Hey folks,
The cloud provider account that hosts this forum was signed over to me last night.
So like I promised, the details: The previous owner is attempting to stay on the account for a while. While the decision isn't necessarily up to me, he has a terrible track record of doing things in an efficient manner so I will be limiting his involvement. I have personally seen that the guy is very sporadic in availability even though it was his responsibility to maintain the forum's inner workings. Take the expired security certificate late last year that took days to fix as an example. Or the letting the Xenforo license lapse part, which he didn't even inform the staff of until after it expired. That's why certain forum features are broke or work sporadically. He was/is very picky with which staff member he is willing to respond to. I have been told that there have been times where he seemed to not know what he was talking about, and carried out personal projects on the forum. Honestly, my biggest fear is discovering there's a huge mess with how he's implemented/changed things. Doing that on a live server is a huge no-no for many reasons, but I'll just leave it at that.
MTurk isn't fun without forum drama right? Well, I didn't say all that because I want drama. I said it because I wanted to point out the places where they went wrong. It is my commitment that I will not be making those same mistakes. I'm not going to do something with the forum just because "wouldn't it be cool if...". The biggest thing they failed to do was listen to the staff members who actually use the forum. So many things could be different had he listened/been willing to do what he signed up for, and it really bothers me that the staff couldn't do anything about it other than watch him fail to fix/update/implement/whatever things. I love this forum just as much as the many people who post here, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure the staff is heard. They are so much more involved with this place than I could ever be, so they deserve to have what they need.
There will be no immediate downtime unless something just happens to break out of the blue. My priority right now is make sense of everything the previous owner has done, and then I think the staff is going to be renewing the XF license so that we can get some minor forum changes done, like the previously mentioned import avatar with link thing. If it says anything about our current situation, Aveline has made a (from what I understand) long list of all the things that are broken, whether it be the forum itself or something that connects to it. So while it would be nice to see immediate changes, its probably going to take a decent chunk of time to get everything mostly working as intended.
I also previously mentioned that I'd like to cut some costs for the staff. I'm sure we can all agree that the forum is less active than it was a year or two ago, but that doesn't always equate to a smaller bill. I want to see this forum go for many more years yet, so I'm willing to handle some of the electricity costs for them. I could give more details on this later, but basically I want to make a backup of everything running now and start putting it on my own gear, mess with it and see what breaks. From there I'd go with a parallel conversion system and slowly start hosting the smaller things on my end and see if I can do so reliably. Then move onto the bigger and more important stuff. And so on. If not, no harm done because it will all still be running in the cloud as well.
I'd like to point out that I do not have any involvement with the money donated to this forum. I simply relay the monthly bill to them, and then they will PayPal me the money. I also still feel weird about being an admin so I do not associate myself with the staff yet
For what its worth, I'm sorry that the forum has been handled so poorly in the past, but I pledge to making sure it doesn't take that path again. I look forward to the future of this forum.
