Recognition for prominent members of the old board?

[Archie]

…
By the way I have made about 3266 posts and I think the total number of posts a person has made over the two sites should be recognised and carried on for credibility and status reasons.

Editing the post count if that is even possible would require manually editing the database and would not be a good idea. But your old post count is still displayed on the pages on the backup site (as of June 2023).

On this forum, one thing that would be feasible is that I could create a special “rank.” I’m thinking it would be based on post count and/or seniority on the old forum. There could be a little badge or something.

If people want that, let me know.

[borjastick]

I think the starting point should be that no one wanted the old forum to shut, let alone in such a dramatic and instant fashion. It worked well and thus I think as much of it should be resurrected or re-employed as possible. Post count, status or badging is I think important. As was the moderator team.

If it ain't broke don't fix it is the motto in my opinion.

[Archie]

I hear you, and rest assured, had it been possible to restore everything exactly as it was, including login data, etc, I would have done it. But let me give it to you straight: a full restore of the sort you are talking about is not possible and isn't going to happen. And the reason for that is technical (see below). This is how CODOH explained it (email from 1/25/2024),

Dear fellow revisionists, friends, patrons and supporters!

On top of the unfortunate situation CODOH finds itself in as reported, our backup service's recurring payment service failed in early 2023, and no one at CODOH's end was monitoring the email address where our backup service sent warning emails. As a result, backup services were terminated in March 2023.

In other words: Not only are all of CODOH's websites down and its server accounts held hostage, but we do not have a backup of our sites either.

And on the forum specifically,

Forum.CODOH.com : A forum member secured a relative recent backup, which should be (almost) complete, so we will be able to restore the Forum to a large extent.

To clarify, the "relatively recent backup" referred to is the one I have hosted here on the site. That's as good as it's going to get (although we can enhance the searchability over time, which imo is really what matters). The "forum member" who made that backup was Butterfangers/Callafangers. But Fangers did not have access to the web server or the actual SQL database for the forum. His backup was made from a site ripper/web crawler that simply downloads the HTML pages on the public web. So above where it says "restore the Forum to a large extent," that refers only to the content. To recover all the user data etc you need the actual SQL database which we simply do not have.

As far as moderators, I know you can be trusted and since I know you're interested and willing I will definitely keep you in mind for the job when there is a need to appoint additional moderators. When that happens will depend on how busy the site gets. Right now the site is so small the moderation duties are minimal. There is more need on the admin/tech side, but that is more specialized.