Hi Folks,
Big change coming in our forum. And I'm going to need your help and 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 over things from this board to the new board. Screen names, log in info, avatars, and years and years of previous posts and content.
And 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 8/1.
It depends on how well the transfer goes (there a TON of old material here) I'm expecting the forums may be down for several days after 8/1 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 a higher level of customer service from our forum provider in helping solve our forum users issues.
They said what I was asking wasn't acceptable and not 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 was boss.
To their credit, they are helping with the transitioning and they gave us some time to do it. I'd been holding out hope we could delay it but the date is 8/1.
And in the end, I think it will be a plus for us and for 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 5x 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. I've no doubt it'll be bumpy and any grace you can give us is most appreciated.
As I said above, this forum will be offline Monday morning 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'm expecting the forums may be down for several days after 8/1 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've 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
Big change coming in our forum. And I'm going to need your help and 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 over things from this board to the new board. Screen names, log in info, avatars, and years and years of previous posts and content.
And 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 8/1.
It depends on how well the transfer goes (there a TON of old material here) I'm expecting the forums may be down for several days after 8/1 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 a higher level of customer service from our forum provider in helping solve our forum users issues.
They said what I was asking wasn't acceptable and not 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 was boss.
To their credit, they are helping with the transitioning and they gave us some time to do it. I'd been holding out hope we could delay it but the date is 8/1.
And in the end, I think it will be a plus for us and for 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 5x 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. I've no doubt it'll be bumpy and any grace you can give us is most appreciated.
As I said above, this forum will be offline Monday morning 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'm expecting the forums may be down for several days after 8/1 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've 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
