The Avengers Forever: IMHO

	IMHO: 28 March 2008 Page 27 of 29

TheAvengers.TV International Forum Relaunch

Yes, yes, I know, I know. I sold my soul to the Devil, abandoned all the stalwart fans who have praised me for developing a custom message board from scratch just for us, and replaced hallowed ground with stock code.

But you see, I was faced with a quandary: either I cave in and go with off-the-shelf software, or I leave the Forum offline for another month or two while I desperately try to squeeze development time into an already-overfilled schedule. Meanwhile, I have a frightening backlog of updates to make to TAF. Frankly, it looks like it may be Summer before I emerge from my office.

As it was, the move to a new host was far more problematic than my worst-case scenario suggested it might be. You'd think that web hosts that have been around since the 90s would know what they were doing when you ordered up a new account. But, trust me, after having dealt with nearly a half-dozen of them, I can attest to the fact that even the most highly-rated hosts barely know their fingers from their toes.

I also have almost two dozen websites to tend to, and the move affected every one of them. I suppose it was my fault to try to do everything at once, but doing it piecemeal would have created issues as well. As it is, one of my websites is still offline; another took three weeks to recover from the depths of space, whereto it evaporated without reason or explanation.

So, I had a choice: make the fans wait, or get them cracking with proven software that would take little or no effort on my part to configure. I did my homework, and phpBB came up the winner as being the most robust free bulletin board application going—even among those that cost money.

At least the new forum is not remotely-hosted. This is one of those good news/bad news things, actually: the good is that it's entirely under my control; I'm not at the mercy of yet another host. The bad is that, if TheAvengers.TV host goes down, the Forum does, too. Hopefully the latter will not be a frequent event, because if it is, I'm in the market for yet another host.

Naturally, everything that has gone on before in the Forum is now "lost." Well, not entirely lost; I have backed up the database for safekeeping. But frankly, many discussions were getting a bit long in the tooth—as was the Forum code itself—and a fresh start might stimulate some interesting new topics. I hope you'll agree, and I hope you'll jump back in!

And that's my humble opinion.

David K. Smith, 28 March 2008