TO whoever owns/runs this forum

It's pretty bad, very glitchy, it needs to be redone. What is worse is that it has been hacked.

I don't care if it was a free forum, but this or guy or firm (beartooth mountain LLC) whoever owns this forum gets $$ from membership dollars. For the money we all pay he should either fix this crappy software or provide acceptable service for the money paid by the the members.

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You think that the member fees are making anyone rich? I highly doubt they even cover server costs. Also, moving to another software like phpBB or whatnot we would end up losing the past forum posts.

While I agree that the website needs a major overhaul, I do not agree with the fact that membership fees generate a large yearly inflow, nor do I agree that they are enough to not cover server costs, nor do I agree with the fact that it could be ported over to phpBB without loosing the existing content – I have over 7,000 hours invested into phpBB and am pretty certain that pretty much all of the existing content could be ported into a phpBB forum.

While we can will stop speculating if this site makes money or not (nobody has seen the financial balance sheet) I think we should pony up extra cash in donations to move to a different forum settings.

In the field of Information Technology nothing is impossible. All we have to do it to form a tech heavy small action group and figure what it takes to migrate this forum to a much better bulletin board.

PS: This thread too has been invaded by spam bots.

Much of the current spam is due to the "open door" policy of the group. How to eliminate the spammer and posts is a seperate issue.

I am sure that Roger and Ryan are looking at the problem with an eye to fixing it.
Some things they are considering:
1) Cost:
*New software costs dollars, there isn't enough.
*New software is much less concerned with bandwidth, increased bandwith costs money.
*New software means Ryan, minimally, will need to become familiar with the ins & outs. Not easy since he doesn't get any pay from this, it is *barely* self supporting.
*The company cannot aford to hire full or even part time moderators. No money.
*New hardware, beyond basic maintence, will likely be needed…it costs dollars.
2) Time:
*Volunteer administrators? Well, there is a limit to how much time they are willing to put in…Roger & Ryan included.
*Mistakes will happen, untrained people *will* make mistakes. Backups, time off line, etc…these things that make a site behind the scenes, cost time down.
*Lost data will likely happen, out of sync, or non-sequiteurs…confusion. All result in everybody wasting time here.
*New software could cause the site to be down for a week…or more. Transfering old data to a new format is never seamless. Often this means a parallel site…and dollars in a new site, besides not having data available.

The simplest solution? I don't have any further suggestions. Nor, is my input worth all that much when these decisions are considered. It has only been a week, but it is clear that some decision will need to be made.

I appreciate your optimism, but adding a moderator is free and easy. There always should have been a second moderator. Another moderator should have been one about a year ago when I started noticing more spam attacks here. More moderators definitely should have been added a couple weeks ago when spam really started getting bad.

In any case, it seems that the policy of BPL is to respond to an attack by making no useful changes and magically hoping that the problem goes away by itself.

Moderators are free. If giving gifts to moderators was seen as a necessity, it could be done in the form of free membership. That's a REALLY good trade considering that BPL is rapidly heading towards its grave, which leads to a loss of membership revenue.

Seems to me that the spam started when gear buyer came on site

What, me worry?

> while this site and forum is bringing them a nice revenue,
ROTFLMAO

I don't have access to the books, but I do know that Ryan J has to have a full-time job outside of BPL to feed his family. What BPL earns is very small. And maintaining the web site costs a fair bit of money.

Cheers