After a difficult 18 months behind the scenes at Surrey Scoobies, we're finally accepting that new forum we bought was a turkey, and are abandoning it in favour of a full Facebook group. You guys might see a few new members as people who balk at the idea of using Facebook may migrate to SES as I've encouraged them to do.
Here's the post I made about it today on the SS forum and FB group:
===================
**SURREY SCOOBIES ANNOUNCEMENT**
We are going "full Facebook" with immediate effect, and therefore discontinuing the vBulletin forum in a phased manner.
Sept 2016 marked the 1st birthday of the new forum, meaning we had to fork out £400 for the annual renewal. And for what? It's dead. So we will NOT be renewing it again. I've fought long and hard to try and get back the momentum we had before we were hacked in Summer 2015, but things were never right again. None of us has the appetite to incur further hosting costs, or do a lift-and-shift of our database to get another PHP host, and we're pretty much out of funds now anyway as we haven't taken a single £10 member subscription in over 12 months. It's become a money suck-hole and for absolutely no good reason when Facebook offers a much more centralised and modern online platform from which to operate.
If you're allergic to Facebook and will be orphaned by this move, then I apologise wholeheartedly. If you're particularly enthusiastic about PHP based forums as your platform to talk about Subarus, then I highly recommend signing up to South East Scoobies if you're not on there already. It's a great, friendly, busy Subaru forum with a natural geographical overlap with us since it covers all the counties in the South East.
The Surrey Scoobies forum will stay online until Feb 2017. If you are particulaly keen not to lose any posts (build threads, how to guides, car photos etc), then maybe find them NOW and re-create that content as new threads over on SES.
I never wanted this outcome, and if it wasn't for the overhead costs I'd find away to struggle on with the forum. But that £400 bill was a wake-up call and made the answers to a few questions seem very clear and obvious all of a sudden.
Regards,
Sean on behalf of the Surrey Scoobies team (AP, Sean, Guy, Steve TBTSTT, Banstead Stig, Riiidaa, Anger).
|