I'd like to start by thanking Albert for hosting our community's new home. This platform has been crucial in bringing our group together and facilitating knowledge-sharing, which would be difficult to achieve without it.

That being said, I think we're still vulnerable to disruptions if something happens to Albert or the current setup. To address this, I propose that we establish a committee to oversee the creation of a more permanent and stable home for our community. This would involve securing reliable hosting, maintenance, and data management, including the ability to export our databases if needed.

To ensure the committee represents our diverse international community, I suggest we aim for broad representation of at least 3-5 members. I know we could nominate some individuals who have demonstrated long-term commitment, but it's essential that potential committee members volunteer and are voted in to confirm their willingness and community acceptance to take on this responsibility.

I'm personally willing to contribute financially to partially support a hosted platform managed by an elected committee, even if I'm not part of the committee myself. I could (and should) not do it alone though, so I expect other donations to help meet the appropriate level of support we would look to achieve.

Establishing bylaws, rules, and other governing documents would be an important next step, which I believe the committee should handle once it's formed.

Thoughts on this proposal?

If Albert gives elevated rights to this forum to a small number of people, that would solve everything, right?

Or he could provide Admin credentials in some sort of lock-box arrangement, which we could retrieve and open if Albert were to become incapacitated.

That covers half the concern, the other is robustness and redundancy of the environment (e.g., a hard drive goes bad, database corruption, patching, support, upgrades, storage capacity, etc.)

(09-03-2025, 07:37 PM)Eric Pearson Wrote: If Albert gives elevated rights to this forum to a small number of people, that would solve everything, right?

Or he could provide Admin credentials in some sort of lock-box arrangement, which we could retrieve and open if Albert were to become incapacitated.

Unfortunately, no,  the current forum is totally dependent on Albert's situation:

The server is running in my house, in the former wine cellar of an (also former) village inn. The ADSL connection is a bottleneck, in terms of transfer times. 

Also note that it is running under his personal domain name: richheimer.de
Although we are all very grateful to Albert and owe him a lot, this is not a long term solution.
I totally agree with George. 
I'd be willing to participate in such a committee.

I think we need to differentiate. PUMP was never created as a replacement for the PowerBASIC forum, and it will never be such. If you look carefully at the acronym you will find the words "meeting point". Or, in British english, a "muster point". A place where people report to in an emergency.



And as this PUMP is working fine right now, as I can tell. And will as well in the future, least as long I am living (right now I am 73).

Here we are talking about future plans for a proper replacement of PowerBASIC forum. In an ideal world we would be able to start with the wealth of knowledge already existing in the "forum without public DNS". And also in Gary's database, of course.

The plan is setting up and manage the "PB-Forum II". I believe here are many people with immense knowledge and skills for doing so.  Certainly I am willing to volunteer, and being a small part of this endeavour.

Cheers,
Albert

POWERBASIC.COM 

• Registry Expiration: 2025-10-13 04:00:00 UTC
  

Hmm.

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Also, I clearly misunderstood Albert's intent for this website.  Never mind.  

(Yesterday, 10:27 AM)Eric Pearson Wrote: POWERBASIC.COM 

• Registry Expiration: 2025-10-13 04:00:00 UTC
  

Hmm.

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Also, I clearly misunderstood Albert's intent for this website.  Never mind.  

Just an idea: Would it be possible to get in touch with the content's owner of the PB forum, in order to obtain a full backup of the VBulletin database? 

In the next step we would set up a similiar VBulletin forum, e.g. "PB Forum II", run by a commercial provider, administered be a group picked from our PUMP community. The financial issues need to be determined. Something like crowd funding?

(Yesterday, 10:27 AM)Eric Pearson Wrote: POWERBASIC.COM 

• Registry Expiration: 2025-10-13 04:00:00 UTC
  

Hmm.

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It doesn't matter if the domain registration expires if we are using a Hosts entry 
The problem will be when the vBulletin hosting expires 

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(Yesterday, 10:58 AM)Eric Pearson Wrote: Just an idea: Would it be possible to get in touch with the content's owner of the PB forum, in order to obtain a full backup of the VBulletin database? 

I've contacted Gary privately to find out whether he can do that since he seems to have some sort of access to the database. If he can, then setting up a new site is certainly do-able.  

Starting a new site hosted by someone like NameCheap or Hostinger from scratch using myBB or vBulletin would not be very expensive.   (If we cant get a dump of the current database, then a new forum could host a downloadable copy of Gary's gbThreads for people wanting to grab the old content.)

VBulletin costs $179 for a permanent licence.
Namecheap hosting costs  $38.77 for the first two years and currently $91.88 for subsequent two years.
Domain name costs about $15 p.a.  (PBUsers.com is currently available)

Although NOT a database back-up, I took the liberty of performing a recursive scrape of the forums using WGET.

It comes to about 56K items totaling almost 10GB. Not sure its everything, but I expect it covers most of the modern posts in the publicly available forums.

I like the idea, and I can put together a forum software in just a few days. The software itself would be free forever, no yearly subscriptions, no licenses, no expiration dates. It would start off simple, but we could expand it over time to fit whatever needs come up.

The only things that could "expire" are the external services required to run it online:

• Hosting (web server): This is where the forum’s files and data live. Hosting services are usually paid monthly or yearly, and if not renewed, the site would go offline.
  
• Domain name: This is the address people type to visit the forum (e.g., PowerBase.com). Domains are also registered for a limited period (typically one year) and need to be renewed to keep ownership.
  
  

So, the forum software itself is permanent and free, while the hosting and domain depend on third-party providers and must be renewed periodically.