Quote:
Originally Posted by Kajue
We could use the Discord to organize, maybe a crowdfund internationally (Patreon, GoFundMe, etc.) in order to be able to have the funds to promote Alizée, and the forum on the various social media sites (using targeted niche Facebook Ads, Instagram Promos, etc.) and for the Funds to be able to keep THIS site going, as well as money to go into making new improvements to the site itself.
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The topic of updating this site comes up every so often, especially after a crash like we experienced. There was a point where we thought we might have to shut the site down. New members were few and far between, Alizee was not making any news, and when she became pregnant we thought she might disappear from the public's eye, similar to what happened with Annily. Our fears did not materialize and new members started coming on and Alizee continues with her career, so this site will live on. It just needs a serious facelift.
Just about all the members involved in the upgrade conversation before wanted to update the landing page. Currently it has a picture of Alizee during the DALS era, so yeah, pretty aged. We didn't understand why we couldn't do at least that, but Ben had explained the reasons. The next idea was to create a new forum, but saving the history we have in here was very important.
I did some research back then about the newest version of vBulletin. This site runs version 3.8.4. The most recent version for vBulletin is 5.x.x. There are some very good improvements. It turns out that vBulletin itself has servers to host vBulletin sites at very reasonable prices. I got in contact with one of their representatives and got some questions answered.
Here were the advantages of hosting on the vBulletin servers:
1. They were inexpensive.
2. They would migrate our historical data to the new platform at no cost.
3. There would be no need to perform any maintenance or upgrades. As long as we use them as a host, our forum would always be up to date with the new versions as they come out.
4. We would be able to add language packs to the site.
5. Many new and improved modern features.
There were some disadvantages, the big one being that customization is limited. They don't allow third party products on their servers, so adding a chat box would not be allowed and they don't have a native chat box. The chat box was important to a lot of members.
The other option was to get a backup of this site, purchase the latest version of vBulletin, and try to figure out how to migrate the data ourselves. We could add all the add-ins we want and make the site as rich in content as we liked. We would have a choice to host wherever we wanted. However, there would be the initial cost of vBulletin, which is over $200, and an investment of many hours of work.
With the topic of Discord that came up, it is pretty much a fancy chat box from what I was told. For those preferring that kind of interaction, it might be a good option. For myself, there are so many hours in a day and a hefty chunk of those hours are spent staring at a computer screen for my work. The time I spend on this site is set aside from what I have left in my day. I personally would not have the time to be engaged in chat. I have cut my social media presence in a big way to have time to do other things and to not spend hours staring at my phone after hours of staring at my computer monitor. So a platform like Discord doesn't interest me so much and will remain committed to improving the forum. I wouldn't like to see our current members get split up, but if it happens then both sides will have to work on regrowing their membership roles.