An explanation, or as close as I can get to one

Ken Anderson said:
I suppose I owe most of you, who were part of the original board, an explanation. You already know much of it, so I'll skip through some of the details.

When I started the Seniors Only Club in January of 2015, I used a forum host that specialized in XenForo hosting, and which was recommended by XenForo. I bought their highest package, which included far more than what a board of our size would need, and it worked great.

However, after a few years, I tried logging in to the cPanel for our forum host and found that I was redirected to another site. The host had sold to another company, but I was able to log in to my cPanel, and things worked fine. Then, the site went down. When I tried to report the outage, I found they had sold it, and we were on a third hosting company. We were down for a day or so, but I was able to work things out with the new host, and we were back online.

Then, the big problems began. The hosting company was sold to the fourth host, Chicago VPS. They had drastically reduced the resources and space available to the board to the point where it wouldn't run. They wanted me to upgrade to a dedicated server, which I would be willing to do, but I have never used one, and it would be up to me to maintain not only the forum software but also all the behind-the-scenes software and databases involved in running it. For a price, they said, they would move it for me, but they couldn't guarantee that it would work.

In the process, I learned that they mostly hosted online gaming and got the idea that they would rather just be rid of us. With your help, I found that ColoCrossing owned Chicago VPS. Since it seemed crazy to me that they would tell me my plan didn't provide sufficient resources to support the forum, yet were unwilling to let me pay for an upgraded plan without the uncertainty of whether that would even work, I went over their heads. I talked to one of the managers at ColoCrossing, the parent company.

He told me there was no reason for me to pay for a dedicated server and that the plan I had should be more than enough to support the board. He personally got the board going again, and it worked fine for a couple of weeks. Then, it went down again. This was repeated several times, and I got the impression that he was sincere, but that the subsidiary company was working against it, and I couldn't keep the board going if it was going to be down every week or two.

I decided to move it to another hosting company, but unless I could be sure that the board would be in working order at the time of the move, I couldn't be sure that the move would be successful, and I would have to pay someone to do that without knowing that it would even work.

Then the board went down for the final time, and either the guy I had been talking to was on vacation, or he stopped responding to me. I was going to restart the board, as I have with this one, but everyone wanted to save their login and the database of old messages. While I could understand this, it came at a bad time. The web directory, where I have been working for going on 20 years now, hadn't paid me for a couple of months. While I could afford to pay for a new hosting company and buy a new forum software package, I couldn't afford to pay someone to move the old database to the new host, and didn't want to ask anyone for help in paying for it if I couldn't even guarantee that it would work.

I was embarrassed to have assured everyone that everything would be fine over and over again, only for the board to crash repeatedly. People were saying I could do this, or I could do that, but I was the one who had to do it, and I couldn't do it myself and was at least temporarily unable to pay anyone else to do it, particularly when no one would guarantee success.

So, I let it go and focused on exercising, dieting, and losing weight. I didn't want to even think about the Seniors Only Club because it hurt. It was like a death that I was partially responsible for, and I was ashamed, yet I missed the board and, more so, all of you guys. So, I am thrilled to have the Seniors Only Club 2.0 up and running, and that you even wanted me to restart it after all these months.

I'm the kind of guy who, when someone dies, I'd rather pretend I didn't know about it rather than visit the survivors with words that will seem empty to me. I'm not suggesting that's a strong trait. Some people are better at that sort of thing than I am. I am a flawed person.
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It seems to me "Ken", that it was not your "fault", and you went beyond the "call of duty", caring for all SOC members. :)
 
The only thing that is a little inconvient now is when Kenny switched to this host,they started blocking HTTP which makes it harder for me to get here...


This is not a banking site,no need to force SSL .. Yes you can offer SSL but dont block http!! (Im on an older browser so I have to go thru a proxy to get here when Im on my computer)
 
Having been the admin and sole supporter of a specialty medical forum, 20 years ago, I fully understand all the work and expense it takes to set up and keep a forum running. Then promoting the forum is another expense and time consumer. After two years, I shut my forum down because I refused contributions knowing that contributors might expect special favors. It was a lot of work and expense. I fully understand your frustration with the servers and also your disappointment that years of work would end up inaccessible to you.

I know others were concerned about your health, which at our ages, is certainly a valid concern. Somehow, I knew that you just wanted to disappear and be forgotten, having been in that same situation, years before. Sometimes we all need a time out. I know it is easy for you, or any of us, to look back and think you should have handled things differently; such judgement is easy but of no value, because we don't know the outcome had that alternate scenario played out.

If we look at the result, the current forum, then we must forget about the process, the past. While the results don't always justify the means, in this case, I feel they did. Sometimes appreciation comes from deprivation. The old saying, "You don't know what you have, till it's gone," I think applies to this forum. Thanks @Ken Anderson for the work in getting this new version going. No explanations or apologizes necessary.
 
I think I've posted this link somewhere already, but anyone who is interested in viewing the old forum can find much of it on the Wayback Machine. It didn't archive every page, but you'll find quite a lot of it there, in case you're looking for something that was said there, or to gather familiar topics. -- Seniors Only Club on the Wayback Machine

Just pick a date from before it went down, and you should be able to click your way around from there, just as you navigated the old forum.
 
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