Hi all,

Several years ago when i was a member of a forum, i made suggestions to our moderator. One thing lead to another and now, years later, i'm the administrator.

The business/website that set up our forum is going to shut down in 3 or 4 months. Hence our forum will eventually be "archived," frozen, if i don't act.

I would like guys from our forum to transfer the data -- the forum and all of its posts -- to a new forum.

I don't really have a good idea as to how to go about this.

I imagine that i'll need to find a webhost. How much do they run? Can you recommend any?

Would the current owner's tech guy be able to simply just give the forum and/or the software to us? They will no longer be using the software. Could a tech guy do this easily? Or would i need to, again, hire a guy to "bridge" the old forum in to a new one.

I have not yet approaced our owner with this idea. (And it's possible that it might not even be feasible for him to do it.) I'm just now getting started gathering information. I'm sort of in the dark, so to speak.

Any advice would be welcomed.

thanks in advance,
and thanks again for all of the valuable help given in the past,

A lot of the users here have had good results with www.mindraven.com which is run by the former UBB.threads owner.

As for moving a forum, I have a guide here. If you want to just hire someone to do it, I offer such services privately.

You'll need to acquire the license information for the site for UBB.threads or buy a new one (see pricing link on the links bar to the left), and a domain name (unless they're giving you the domain as well).

Hi Gizmo,

Thanks for the tip about mindraven. I like Rick as he did help us out greatly.

Please PM me with a ballpark fee amount for what you'd charge to move our forum.

By "acquiring the license information" for the site do you mean that the current owner of the site would have to transfer the license to me (us)? (As i imagine that he would gladly do if this plan becomes feasible.)

I'd like to keep this as cost efficent as possible. But i can have others chip in if need be.

I'll look at that guide shortly.

Thanks again, Gizmo

Jim

I think Rick's wife runs the game over there.

Will momentarily.

Yes, as UBB.threads is a license based product, you need a valid license to run the software; so either the former owner will need to provide you with their license and its password (they can recover license information here) or you'll need to purchase a separate license.

Well, general operating fees for a website are:

• Domain Name (price varies, I offer registrations for $19.99/yr, but I also include dyndns services through enom), other retailers you could get as low as $8 or so (I'd recommend GoDaddy, for domain registrations, but not for anything else).
• Hosting (again, varies; I'm not sure how large your site is offhand, but standard virtual hosting should work in most cases (unless your community is HUGE, in which case you may need a VPS which can raise costs a bit), this is generally paid monthly, but a lot of places give discounts if you prepay for like 3/6/12 months).
• Licensing (here, UBB.threads is $139 for a license (unless the owner grants you the license) and $59 for a year of upgrades).

Not a problem

Again, excellent stuff, Gizmo. Thanks.