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Oh, then I misunderstood that option. I don't think there's a point of a clean start given how small the community is. Then I'm for Option C, and I hope that some solution will eventually surface to migrate AE to a different server.

I do not think yet another new empty forum solves anything. There is a reason why they have failed in the past. Personally, I think the best approach is to...

1. export the database
2. move the site installation to a different server
3. register and set up a new domain name (or use an existing one)
4. add a script that properly forwards (error code "moved" so search engines correctly update old links) from aros-exec.org to the new domain for the forum.

Once you have done all of this, then you can rest assured that the website will not suddenly disappear over night.

This would provide plenty of breathing room to evaluate what options there are in terms of forum software and how to best integrate all of the old content (will likely need a custom database conversion script).


@4pLaY

By the way, I think the "white pages" issues is likely an Apache2 misconfiguration. Do you have access to the Apache2 log files?

amigamia: There you are :) What you need help with. I might help you. I can take care of regestring and I think we should change the arosworld logo. I have some ideas there.
I would apreciate if the fonts in the forum where a tad bigger. Use aros-exec as reference. I think that size if perfect.

Hello everyone, I just found out about this news. If you are all interested, I can revamp www.arosworld.org. I know I stated I wanted to put it up for sale but I ended up renewing it for another year. I may need help if anyone is willing to participate. Work, College and family time are taking most of my time..

Keeping the old data available is of course the preferred way, although I hardly search old posts.

That is the downside of all this forum stuff. You can still read the old newsgroups like comp.sys.amiga.* without bigger problems. Forum content is difficult to keep online.

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Not on the same server.

@ 4pLaY

As a first step, you could try to install MySQLWorkbench on your home computer and use the database credentials of the AROS Exec installation (see config files) to connect to it. If you can connect this way, exporting the data should be relatively easy.

As mentioned, setting up phpmyadmin on the server is another option but its functionality might be limited depending on the exact PHP configuration.

Generally, I strongly recommend to not set up a new empty forum right away unless this website suddenly does go away. Importing the old data into a new empty forum before you transition should be preferrable to trying to later merge two established forums as this can lead to various conflicts (duplicate user names used by *different* individuals, and so on).

We can also discuss via email or IRC (Freenode) if this helps.

You don't need to be an administrator to upload phpmyadmin using ftp. If 4pLaY has ftp access to portal files it should be easy to upload phpmyadmin, configure it, download database dump, and delete it.

It sound like 4Play does not have admin access to the server, at least not full. So likely not able to install any packages. Or the server service is set up with different admin tools.

Installation of phpadmin is quite easy (same as installing other php webapps). I could help with it. It would be good to copy the whole site content somewhere only as read-only. Besides that, I vote for Option B.