Hi Folks,
Big change coming in our forum. And I will need your help, patience, and grace, please.
We've been fired by the company that currently hosts our forums.
It's one of the more bizarre things I've ever had happen in business.
So we're getting a new message board forum.
The good news is we think we've been able to transfer things from this board to the new board. Screen names, login info, avatars, and years and years of previous posts and content.
And the better news is the board appears to be both faster and have much better search capability.
The new board will be hosted by https://xenforo.com/. @Memphis Foundry did a ton of work on this and Xenforo was far and away the best option to do all the things we wanted.
As we make the swap, the forums (both this one and the new one) will be offline starting August 1.
It depends on how well the transfer goes (there is a TON of old material here) I'm expecting the forums may be down for several days after August 1, if not the whole week or longer. Hopefully, it won't be that long, but I want to be honest in letting you know Keith has done hundreds of hours of prep work on this, but we truly don't know until we get more into it.
When the new forum is back online, your old bookmarks may not work. The safe way will be to go to www.footballguys.com and select "FORUMS" from the black horizontal navigation bar at the top of the site.
To be clear, this is 100% the choice of our current forum provider. Not us.
It doesn't do anyone any good to air dirty laundry details. But I feel you're owed some explanation. The bottom line was this was about Customer Service. As many of you know, we've had our share of forum glitches with some folks unable to access forums and such. I requested higher customer service from our forum provider to help solve our forum users' issues.
They said what I was asking wasn't acceptable and not to do it again.
I told them with the amount of money we pay to host the forums (almost $10,000 per year), that answer wasn't acceptable.
I did it again.
They then told me they were done doing business with us.
I guess they showed me who the boss was.
They are helping with the transitioning to their credit and gave us some time to do it. I'd been hoping we could delay it, but the date is August 1.
And in the end, I think it will be a plus for us and you as a forum member.
But I'll need your help, your patience, and grace.
This couldn't happen at a worse time. August is five times busier for us than any other month. Keith and the tech team are already buried, and the last thing they should be doing is trying to transfer a giant dataset to a new forum. But here we are.
I think the new Xenforo forum will be much better. But I'm sure we'll have hiccups and glitches. Some things we'll be able to make it like this forum was. Other things will have to be different.
I'm asking for your patience here as we make this transition. No doubt it'll be bumpy, and any grace you can give us is most appreciated.
As I said, this forum will be offline Monday morning at about 9:00 AM ET. I'll try to have an update once per day on my Twitter account so folks can know where we are. https://twitter.com/Football_Guys. I expect the forums to be down for several days after August 1, if not the whole week or longer. I'll post updates on my Twitter feed to let folks know so you're not in the dark.
Again, this wasn't our choice. We've got a zillion urgent tech projects happening beyond this. But it's where we are. And I'd appreciate patience and grace as we make this change. I have no doubt people will be unhappy with some parts of the new board. But please know we're doing our best here for y'all.
J
