I have a suggestion to improve this forum. Have you ever thought of switching to a more modern forum version, such as phpbb2, or perhaps even vB? Then you could have differnt cats for differnt things, such as kits, knives, first aid, etc. It's Just a thought
David

I think it's intentional - in order to keep everyone's primitive skills sharp...

<img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Cost, not just to buy software but for someones time to install and support it, the $$$'s just are not there. You can see some of dougs older comments on the issue, but I think I summed it up right.

I'll bet it's a combination of "if it ain't broke, don't touch it", and "this isn't the focus of Doug's site.. the content is."

And while several of us could set Doug up with alternatives (free ones, even), I do see his point about the administration. He has nothing but our word that we'll be around a year from now to continue to maintain the site.

Plus the security issues of having multiple administrators.

I would have to say it is very much in the "ain't broke" rule. Replacing this would not be inexpensive from a dollar or time issue. We would have either manually transfere the archives or loose them. And the "improved" formats you mentioned use more bandwidth- there are some here who can't fully use THIS "old" system becuase of thier lousy bandwidth.

Besides, what's wrong with old fashioned. I've used a slide rule in examines where professors said no calculators, I loath CAD (hand drawers of the world, unite!), and I still write my html in notepad. Is it flashy, shiny and expensive? Nope. Does it work. Yep.

But it is sort of broken, isn't it? Several of us lost our accounts (some more than once) during this past summer's outages. More up-to-date and robust board software should help eliminate problems like this and provide better fault tolerance for hardware failures.

Software is at the mercy of the hardware. We need silicon to fix out problems, not code. Speaking as someone who became an unperson, I don't mind the software.

It doesn't quite work that way... Outside of total hardware failure, software plays a major role in determining whether hardware errors are recoverable. The problems this summer looked like database corruption, which is sometimes fatal and sometimes not. T'all depends.

A couple of the other forums that I frequent have unfortunately gone that route of having way too many sub-forums without any decent tool to review all new posts. When looking at these forums I simply don't have the time or patience to stop into every sub-forum, so I tend to look in only one or two and just skip the rest.

Though I don't spend too much time there, the BushcraftUK forum is a good example of just too many sub-forums. Some of the sub-forums even have their own sub-sub-forums. Argh!!

I myself very much prefer the all-in-one ETS forum since I can failry quickly review all of the posts by looking in just two forums.

The root cause is the hardware failure. No hardware failure no corruption. That said, looks like MySQL / the BB app is to blame. You'd think stuff would be protected inside transactions and, at worst, this forum just wouldn't work. To corrupt stuff is just silly. But then, MySQL could have functioned perfectly and the file system let us down. Or maybe it's a journalling file system, and the stupid drives didn't flush buffers to the actual disk when they said they did, or maybe... And what about back ups? There shouldn't have been any lossage... just restore from most recent backup. But sooooo many people think backing up table space backs up the database and this just ain't so. *shrug*

Actually, since it was obviously running on Windoze, I'm ready to blame Micro$soft. <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Well, hardware failures will always happen, so we can factor them out of the discussion... <img src="/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

But databases can certainly get corrupted without hardware failure and I wouldn't be surprised to find there's a long list of known bugs for this ancient forum. <img src="/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

Anyway, if we blame Micro$oft, perhaps the Bill and Melinda Foundation would give Doug several million dollars to make up for it.
<img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Hey, I'd volunteer to convert ets over to a decent (and recent) CMS, all with freeware on linux. He won't, of course, but it does make me wonder... can I bill it at industry standard rates, and then count it as a deduction?

1- to the administrators, webmasters and the such, congratulations, keep up the great work = this is a great forum.
2- It’s free = it’s great !
3- There are a bunch of great collaborators answering questions, helping everybody out = that’s great !
4- As long as everybody keeps the input positive and the sharp eyed moderators weed out the negative = that’s great that’s great !

My 2c

I like the current setup, forces me to read all the posts. <img src="/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

I know. And I've had files get mangled on a non-raided server when the power supply tanked. Everything that wasn't being accessed on the drive seemed to be fine, everything that people told us they were working with was poofted or looked like it had been chewed on by a t-rex.

I was signed in and idle when the last round of server glitches happened. I had it in the background, and took a break from what I was working on, and the forum was down. Based on my experinces, it is quite possible, if not probably, that is why my "ironsraven" handle and all of it's posts are vapor now.

Dude, it's SQL. SQL is the offspring of Satan and Kthulu, with Loki as midwife. It was corrupt from the moment it started.

<img src="/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" />