Thank you all for your support and kind words. These forums started over two decades ago as a self-help feature, mostly because I would get a lot of questions I could not answer. Over that time the community here, including too many that have since passed on, has shared a great deal of information and insights on many topics of mutual interest and have jointly created a significant resource.
This episode was also a bit of a wake-up call as, in reality, my backups have been and are appallingly poor. So, this brings up the 'silver lining' coming out of this episode.
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Originally Posted by DaveA
Which makes me wonder, who is Lee’s backup?
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There isn't any, although I actually have left instructions in my will to my potential executor to attempt to contact the moderators and offer some money to help encourage them to continue the project.
The reason for the absent to poor backups and failure to upgrade the software is that remote operations have been more than a bit unwieldy for me. Five years ago I was very tempted by the arrival of a specialized hosting service operated by vBulletin with automatically applied updates and daily backups (and of course their intimate knowledge of the system.) At that time, though, migration of a board of such an old version had not become routine.
You will likely notice, within the next two weeks, another but shorter interruption in service with a sudden change to the appearance of the board. This will occur when we are updated to version 3.8.11.
After that, if all goes as intended, the board will be ready for migration to the latest and current series 5 version of vBulletin. This will involve yet another interruption of service and will not be without some pain, however, as it will mess up bookmarks and links to favorite threads (though in a systematic way.) When the migration is performed, these forums will occupy vikingsword.org rather than being vikingsword.com/vb.
At some point, if there is interest, I would like to see vikingsword.org evolve to be a part of a larger non-profit society of collectors and students of ethnographic arms and armor that might also hold 'wandering' live meetings (such a happened for a while with the Timonium seminars) but also with streaming feeds for those remote.
Even if that is an unrealistic pipe-dream, keeping these forums in a current version should insure somewhat against their sudden undesired disappearance.