How to continue from here?
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This place costs money, but not much (in total right now less than $50 per year). We seem to have many volunteers who'd be willing to chip in.
With regard to stability, my idea would be have at least three admins for the system who can take care of potential problems and who have access to the server, DNS entry etc. No hardcore sysadmin skills are needed. I've asked Jon and George whether they'd like to play these roles.
One potential issue is the legal side. We could potentially be sued for, say, copyright violations, or child pornography, or whatnot. The person who is the formal owner - which would be me at the moment - would potentially be on the hook for that. I don't think it's a very big concern, but I wanted to bring it up.
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OK, I was looking here: https://nodebb.org/pricing
to see pricing, I thought $250 per month was the cheap option.
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Yes, that's the price if you let NodeBB do the hosting. It's great business for them. Their costs are very minimal, and all they do is occasionally perform an update of the software (which also happens more or less automatically in our system, too), and provide email support (which presumably goes to some poor student in India).
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One other thing with regard to long-term stability:
It's very easy to download a "snapshot" of the whole system - all installed software, all posts, all users, everything - and install it on a different server, potentially from a completely different company. So there's very little "lock in".
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About the money / funding this place:
- This is what WTF worked out: the admin posts a call for donations, and the admin tells people to stop donating whenever the admin has received enough donations to keep the place running for, say, 2~3 years. Repeat the same exercise whenever the reserve runs low.
- Corollary: because monthly expense may be tied to how much storage we use, the WTF solutions is to "purge" old content every now and then to keep the storage cost manageable. We may want to consider this when storage cost becomes an issue.
About transitioning from Tapatalk to this place:
- Pin on top a read-only topic in Tapatalk telling people to come here.
- Set a time table and tell people when you are going to make the Tapatalk a "read-only" place (assuming you/the Tapatalk admin have the power to make a forum "read-only")
- (In my little corner, I will switch coffee-room.com/tncr to redirect here per the aforementioned time table)
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Any concerns with losing data and, more important, stats from over there? I see it has
Georgesome folks with over 100,000 posts. Then again, I don't know the history between when I left in 2015 and when I came back in 2020 with how Tapatalk even happened.Klaus, if it matters, I defer my vote to the majority. I do like this platform and see no showstopper issues with it. Might as well proceed and the other one is a "safety net" fall back, if needed in the next few weeks. Nice work, again!
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@Axtremus said
About transitioning from Tapatalk to this place:
- Pin on top a read-only topic in Tapatalk telling people to come here.
- Set a time table and tell people when you are going to make the Tapatalk a "read-only" place (assuming you/the Tapatalk admin have make a forum "read-only")
- (In my little corner, I will switch coffee-room.com/tncr to redirect here per the aforementioned time table)
I like that idea.