It's time to do this. Unless someone is stupid enough to take on this role (see below why that is not a good idea), the Bavaria forum will be shut down by March.
The reasons are multiple:
- Hosting costs have skyrocketed and the donations are no longer covering them, we're still about €200 in the negative after the last call for donations and I'm not willing to go further out of my own pocket.
- Due to massive increase in spam/troll factory accounts, I have to approve signups manually, which is time consuming and also annoying for new users. Automatic filtering no longer works in the age of LLMs.
- The UK has passed some idiotic legislation (https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/time-for-tech-firms-to-act-uk-online-safety-regulation-comes-into-force/)and claims it affects us, which is why lots of forums are shutting down. I have no interest in dealing with this nonsense. For a more thorough explanation, read here (https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/)and here (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/forum/topic/6463/).
Should anyone consider taking over, you're welcome to, but considering the legal implications above, you'd have to be a lawyer with a lot of time on your hands. I'm a technical guy with technical skills (which you'll also need) and no interest in fighting legal battles.
If you do want to take over, in addition to the above legal chops you also need to know these things:
- Domain ownership, WHOIS records, how to transfer a domain
- DNS hosting, DNS records
- SSL certificates/letsencrypt
- PHP hosting (gandi.net currently)
- Forum software (SMF in this case)
- SQL databases (MySQL unfortunately)
- HTML/CSS, there's a few customizations and the download page, which is handmade.
- Bit of PHP hacking (very little, but there is some custom code)
- Forum moderation
- Member administration, which means telling troll factory and spam signups from real boaters. This takes a lot of time, although you could find volunteers. If you mess it up, you also have to clean up the resulting spam postings and complaints afterwards.
I can do a handover if someone is found, but I do not have the time to explain how these things work, so you need to already know how to host such things yourself and have done domain ownership transfers before. And be sure you read the legal nonsense first. Frankly, I don't see why anyone would take on this personal risk.
It's sad but that's the way things are going in this world right now.
Thanks for all the good information shared. I hope it gets archived somewhere, but please don't all hit the server with some bulk-downloader all at once.
Cheers,
Yngmar
Discussion thread here: https://bavariayacht.org/forum/index.php/topic,4395.0.html