I've only just found the place you can change the wording of their standard message - the very strong implication of the old message was that if we didn't pay, it just meant the board would revert to being ad-supported, rather than carrying on and racking up a giant bill (they send me letters in the post, rather quaintly.) I've made the situation a bit clearer!

I've also asked Boardhost to make the board ad-supported with immediate effect (an option which definitely wasn't there before!) I'd *hope* they're not stupid enough for that to mean the community funding link disappears, but that seems optimistic given their track record thus far; if it does I'll have to put it back, and we'll be in a catch-22 situation of racking up more bills in order for people to be able to chip in and pay the bill.

I've made an additional payment of seventy-five dollars towards the total.

-- Edited by Steve Devereux on Tuesday 5th of November 2013 12:01:20 PM

They can convert it to "ad supported" once the balance is cleared, but that doesn't affect the existing bills, just prevents further ones from being racked up once they've been paid. It's not a good system. Well, it is for them, obviously.

Is what I'm hoping for, yes! Then we can move this whole thing to another host (or if nobody's keen on that any more, just leave it as an ad-supported Boardhost effort).

I'll see what I can do.

I'd take over hosting on my server gladly, but cannot pay the debts, can contribute a little, though. But exporting so the archive stays is hard with this activeboard thing. I AM fine with an addsupported board, though.

Well, that was incredible. 

Having requested the move to an ad-supported board, Boardhost suddenly got in touch by e-mail last night (after, what, three years?) and said the amount we were paying was insane, and that they could knock some money off the outstanding total - only to find that between us we'd all paid about $250 (!) since yesterday, more than halfway towards the total, so they wrote off the remainder.  They've also moved the board onto what should (in theory) be a much cheaper package, with a consistent monthly rate and much more of a realistic allowance for visitor numbers.

So, firstly THANK YOU to everyone who contributed - I am consistently amazed by how generous everyone is.  Pulp fans once again proven to be The Best.

Secondly, now that that's sorted, what do people think about the future?  I know I'm never here, and that this hasn't been "my" board in anything other than a strict legal sense for many moons now, and the lion's share of the money hasn't come from me, so it doesn't really feel like my decision.  That being said, I still love Pulp with all my heart, and I'm happy to keep the board here, shoving a few quid in the meter as and when - but I know it's lacking in some features people have specifically asked for over the last few months.  I agree with Eamonn that if we are to move to a different provider, exporting the archive of posts, profiles etc. is a must - so if this isn't easy, my view is that we might as well stay here.  But what does everyone else think?

Thirdly and finally... I know I'm about ten years behind now, but would people find it useful to have Bar Italia (as in the site itself) back up and running (it'd just be an adjunct to the forum at this point, but anyway)? The plan would be to just port as much of the content as I could save from my various old computers into a Wordpress site (which would have the added benefit of allowing comments)... but with the Wiki, Pulp Songs etc., my feeling was that it had run its course in terms of usefulness.  Still, the offer is on the table.

Once again a whacking great big thank you to everyone who put money in, or even just looked at this and didn't think "cuh, what a wanker." It's appreciated more than you know.

Gah, that's an arse. I've had a quick look through, and should push come to shove, I'll be able to grab the data through screen-scraping. Though I guess looking at the forum with ads would be a sensible option, if they're not too obtrusive and noisy and try to launch a tonne of popups, the status quo is always a good option.

-- Edited by Ste on Wednesday 6th of November 2013 08:05:15 PM

I actually checked last time this came up, and it seems to be difficult to get the data in a workable format in the first place.

Seems my last entry was cut off - was going to say "...user details would be unrecoverable"

Has anyone noticed the mobile view has improved? You can now see the time since the post was updated.

Same here, I've never actually seen the logo. Am I missing much? Is it good?

Also, really nice to see so many people contribute so quickly. With other forums I've been on it looked like trying to get blood from a stone asking for contributions from users. I'd donate myself, but I've nowt to offer

The logo (and background) was lost when the pulp.gb.com host went down and I forgot to renew it :) I've probably still got it somewhere.

The fundraiser was amazing - thanks to everyone's astonishing generosity, there's no need for anyone to donate anything else for the time being, I think we're okay for another couple of months yet while we work out what to do. I like the site Sturdy linked to above, it's just a matter of being able to export all these posts. When we first moved over, I have a vague recollection of spending ages manually copying and pasting entire threads from the old forum into the new, but that seems crazy.