That could be mitigated with CloudFlare. Small scale hosting starts at about £50 per year. 10 folk a fiver each. My gut feeling is if we asked, we'd have plently of support.

Keith will hopefully tell us what the current bandwidth/server basis is.

It would be good to be able to get the ball rolling.

Re GDPR, transferring the information isn't the issue, really. It is the Data Controller responsibilities. Effectively Keith did this via his company and rather than having to set something up specifically for the forum, if someone was willing to 'own' the forum through their company, that would be a great help (I think someone did on the previous page).

The biggest risk from running a forum re GDPR/Data Protection is libel, and hacking of credentials / information (I'd suggest). The first is mitigated by Moderators being in place plus authenticated users posting, the second by using Third Party services as the authenticators (such as GitHub and Google) and not storing (protected) personal information.

It isn't quite as simple as it used to be, but equally, nothing insurmountable for folks who have built or renovated a house!

Posted By: borpinKeith will hopefully tell us what the current bandwidth/server basis is.

Is anybody actually in direct touch with Keith? There's no point in talking and planning unless we know he's willing to help by transferring ownership (data, maybe DNS etc).

I'm currently a member of another forum where the owner (i.e. the person with managment rights to the domain etc) has gone incommunicado, which has caused a lot of grief. Fortunately things have improved recently there. One of the things we have learned is to plan for future transitions and the withdrawal of key people etc.

FWIW, I don't have a google account and continuing to be a member of this forum wouldn't convince me to create one.

Yes, I too have written to Keith a couple of times over the last couple of months but no reply yet. Will let you know if I hear from him. Nick

It seems ironic that the green building forum is possibly going just at a time when these issues are becoming mainstream.
Its probably one of the few websites a view daily.
Would be really sad if it goes,glad there are ideas to keep it

Posted By: wookeyIdeally upgrading to at least a newer vanilla version, but that's more work.

From a quick scan, moving to Discourse (not to be confused with Discord) looks reasonably simple. This is the same platform as used by Home Assistant and Node-RED forums (amongst others).

Posted By: wookeyWe could just put in on my existing VM (which would cost nothing), but it's easier for future management if it's an explicit separate account.

Yes keep it separate makes most sense with several folk identified as admins.

Posted By: wookeyDNS for .co.uk is £55

Ideally, Keith might allow the current domain to be transferred

Posted By: wookeyActually getting access to the old machine to copy stuff over could be a problem, given Keith's minimal interest in such discussions over the last few years, but here's hoping we can sort that.

Let's hope.

Posted By: GarethCMy website is a WordPress one (geckoglazing.co.uk).

For me, having a company to provide the top cover would help, especially around GDPR. I don't see it as trying to tack on to someone elses hosting - that just invites trouble. As long as the domain and the Hosting is in the hands of a few folk, then it shouldn't do a Navitron!

let's see if Nick or Tony get a response.

Posted By: borpin

Posted By: wookeyIdeally upgrading to at least a newer vanilla version, but that's more work.

From a quick scan, moving to Discourse (not to be confused with Discord) looks reasonably simple.

Have you grokked the process? Looking at https://meta.discourse.org/t/migrate-a-vanilla-forum-to-discourse/27273 it tells you to use https://open.vanillaforums.com/addon/porter-core which appears to be a vanilla addon that needs installing on the same machine as the vanilla forum. Possibly it can be run in another instance - I have no idea what the architecture of vanilla is.

So I _think_ the idea is that with that extension installed there is some kind of import/export facility exposed which just gives you a tarball, and discourse has a script that should grok that.

What's not clear is whether 'vanilla porter' can run in the ancient version of vanilla we have here. We might have to set up a vanilla v2 in order to install the porter extension and then use that to import GBF. Which is a faff, but would get us an upgrade anyway. https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/38331/converting-from-vanilla-1-porter-gives-error-message suggests that some dicking-about may be required.

I am amused to note that the wikipedia entry for Vanilla starts at version 2.0 (july 2010), and we are on 1.0.3. That came from 'getvanilla.com' which no longer exists. It predates the Vanilla releases list which goes back to just before v2.0 (https://open.vanillaforums.com/categories/blog/p5).
Aha. I found vanilla 1.0.1 in the software heritage archive and that was released in 2006. Not clear where 1.0.2 and 1.0.3 got to. I guess they are out there somewhere. https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?branch=refs/tags/Vanilla-1.0.1&origin_url=https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla1
So somewhere in the 2006-2010 range. Looks like everything started again with new repos and a new site for v2.

I did try setting up Discourse on a Hetzner VM a couple of nights ago and most of it went OK but I got into an argument with ruby about rack versions. And then it was 4am so I stopped. But clearly that can be dealt with: it's just 'computers'. Annoyingly discourse is not packaged for Debian so you get stupid stuff like this instead of a nice 'apt install discourse'. Neither is vanilla. Grumble.

In the meantime I'm running an httrack web-scrape of the existing site so we at least have a copy should that be the best we can manage. I'm just saying this so we don't all do it and waste a lot of bandwidth. I presume fro the commentID number that there are about 30,000 posts. At 10 per page that would be 3000 GETs, at 5 per page 6000, and then all the images. I guess that's not actually too many.