jvj

[pfj]

I'm sure you've all noticed the 'Community Chest' icon\link at the foot of this board's front page. This voluntary contribution feature was enabled by FreeForums.com and, despite the 'Make a donation' message you'll see upon selection, has absolutely nothing to do with us!

Fortunately, no one has made any donations thus far. If you are even considering such a step, please don't do it! You'll just be wasting your money. We're still looking at various solutions to our hosting problem. However, none of them involve seeking any financial assistance from our users!!

Cheers, -Paul (part of the REAL jvj Team)

[SireOfDragons]

I dunno if its proper for me to respond here...

Ive recently made myself a forum using this host. Currently I have only paid the fee for no ads, but it is only 15 dollars a year for a domain name. What I have noticed is that there are separate fees for removing certain items from the site. I do not know how you all have it set up here with it being on top of another site.

Myself I use a free redirect host with my link on that. The community chest still appears, but at any rate I do know someone who can build forums and has competitive prices if that may be of use. He was also a reader of Julies books. I won't advertise that on here.

Anyway my forum is linked in my signature if anyone is interested

[theUnguru]

Paul,

I've said this before, but if you are looking at alternatives, don't get voodoo'd into any hype about hosting and forums. Not that you would, but there's a lot of hosts out there who really don't give squat about their people.

I'd be going with your own hosting somewhere. Sure, it's a hassle because you have to take care of the forums, but given it'd most likely be Apache you're running on, plus PHP and MySQL .. it's as likely to have as much trouble as the other 5 gazillion other setups like it (read: not much).

There are some very good hosts out there (Media Temple - www.mediatemple.net - is my goto at the moment) amongst the trash. A good way of finding them is to surf round the top tech blogs and see what people are pimping .. anything with more than a few people blinging is probably pretty good.

Anyway. Blah. Hope you get this sorted without too much hassle.

[pfj]

I dunno if its proper for me to respond here...

It certainly is. There are no restricted areas here.

Seen your forum, dude. You have a really nice theme on there which, from the start, puts you in the right mindset. It looks great (and no ads to spoil it).

The problem with FreeForums.com is they got us signed up ad-free and then hit the u-turn button. We want to move on, but they've disabled the back-up feature.

Yeah, Unguru, it looks like we probably will go down the self-hosting path. We'll soon be in need of additional server space anyway. I'll certainly take a look at Media Temple. As I'm sure you know, there are way too many hosts to choose from (all like chocolates in a box). Outwardly, they all look alike too: Apache-based, SQL support, PHP, PERL and PYTHON scripting and all those user-friendly touches like CPanel, Fantastico, etc...

We still have no database back-up to transfer though. FreeForums are scheduled to switch to phpbb 3 in the not too distant future. Maybe that shake-up will see the back-up feature restored (at least temporarily).

-Paul

[SireOfDragons]

Well pfj The forum looks good but you didn't join it!!! Only a few people have and they haven't been coming on and chatting. I see more guest browsers than anything.

What people don't realize is all the names that are seen chatting...are me. Trying to make it look like its getting use. The 3 other people who have signed up don't even reply to me welcoming them.

Anyway this is not news and announcements but I mentioned I do know someone who can build templates for forums if Julie or whoever would be interested. Assuming of course that none of you are knowledged in that area.
I'm certainly not I build pages but nothing so highly sophisticated as that.

[SireOfDragons]

Well pfj The forum looks good but you didn't join it!!! Only a few people have and they haven't been coming on and chatting. I see more guest browsers than anything.

What people don't realize is all the names that are seen chatting...are me. Trying to make it look like its getting use. The 3 other people who have signed up don't even reply to me welcoming them.

Anyway this is not news and announcements but I mentioned I do know someone who can build templates for forums if Julie or whoever would be interested. Assuming of course that none of you are knowledged in that area.
I'm certainly not I build pages but nothing so highly sophisticated as that.

Oh hec I just realized someone in your bunch knows something because I see that jvj message board banner at the top

[pfj]

Ok, you've got me there!

You're obviously having a few problems getting people signed up and posting messages. I guess you'll just have to do a little more on the promotional side. Things are actually pretty quite here too, so I know how you feel.

Template-wise, we just want to align the board with the rest of the site. At the moment, we're loading the board into a frame. It's ok, but the scroll-bars can get a bit confusing! When we finally begin hosting the board ourselves, and have access to the code, we'll do the job properly.

-Paul